The Dust Bowl | The Battle in Muscatine | 4
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From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American Scandal. In the 1930s, dust storms raged across the southern Great Plains, a region spanning from Texas to Kansas to Colorado. These storms towered into the sky and blew across state lines, carrying black clouds of dirt that made the air unbreathable and turned the former grasslands into a barren desert.

Thousands of Americans lost their lives to the Dust Bowl, and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee their homes.

When experts studied the crisis, they traced the cause back to decades of unsustainable farming in a region they said was never meant for agriculture. The Dust Bowl, therefore, was a man-made disaster. And experts ultimately pinned much of the blame on government policy, which encouraged Americans to move out to the southern plains and plow up the land, setting the entire crisis in motion.

In the mid-1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his administration launched into an ambitious program to combat the Dust Bowl. They encouraged farmers to adopt conservation techniques and converted large portions of the southern plains to grasslands. And eight decades later, the worst of the dust storms are now a relic of American history.

But today, the country is grappling with a new set of environmental crises. And with elected officials divided over the proper response, government action appears to be stalled. But according to today's guest, Attorney Scott Anton, even without action by state or federal legislators, Americans can still have a large impact on the environment using the power of the courts.

Enten is a partner at the public interest law firm Minor, Barnhill & Galland. And over the course of his career, he and his firm have taken on everyone from industrial polluters to companies that defraud the public.

In our conversation today, we'll look at his law firm's fight against a corn processing plant in Iowa, which for years had polluted the air of the nearby community of Muscatine. We'll discuss how his team's legal strategies could offer citizens a path forward to help address environmental crises, including seemingly intractable issues like climate change. Our conversation is next.

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Help Dell make a difference and shop AI-ready PCs powered by Snapdragon X-series processors at dell.com slash deals. That's dell.com slash deals. Scott Enten, thanks for speaking with me today on American Scandal. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Now, you and your firm waged a long and complex battle over a corn processing plant in Muscatine, Iowa.

Before we get into the case itself, why don't you set the scene? Tell us about Muscatine. What is that city like? Sure. Muscatine is an eastern Iowa river town. It sits on the western banks of the Mississippi River.

There's a charming downtown area that is surrounded a little bit by fairly affluent neighborhoods. Muscatine, throughout its history, has been the home to pretty big industry. Heinz has had a plant there. Hahn Furniture is headquartered there. And as you travel south from downtown towards what's called the south end of town along the Mississippi River, there is just this behemoth corn wet mill, and that's Grain Processing Corporation, or GPC.

So the GPC, you say it's a corn wet mill. What is that? So it's a huge manufacturing facility and it manufactures ethanol, liquor that goes to distilleries, everything from byproducts and pharmaceuticals to animal feed. And this facility takes in thousands and thousands of bushels of corn every day. It separates every part of the corn kernel.

and puts it into the manufacturing process to make all of these products. So it's a very big operation. They have a very diverse group of products that come out of it. And there's a lot of processes, chemical processes and manufacturing processes that go on there.

And this is a pretty old plant, right? Yeah, the plant was actually built by the U.S. government during World War II as a government industrial alcohol plant. And it was purchased by GPC, a local family, back in the early 1950s. And it was converted into that wet milling facility in the late 50s and

And since that time, it's just expanded several times. I think if I'm remembering correctly, they back in the 50s were processing about 40,000 or so bushels of corn every day. And by the time we were in the middle of the litigation, they were processing over 150,000 bushels of corn every day.

So this is a longstanding, very large industrial plant that probably provides essential resources and products to the nation and lots of jobs to the community. So what's the problem? Well, corn wet milling, it's a very dirty process, meaning that it creates lots of emissions and lots of pollution at every step of the way.

You know, to simplify it a bit, what the processes involve are the release of various pollutants. Sulfur dioxide or SO2 is released during some of the processes there. Particulate matter, you can think of as dust, but really fine microscopic dust is

And that dust actually comes from heavy metals and combustion products from a coal-fired boiler, as well as, you know, from the corn holes themselves.

