A case study in "environmental racism" recounts how a toxic-waste disposal facility polarized a small rural town in Mississippi, pitting poor blacks who wanted the plant against two white housewives who led the movement to stop it. The creek referenced in the title flows through poor, mostly black Noxubee County, Mississippi; the uproar is over a proposal to construct a chemical waste dump there. Environmental lawyer Colin Crawford tells this cautionary, near-tragic tale from the perspective of the leaders of each faction: Martha Blackwell, the wealthy white woman who leads the opposition to the dump; Ike Brown, the political boss of the black community, who favors it; and Ed Netherland, the company man searching for a site for the dump while trying to sell it to the citizens of Noxubee. The clash of race, environmentalist fear, greed, and class makes for a fascinating story--and one without a happy ending. In 1983, Hughes Federated Technologies and U.S. Pollution Control, Inc., formed a partnership in order to place a hazardous-waste disposal complex in low-income, predominantly black Noxubee County, Mississippi. The proposed siting was more than controversial; it polarized along racial and economic lines the citizens of Noxubee, who were torn between protection of the environment and the promise of employment. On one level, this work by an environmental lawyer is a sociological inquiry into the "jobs vs. the environment" dilemma. But it is also about environmental justice (EJ) and the politics of hazardous waste in which low-income and minority communities are singled out for the placement of toxic-waste facilities. As a documentary history of a specific incident, this belongs alongside more theoretical works such as Robert Bullard's Unequal Protection (Sierra Club, 1994), Jim Schwab's Deeper Shades of Green (Sierra Club, 1994), and the classic of the EJ movement, the United Church of Christ's Toxic Waste and Race in the United States (UCC, 1987). Highly recommended.?Susan Maret, Univ. of Colorado Lib., Denver Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. A blow-by-blow account of a rural southern community's fight to keep toxic waste out of its backyard. First-time author Crawford, an environmental lawyer and advocate, has a charged story to tell, full of complications. One is the strange coalition of forces that sought to bring what was to have been one of the nation's largest toxic-waste facilities to Noxubee County, Miss., whose population is largely black and poor: Big-city hustlers, working in alliance with local entrepreneurs, one of them a black political organizer named Ike Brown, ``the county's Al Sharpton, or its Savonarola, or its Boss Tweed.'' Another is the equally unlikely coalition of forces that gathered to stop the facility from being built: Some of the county's wealthiest white residents, the descendants of plantation owners, as well as its poorest black sharecroppers. Crawford tells the story of their battle exceedingly well; it's a tale that takes fascinating political twists and turns. The opposition forces have helped change the face of local politics, if only at the personal level--``I never imagined I would see Miss Mildred walking down the street with a black person,'' one activist remarks of a doyenne who overcame a lifetime of prejudice to battle the threat to her home. Whether those forces will succeed in keeping the dump out remains to be seen, as the fight moves into the courts. Apart from the fact that toxic-waste dumps are almost certain to leak into the groundwater after a decade or two, Crawford notes that such a dump would be especially ill advised in Noxubee County--with ``some of the nation's best farmland and a future source of our food security.'' An important contribution to the growing literature of environmental degradation and racism, and a fine case study in local politics. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. The fight brings vividly to life the epigram of the man who understood Mississippi best, William Faulkner : "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." -- The New York Times Book Review, Anthony Walton