On the banks of the lower Mississippi River in St. James Parish, Louisiana, on sprawling tracts of land that break up the vast wetlands, hulking petrochemical complexes light the sky day and night. They piled up over the past half century, built by fossil fuel giants like Nucor and Occidental. In that time, they replaced farmland with concrete and steel, and threaded the levees with pipelines that carry natural gas from as far away as West Texas. When the plants came, the lush landscape of this part of south Louisiana deteriorated.
“The pecans are dry. They don’t yield like they used to,” said Gail Lebouf, a longtime resident of the region and a co-founder of the community group Inclusive Louisiana. “The fig trees, the blackberries — all that I came up making a living off of is not there anymore.”
Lebouf is a leading activist in “Cancer Alley,” the 85-mile stretch of land between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where strips of residential blocks are sandwiched between the region’s more than 150 petrochemical plants. She has spent the past several ye... Read more