And then also volatile organic compounds or VOCs. That's sort of a generic term that sweeps in hundreds of possible compounds. But one way to think of them is that they're all just gases that are released during all of the chemical reactions that occur during the manufacturing process.

And those VOCs can be really pungent and really stinky. They can be irritants to people. SO2 or sulfur dioxide, that's an irritant that can cause eyes to water, scratchy throats, sort of like a sinus headache.

particulate matter that's really fine. Not only does it coat people's properties and cars or can it, but it can also get into the lungs and again, irritate your throat, make you cough, irritate your eyes. This facility was operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And so while the emissions might change and might not be the same from minute to minute,

There's just a constant flow of pollution coming out and of things that smell bad and can irritate. So that was the problem. So when I was looking for colleges back in high school, I visited one and thought it was amazing until I went out into the evening and realized that the whole town smelled like rotten eggs because there was a mayonnaise factory nearby.

I immediately decided this was not the college for me. But you're telling me over the last 70 years that the entire community has been living right next to this.

Yeah, the plant was built on what was called Muscatine Island, which was, again, in the south end of town. And neighborhoods were there when the plant moved in. And so, you know, there was just a soup of pollutants that came out of this plant on a daily basis. And depending on which way the wind blew, it was polluted.

It could really present some, you know, just obstacles to daily life. You know, I remember days when I was there just as a lawyer. I'd come for a few days and go back to Chicago. Then a few weeks later, I'd come back. But even in my trips to Muscatine, there were days when the air was thick with pollutants. I could taste them in my mouth. I could feel them in my throat.

So you can imagine what the residents experienced, you know, that being their regular sort of experience. We take for granted our ability to, like you said, walk outside at night and just go for a walk or sit on your porch and have a cup of coffee or have a barbecue or walk the dog, have a catch.

You know, if you're doing those activities or opening your windows when the wind is blowing from the plant towards your house, you know, you're losing the ability to just enjoy your home. I mean, we spoke with folks who had children's birthday parties canceled, holiday meals ruined because the pollution was just inundating them. And you can't sit down to eat a turkey dinner while you're smelling rotten eggs or some other awful chemical smell.

How many people are living around the area of the plant? So at the time of the litigation, there were about 2,400, I think a little more, but about 2,400 residences. And so in any given year, you know, that's going to be roughly 6,000 or more people living. And I'm talking about just within a mile and a half of the facility. The town is much bigger once you get outside of that. But in that immediate area,

you know, 6,000 people at any given time are living there. So you're describing a daily reality that I think most of us would think unimaginable. So I assume that the residents would have tried to do something about it after all these decades.

Yeah. You know, for years before the litigation, residents from the south end of Muscatine, they complained both to GPC and to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. You'll probably hear me refer to it as the IDNR.

You know, folks complained of cord holes and particulate matter on their houses and cars. There were complaints about the odor, the smoke. There was a blue haze that's produced from the corn wet milling process and dust. So there were complaints. But, you know, unfortunately, for many years, they fell on deaf ears.

Well, who owns these deaf ears? And were they really deaf? I mean, how did company and government agencies really respond to the problem, if at all? Well, for years, just not much was done. And, you know, when I talk about deaf ears, I'm talking about both with the company and with the IDNR. Now, ultimately...

residents got fed up and they began to organize. And that's actually sort of how my firm got involved in the litigation. There was a wonderful local lawyer in Iowa City named Jim LaRue, who went to some of these first community meetings by an organization called CLAM, Clean Air Muscatine. And he observed the problems for himself. One of their meetings was in an open air park and they could

you know, just feel the pollution, the eyes watering. And Jim, you know, was familiar with our firm and reached out to us. And that's how we got going with our civil lawsuit. But around the same time, the attorney general actually filed a lawsuit, an enforcement lawsuit against GPC. That's a very different animal. And, you know, it's not capable of

The same things that a civil lawsuit is, but it took decades for folks to take action. So as you state, after decades and decades, finally action is taken by the government, but also by your firm. That's the start of your story. What was the goal for your case and how was it different from any governmental action, for instance?

