In my college classes and in my book I attempt to explain why places like Cancer Alley exist. I figure if we can understand why, then we will know where and how to make effective change.
It’s easy to see that the lives and health of the people in St. Joseph’s Parish aren’t valued by the shareholders of Formosa Plastics. Shareholders invest for profit. That’s the only thing they measure and the only thing management is accountable for.
Formosa is a $38 billion company headquartered in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan. It’s highly unlikely that any of the investors or senior managers have ever visited St. Joseph’s Parish or met the people who live where four new plastics plants are now proposed. Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes.
Louisiana has a reputation for being easy on environmental regulation. Poor communities there have welcomed the good paying jobs with benefits. They accepted the trade off between ugly refineries and foul odors, and the good paying jobs for people without college degrees.
This is familiar to many of us: Maine’s history of 35 paper mills is based on the same motivations. Except that there are 140 petrochemical plants in Cancer Alley, and the demand for oil, gas and plastics keeps growing.
Eric Liu, a senior aide to President Obama, writes that “power justifies itself”. What he means is that people rationalize why things are the way they are. In the case of Cancer Alley, it makes sense to build petrochemical plants in a place that has the infrastructure and is already a polluted industrial landscape. This is the same rationale behind zoning for “designated growth areas”, which is generally considered to be a good approach to land use planning. But is it?
Naivete about toxic emissions is part of this picture. No one—from corporate managers to local residents—wants to believe that the plants in Cancer Alley are emitting high levels of noxious chemicals. After all, the companies applied for and were awarded environmental permits. It’s painful to think that innocent people are being taken advantage of in the pursuit of profit. So many simply deny it. Others rationalize these actions by thinking that dark skinned and poor people are somehow less worthy than (“hard working, risk taking”) lighter skinned people.
Naivete about current business practices also figures in here. Several generations ago businesses were mostly locally and regionally owned. Business leaders were respected members of the local community. Local journalists made sure they were held accountable. These things are no longer so.
Now business leaders work far from their operations, and are under constant and intense competition. They are under tremendous pressure to keep costs low. So they avoid using green chemicals that might cost a little more. They defer investing in equipment that would scrub emissions before they are released into the sky. The same cost avoidance is what drives retailers like Walmart to pay so little that employees need food stamps just to get by. So we have a whole system that is rigged against the low income and Black residents of St. Joseph’s Parish.
But the fact that a group of them sued the state of Louisiana changes the game. RISE St. James, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and several other community groups are no longer buying the trade off between jobs and their health.
Once people wake up to what’s happening and seek a better future, a whole new cycle of thinking and action begins. As a new campaign gains public attention and grows, resources and support grow too. In the case of RISE St. James, Earth Justice came forward to provide legal representation. Foundations and donors are providing financial support for the case.
This new cycle of thinking and action leads to more things that you and I can do. We can spread the word about environmental racism. We can tell a new story about the strength of local communities and how they can stand up to huge corporations.
We can reduce our use of plastic and demand alternatives. We can work with local and regional leaders to pass plastic bag bans. We can pass producer responsibility laws that require manufacturers to take back and recycle the products they make. If you’re a shareholder, you can join shareholder initiatives that demand environmental impact reporting and better wages for workers.
You can probably think of more ways to change the game. What if corporate leaders were required to meet regularly with local communities and ask about their experience? What if local communities and employees had voting seats on corporate boards? Many of these ideas are being explored and implemented.
The bottom line is, once we ask why, we open our minds to a world of possibility. Asking this simple question is the key that unlocks a healthy future.