The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2022 by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Author:Ayana Elizabeth Johnson [Johnson, Ayana Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

There’s a Clear Fix to Helping Black Communities Fight Pollution

Rachel Ramirez

From Vox

Sharon Lavigne has lived in St. James Parish, Louisiana, a predominantly Black community, all her life. She remembers when the air wasn’t covered with thick gray smog, when the water was still safe to drink, when the gardens were productive and fertile.

But now, she says, “we are sick and we are dying.”

Lavigne has watched her neighbors die from cancer and suffer from respiratory illnesses. About five years ago, she, too, was diagnosed with pollution-linked autoimmune hepatitis, with tests showing she had aluminum inside her body. The reason for the community’s decline in health, environmentalists say, is a burgeoning fossil fuel industry right in their backyards.

Over the past three decades, roughly 150 chemical plants and refineries have been building facilities up and down the eighty-five-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that straddles New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which includes St. James Parish. According to data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), seven out of ten U.S. census tracts with the country’s highest cancer risk levels from air pollution are located in this corridor, known as “Cancer Alley.”

So, when Lavigne heard that the Taiwanese plastics manufacturer Formosa was going to build a $9.4 billion petrochemical complex just two miles from her home, she retired from her teaching job in 2018 and started the faith-based environmental justice group RISE St. James to fight the new development project.

Formosa’s vast 2,400-acre site, currently marked off with fences, sits on two former nineteenth-century sugarcane plantations and a burial ground for the enslaved, which the company failed to disclose until RISE St. James filed a public records request. Still, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality approved permits last year for Formosa to build the complex of fourteen plastics plants, despite the company’s own models revealing that it could more than double the amount of toxic pollutants in the area and emit more of the carcinogenic chemical ethylene oxide than almost any other facility in the country.

The predominantly Black communities of St. James Parish and the rest of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley are not alone in this problem. According to the National Black Environmental Justice Network, Black Americans in nineteen states are 79 percent more likely to live with industrial pollution than white people. Researchers also found that Black people breathe 56 percent more pollution than they cause, whereas white people breathe 17 percent less pollution than they generate.

Lavigne said industries “come to Black communities because they think no one’s going to say anything. They think no one is going to fight.”

Environmental groups like RISE St. James usually have one ally in their corner when fighting industrial polluters: the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a bedrock law that requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of proposed infrastructure such as the construction of major highways, prison complexes, airports, pipelines, landfills, and refineries. Passed by Congress in 1969, NEPA, followed by the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, was part of a broader plan to protect the environment from any point source of pollution or contamination.

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