So with our case, our goal was, you know, what can we do for the community here? That's always our focus. You know, how can we make these folks better off than when we found them? And our hands are a little bit tied by what we can do with a civil lawsuit. But the main thing that we were able to do

or set out to do was to make sure that we held the company accountable for taking away people's property rights for the period of time that the law allowed us to. We wanted this company to have to compensate these thousands of people living next to the plant for limiting their ability to use and enjoy their properties. Now, this might not be a huge dollar claim when you look at it on an individual basis, but

Through the class action process, if you're allowed to aggregate thousands of smaller claims, relatively smaller claims,

then you've got a potentially huge liability that the company is facing. And, you know, if you're at trial or the company is willing to put its fate into the hands of a jury, that could be a very big problem. And it becomes a deterrent for past behavior and it becomes a catalyst for change going into the future.

But most importantly, the big difference between what we can do with the civil process and through a class action and what the government can do is we can get compensation. We can try our best to make the residents whole.

The government, with its enforcement action, is often confined to just enforcing the standards in a permit. And those permits are often negotiated with companies. And so there's only so much that the government can do. The government explicitly can't go ahead and try and get compensation for the people that have had to bear the brunt of the pollution. And so that's where we come in. We want to make sure that the people who have suffered

are getting compensated for their suffering. And ideally, that we can use the litigation process to be a catalyst for change going forward.

So I suppose one of the first steps for you then, when you're thinking about a civil suit, and obviously to you, it immediately appears that class action is the way to go, because probably any award would be very small for an individual. So how do you go about aggregating your plaintiffs? How does this process begin? So throughout the whole case, I worked hand in glove with my colleague, Sarah Siskins. Sarah has years of experience working on class action lawsuits and

One of the first things that we began with was legal analysis. You've got to look at what the jurisprudence, the case law says in the jurisdiction. Are you going to file in state, federal court? So there's a ton of just strategizing and legal analysis that goes into it. But really, as trial lawyers, you know, and where I sort of zone in on or home in on is the facts.

You've got to start with the stories. You can hear it from one person, but is that a common experience for everyone that lives in the community? So you've really got to get out there. You've got to talk to people. You've got to make sure, especially for a class action, that there is a commonality of harm because the way it works is,

In the law, because a class action, when you aggregate thousands of claims, becomes such a big threat to a company, there's an extra hurdle in the class action process where a plaintiff's lawyer or a plaintiff has to demonstrate to the judge, to the court, that it's appropriate to treat this case as a class action. And so for the first few years of a complex case like this,

My team is focused on demonstrating that commonality. And where does that come from? Well, it comes from the people who are living the experience on the ground, right?

It comes from documents from the company's files. It comes from documents from the regulator's files. And you have to piece these facts together and shape a narrative that's going to be persuasive and that matches what the law tells you. You go back to that legal analysis in the beginning, and the law tells you that, you know, to get this case certified as a class action, you've got to see X, Y, and Z. Well, you've got to have the facts that show that.

because you can get two or three years down the road. You can invest...

a lot of money, time, resources into getting a case certified. But if the court doesn't agree with you, you're back to having five or six individual claims, and that's no threat to a company like GPC at all. I would imagine, too, in the early stages that after decades of this plant polluting at will, that the people of Muscatine might be suspicious of out-of-town lawyers coming to do good for them.

I mean, that's dead on. That is...

Not just suspicious of out-of-town lawyers, which is always a hurdle that, you know, when you're going to a local community, you've got to be relatable. You've got to be genuine. People have to believe that you're out to help them. But it's not just that that we faced. I spent, you know, a good part of a year going in and out of, you know, lower income homes, trailer parks in the communities immediately adjacent to the plant.

