Sacrifice Zones
FOSSIL FUELS AND RACISM
Extracting and burning fossil fuels is harmful to the health of people living nearby. So are other petroleum-based industrial processes like making plastics. Because of this danger, fossil fuel and petrochemical companies operate where they believe residents deserve less or can’t fight back—creating sacrifice zones along lines of race, class, and geopolitical hierarchy.
Cancer Alley is an 86-mile stretch of Louisiana along the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. 200 industrial plants accounting for 25% of US petrochemical production are located there.
Saint James Parish and its fifth district, which is 89% Black, sit in the middle of Cancer Alley. Many community residents trace their family’s history there back to enslavement and the formation of free Black townships after the Civil War. In the town of Reserve, residents suffer a risk of cancer caused by air pollution 50 times higher than the national average.
One reason the petrochemical industry developed so explosively in Cancer Alley is that residents were methodically deprived of the opportunity to object. The lower Mississippi River parishes were once packed with sugarcane plantations where working conditions were particularly lethal for enslaved people. This extreme brutality and racial regimentation has echoed long after emancipation in the intensity of local white efforts to disenfranchise Black communities. In 2014, the fifth district’s land-use designation was changed from “residential” to “existing residential/future industrial.”
In 2022, however, the faith-based, grassroots environmental justice group Rise Saint James won a huge victory, revoking the permit for a new plant that would have emitted more fossil fuel pollution than 2.8 million cars per year.
Every day, local activists win fights like this in sacrifice zones large and small, near and far.
“FIRST SLAVERY, THEN SHARECROPPING, NOW THIS.”
–MARY HAMPTON, CANCER ALLEY RESIDENT
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Forensic Architecture: Environmental Racism In Death Alley, Louisiana
The Guardian: Huge toxic site to be built on grounds where slaves are likely buried, files reveal | Environment
The Guardian: First slavery, then a chemical plant and cancer deaths: one town's brutal history | Louisiana
ProPublica: In a Notoriously Polluted Area of the Country, Massive New Chemical Plants Are Still Moving In
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health: Uneven Magnitude of Disparities in Cancer Risks from Air Toxics
Business Insider: 'We are being poisoned': Black residents living in Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley' say the state is guilty of 'genocide' and environmental racism
The New York Times: The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery.
EarthJustice: Cancer Alley Rises Up
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