And what you hear, unfortunately, is a bit of a defeatist attitude of folks who live in the shadow of some of these great industrial facilities that are, like you said earlier, Lindsay, job suppliers, big economic boons for towns like this. They just don't think that they stand a chance.

And they're not aware of things that the law can do for them. So you're right. I've got the hurdle of having to convince people that this guy from Chicago is someone that they can trust in their small Iowa river town.

But on top of that, I've got to explain to them that it's worth their involvement. It's worth it for them to describe to me their experience and how that fits into this mosaic of evidence that we're going to use first to convince a trial judge to let us proceed to trial as a class action. And then ultimately to convince a jury that they should see it our way and not GPC's way.

And so getting people to shed this idea that,

It's a waste of time because I'm just little old me and that's a huge moneymaker over there. And no one's going to side with me when I'm standing up against Goliath. That's a tall task too. But apparently you did it. You got enough people together to present your case that there's enough people to certify as a class action. And you're battling motions from GPC all the time, but you run into trouble trying to get this to court. What was your experience?

Real quickly, within the first, I'd say, year and a half of the litigation. Now, this litigation ultimately took about seven years before resolution, from filing to resolution. And within that first year and a half, GPC actually moved to dismiss the case on the grounds that federal law preempted, didn't allow for this type of case. To try and simplify it, to put it simply,

Essentially, GPC argued that we have a Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act is designed to protect people from harmful emissions. And what the plaintiffs are trying to do here is then run around that and file a civil lawsuit. And federal law just says this is the exclusive province and jurisdiction of the Clean Air Act and you can't do it. And the trial judge agreed. So we appealed it to ultimately to the Iowa Supreme Court.

And the Iowa Supreme Court agreed with us unanimously, specifically, it agreed with us that some of the oldest laws on the book, the common law, nuisance and trespass and negligence, that those laws were developed to protect people.

regular citizens, private property owners and their property. So the Iowa Supreme Court agreed with us and sent the case back down to the trial court. And then we were off towards trying to demonstrate that it was appropriate for class certification.

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So I noticed an interesting shift in what many people would think about a case against a polluter, which would probably bring to mind health concerns. But you are mentioning property rights. So the class action vehicle, I have to keep going back to this, because the class action vehicle requires a demonstration that

The common claim, the commonality of every one of the thousands of people in the proposed class, the commonality of their claims predominates over the individual aspects of their claims.

When you get into issues like severe health effects, everybody's got an individual health history that's different from the next person. Everybody's been, you know, has different family history, has been exposed to different things, lived different places.

That's the type of claim that is near impossible to get certified as a class action. And so when you're thinking about making lasting change and creating leverage and creating a deterrent for a big polluter, you can file an individual case for someone that maybe has cancer. And we've done that. But

That's a much tougher way because you've then got, let's say you've got 50 people with cancer. Instead of having one lawsuit that folds them all in, you've got 50 individual lawsuits. And each lawsuit is an opportunity for the defense to win at trial. Now, juxtapose that with a class action that goes after property rights. Property rights aren't nearly as individualistic, right?

Everybody who owns a home or rents a home, when they sign that contract to buy that house or buy that apartment or rent that apartment, rent that house, that contract comes with it, a bundle of rights. That's what we sort of describe it like in law school. And those rights include the right to use and enjoy your property free from interference, unreasonable interference from your neighbors.

And so that's the angle, the strategy that we took, because we didn't think we could get personal injury claims or severe health effect claims certified. But we did believe that we could establish commonality, that there was a single source of pollution, that when the wind blew towards a property, the experience would be generally the same and it would be common. It would be typical amongst all the class members.

And that's how we got the court to agree. So by aggregating what, you know, these nuisance claims are, which are less severe than, you know, a cancer case or a significant health effect. But the aggregation of those smaller claims ultimately presents a bigger deterrent in many instances like it did in Muscatine. How many residents ultimately ended up becoming part of the class?

So our case covered about a 10-year period and people moved in and out. But at the end of the day, about 6,000 people ultimately made claims to recover damages for lost use and enjoyment. So I don't really know, but that seems like a fairly significant class and probably presents a significant challenge to the company. And they would probably bring all their resources to bear. How did they fight back?

So they fought back in a few ways, and they did. I mean, I think at first they were skeptical that we would get the case certified as a class action, but then we got the case certified as a class action. So they appealed again. And this, for a second time, went up to the Iowa Supreme Court. And for a second time, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously agreed with our position and sent the case back down and

told it to go to trial. Now, there were a number of other lawyers who I believe tried to build off the success that we had through the class certification process.

and attempted to gut the class by getting individual class members to leave for a quick settlement. And GPC obviously was a willing participant as they were the ones paying the people for the quick settlement. So that was an attempt to really, you know, if you can reduce the numbers of residents involved in the class action enough, then you've taken away the scariest threat of the class action. But again, that was unsuccessful.

But the other thing that the defendants tried to do was they actually filed a motion with the court asking the court to declare that because they had polluted over these properties for so long that they'd actually earned a property right, a prescriptive easement to do it in perpetuity forever.

And so we had to fight that battle in front of the trial judge and convince the trial judge that despite GPC's efforts or arguments to say that they had this right and no one could take that right away from them anymore, that was silly. And ultimately, the trial judge agreed with us. But

Point is, GPC threw everything at us that they could to gut the class, to get rid of the class, overturn it. And then ultimately, they tried to get a court to declare that they had the right, the property right to pollute over these properties. And they were unsuccessful at each turn.

So after all these attempts to fend off your lawsuit, what happens? After all these attempts to fend it off, we got within a week or two of actually picking a jury and we were able to resolve the case, come to an agreement with GPC. So because we did this through the settlement process and not through the verdict process, we were able to

enlist GPC at the end of the day into committing to a better future, cleaner air for the people in Muscatine. Now, when it comes to settling a case like this, and especially when you have 6,000 plaintiffs, I imagine it's very difficult to find the point in which everyone is satisfied, where the compromises made are all agreed to. Describe this process of ending up with a settlement that everyone can tolerate.

So, you know, having been through lots of mediations in my career, the first line of any mediator is almost always at the end of the day, we're going to get to a point where nobody's happy with it. And that means we've got a good settlement. But but the class process is actually a little bit different than what folks would normally think of as a negotiation. And that's because because a class action is a representative process, it's

You don't have all 6,000 individuals at the table. And you have people speaking on behalf of those 6,000 individuals. But what our legal system has said is, you know what, that's not enough. We want to make sure that we safeguard this. And so we're going to, unlike every other individual case where you've got two parties trying to work out a resolution or a settlement, we're going to make sure that we safeguard this.

In case of class actions, we're going to make the court get involved and the court has to approve any settlement.

So, you know, we hammered out the details of the settlement with a mediator, with GPC, with our named plaintiffs, the representatives for the 6,000 people. But then after that, we had to bring it to the judge and the judge had to review all aspects of the settlement, had to approve it. And then after the judge gives what's called preliminary approval, we actually have to send a notice of it out to every member of the class that we can find.

And give the people who weren't at the table, who were being represented by us and by the named plaintiffs, they have to have an opportunity to object. And it's only at the end of all of those steps that the settlement can get approved by the court and then ultimately administered. So, you know, the class action is a really special process.

There's protections for defendants to make sure that they're not exposed to liability when you've got a bunch of individual claims. And then there's protections for the members of the class to make sure that lawyers or named plaintiffs are going for a quick settlement so that they can get a quick payday and it's unfair to the members of the class. All of those protections are in place and you have to satisfy them to actually get to resolution.

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So then finally, what, I guess, did the people in Muscatine say about how the settlement might have changed their lives?

Well, for some of the folks, especially those that live closest to the plant, you know, we're talking about settlement sums that were equivalent to or exceeded an annual salary, right?

and our named plaintiffs who, you know, were with us from the beginning. They got what's called incentives in the settlement. And really, I think we made a big difference in folks' lives. And I'm most proud of the fact that, you know, GPC at the end of the day agreed to install additional pollution controls

So we could feel comfortable that, you know, the Aaron Muscatine going forward would be much cleaner than what people had lived through in the past. I guess one of the crucial points in your journey here was the win in front of the Iowa Supreme Court. And it's interesting that it hinged on a fairly complicated legal idea, the difference between common law and statutory law. Can you begin to explain to us what the difference is and how you used it in your case in the Iowa Supreme Court?

So we have a regulatory scheme in this country in the context of the environment. There are two really big acts, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. And those statutes are in place to provide limits to all polluters that emit certain pollutants above certain levels. Now, those schemes, those regulatory schemes,

What they don't do is provide any compensation or relief beyond the statutory scheme for the people that breathe in, drink in, are exposed to the pollution. And that's where the common law comes in. Some of the earliest laws that were developed in any legal system were nuisance, were trespass, negligence. And these are laws that can be used to make sure that

that people that have to suffer through pollution in excessive amounts, in unsafe amounts, in amounts that hinder and prevent people from using and enjoying their properties, the common law can be used to make sure that we make those people whole. It's not fair, in my view, to rely solely on a regulatory scheme

that will make a difference going forward. In other words, let's say a polluter is violating its permit and the regulator steps in and the regulator wins an enforcement action and now the polluter is required to comply with its permit going forward. Well, what about the last five years when the polluter wasn't complying with its permit and these folks who live by the plant had to breathe in or drink in or be exposed to this pollution?

It's great that going forward, those folks won't be exposed to those levels of pollution. But what about the five years, 10 years or the years prior where they were? Why aren't they being compensated for having to bear that? And that's where the common law steps in. And that's why we think it's such a valuable tool. So in the settlement, you secured some fairly meaningful concessions from the company, including additional air pollution controls.

Now, forcing a company to clean up its pollution, that's, as you just mentioned, probably normally the province of state environmental agencies and their statutes. But in this appeal to common law, you got the company cleaning up its plant when the government was not doing enough. Is that correct?

That would be one way to put it, for sure. We got them to do it through the settlement process because of the threat. You know, this was a huge class action. Thousands of people were involved, the aggregation of thousands of claims, and it becomes a real deterrent. And the company at some point is faced with the question, do I want to roll the dice and

and put potentially the fate of the company in the hands of 12 strangers, this jury.

Or do I want to work out a resolution with the folks that have filed this lawsuit? And when the latter option is chosen by a company, it affords an opportunity to not just focus on the dollars to compensate people, but to force quicker action than a government might be able to force by getting a company to agree to making its operation better. Of course, if it doesn't,

you know, it's just going to potentially go through the same type of litigation again in a few years. So there's a lot that can be done outside of the government regulatory scheme with the common law.

Many listeners might be familiar with the frustration of a potential polluter or other bad actor pointing at a statute and saying, look, I'm not violating it. I'm not breaking the law. But this appeal to different portions of the law, the common law, seems to be a workaround for this. Is this model replicable?

Yeah, we currently, my firm, Minor Barnhill and Gallon, we currently have a certified class in Illinois, a certified class in Pennsylvania. So we've already been through those early stages and demonstrating to the court that the cases are appropriate for class treatment. And just like with GPC, my partner Sarah Siskind and I and our other partners at Minor Barnhill and Gallon are all working to push these cases forward.

Now, we haven't gotten to resolution. We haven't gotten to trial. So who knows how those cases will end up. But we've used the model that we developed in Muscatine to inform us. We're improving it, always working to make things better. But we're certainly using this tool. And I should say there are a couple other tools that can be used, too, outside of the class process.

You know, we've represented and worked with grassroots environmental organizations before. And the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act actually both have what's called a citizen suit provision. And so unlike the civil process, it's not the type of lawsuit where you can recover damages to compensate people for having to live through it.

But these are lawsuits where if folks are living near a polluter and they feel the regulator isn't doing enough or the regulator should be enforcing a permit where it's not, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act explicitly allow for citizens to file a citizen suit and stand in the shoes of the regulator to try and enforce the permit. Now, we've

been hired to do those cases in the past. And we've also been hired by government entities, by states, cities, municipalities, to bring cases on behalf of its citizens, its taxpayers against polluters to protect natural resources. So both with the government, without the government, with the statutory scheme, and mostly with the common law, there are ways to use the legal system to try and curb pollution in this country.

Now, of course, thinking about it, the largest class you could ever assemble is probably everyone on the planet. And the big environmental challenge of the moment is climate change. While the Supreme Court last year kind of tempered how much regulation the EPA can put on CO2 emissions, I imagine that there's a way forward with these other tools.

Yeah, you know, there's been a huge proliferation of litigation aimed at climate change. And we've been involved in terms of talking through with some advocacy groups, different approaches, how to use nuisance, negligence, trespass laws, ways to do it. But in terms of a success story, we're still waiting for it. We're hoping for it. We're pulling for it. We want to lend a hand however we can. While that bigger litigation is going on, though,

I do think the tools that I just mentioned, especially the class process, can help. And the ways that they help are we're chipping away, right? Climate change is a huge problem. It is maybe the problem of our generation and the next. But, you know, while going after that sort of all-encompassing solution is important, you can also take steps to chip away at the problem. You can identify sources, single sources of pollution.

And by using the litigation tools that are available, by going after single sources of pollution, not only do you benefit the folks on the ground who are immediately affected by it, but you're curbing pollution. You're reducing the amount of pollutants in the air. Sometimes those pollutants are direct climate change contributors. Sometimes those pollutants are indirect or precursors to climate change constituents.

But reducing those constituents in the air is going to contribute to helping address the problem. And so while these bigger litigations are going on and while we're doing our best to lend a hand there and contribute when called upon, we will continue to go after the single sources of pollution to chip away at the problem from the base. It's sort of the way I like to think of it.

I suppose what you're describing is a bit of an optimistic takeaway here, that even though it feels fruitless to wait for the big gears of government to grind away at this problem, that individual citizens and activists and lawyers like yourself might be able to chip away at it from the bottom.

Absolutely. Less pollution benefits everyone. It's amazing. You know, I started doing these pollution cases about 12, 13 years ago, and my eyes are opened every day to a new issue, but the distance is...

that these pollutants travel because they're so small is so great. So you curb pollution at a plant on the Mississippi River in Iowa, you're directly improving the air quality of someone in that wind pattern hundreds of miles away. And so chipping away at the problem, finding the sources of pollution that are excessive in this country, using the common law, class action process, citizen suits, government, you know, actions,

using all of those tools to reduce the amount of pollution out there is going to help with the bigger problem. And while we wait for that bigger solution, we can chip away at the bigger problem. Well, Scott Enten, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American Scandal. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. That was my conversation with Scott Enten, a public interest attorney and partner at the law firm Minor Barnhill & Galland. You can learn more about their work at lawmbg.com.

From Wondery, this is Episode 4 of the Dust Bowl for American Scam. In our next series, we look at the rise and fall of former football player Aaron Hernandez. Hernandez was one of the most acclaimed athletes in the NFL, with endorsements and a multi-million dollar contract. But when his life took a tragic turn, the public was left with unsettling questions about the dangers of football and the costs of professional sports.

American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. Audio editing by Molly Bach. Music by Lindsey Graham. Our senior producers, Gabe Riven. Executive producers are Stephanie Jens, Jenny Lauer Beckman, and Marshall Louis for Wonderland.

He killed at least 19 people during the 1980s in South Africa. Very dark times. People were desperate. We were looking for him. We couldn't find him. And nobody knew where he was. Every single one of his victims was black. He reached such a stage where he was now hunting. World of Secrets from the BBC World Service. Season 3, The Apartheid Killer. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.