Louisiana’s petroleum industry profits from exploiting historic inequalities, showing how slavery laid the groundwork for environmental racism.

Sharon Lavigne was teaching a special-education class when her daughter called to tell her about the Sunshine Project. Named for its proximity to Louisiana’s Sunshine Bridge, the operation, helmed by the Taiwanese behemoth Formosa Plastics, was on track to build one of the world’s largest plastic plants. Already the air Lavigne breathed in her native St. James Parish was some of the most toxic in the United States. Now Formosa planned to spend $9.4 billion on facilities that would make polymer and ethylene glycol, polyethylene, and polypropylene—ingredients found in antifreeze, drainage pipes, and a variety of single-use plastics—just two miles down the road from her family home. The concentration of carcinogens in the atmosphere could triple.

“It hurt me like an arrow through my body,” Lavigne told me when I visited her at her home in Welcome, Louisiana, last December. “Everyone else was saying we had to move.” Within a few months of learning about the Sunshine Project in spring 2018, Lavigne, who’s 69, organized a community meeting in her den. “Ain’t gonna happen,” Lavigne said. “We not gonna be moved out and bought out and throwed out the window.” The group went on to found Rise St. James, a faith-based nonprofit with the mission of halting industrial development in the parish. “I was not a person who would speak up,” Lavigne said. “Boy, did that change.” That fall, Lavigne was spending so much time organizing marches and speaking publicly about Formosa that, after 39 years of teaching, she retired. Then two of Rise’s members died—one of cancer, the other of respiratory distress and other medical problems, conditions Lavigne links to pollution from existing plants. Stopping Formosa became her full-time job.

In Louisiana—where more than a 12th of the country’s estimated 4 million enslaved people lived prior to the Civil War—descendants have the right to visit their ancestors’ graveyards. So when Lavigne learned in late 2019 that enslaved people from the Buena Vista Plantation, whom she believes she’s descended from, may have been buried on Formosa’s proposed building site, she tried to visit. Upon arriving, she said authorities told her she was trespassing and that if she returned, she’d be arrested.

Back in July 2018, Coastal Environments, or CEI, an independent archaeological and environmental contractor, had alerted the Louisiana Division of Archaeology about two possible cemeteries on Formosa’s land, based on historic maps of the Buena Vista and Acadia Plantations. Formosa’s archaeological consultants had missed those sites in their initial survey, but after being instructed by the state to look again, they found and fenced off the Buena Vista cemetery. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal-advocacy nonprofit, Formosa made no public announcement of this discovery. Lavigne found out about its existence more than a year later via a public-records request submitted by Rise’s lawyers. The Acadia cemetery, Formosa reported, had still not been located and may have been destroyed by a previous owner, but both CEI and the Center for Constitutional Rights dispute that claim, arguing that Formosa’s surveyors searched in the wrong area. In March 2020, CEI identified five additional anomalies on Formosa’s territory that could also be slave cemeteries and have not yet been excavated. (“Archaeologists conducted thousands of shovel tests … no remains have been found other than at the Buena Vista site,” Janile Parks, Formosa’s director of community and government relations, wrote me via email. “When [Formosa] learned of remains at the Buena Vista site … the company immediately coordinated with the appropriate authorities. [Formosa’s] archaeological investigations of the site have been transparent and are matters of public record.”)

Rise formally requested access to the Buena Vista cemetery last year for Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the day that enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, found out they were free—more than two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Formosa denied the Juneteenth request, and Lavigne took them to court. In a statement to the Associated Press, the company’s lawyers questioned the need for the ceremony on the basis that archaeologists couldn’t confirm the ethnicity of the human remains. District Judge Emile St. Pierre sided with Rise, giving the group temporary access to the property. “We need healing,” St. Pierre said at the end of the hearing. “Let’s look at where we are in America.”

The conflict between Rise St. James and Formosa comes at a time when many Americans are insisting the country acknowledge and address the horrors of slavery and its repercussions. Around the country, cities have debated whether to take down Confederate monuments, inciting protests. Down the river from St. James Parish, in New Orleans, several monuments have already been removed, and the city council is preparing to rename schools and streets that honor Confederate officials and segregationists. Yet what’s happening with the Buena Vista grave site is unique. Unlike monuments, which are symbolic, the cemetery contains human remains, which have endowed the land with enough cultural capital to sway a judge, at least temporarily, in favor of the community that claims it. Like a time capsule, the graves link the petrochemical industry to the plantation economy, revealing how Louisiana’s petroleum industry profits from exploiting historic inequalities and showing how one brutal system gave way to another.

Two hundred years ago, nearly every inch of Mississippi River–adjacent land south of Natchez was part of a plantation. Rich soil made for strong harvests, and river access allowed for the easy export of goods. In Louisiana, those plantations grew sugarcane, the “white gold” that propelled the southern economy. Arduous to harvest, grueling to press, and treacherous to boil, sugar had been a rare commodity, a crop barely worth the effort, until the transatlantic slave trade solved the problem of labor. In the half century preceding the Civil War, 1 million people were sold into the Deep South, relocated from Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Along the lower Mississippi River, the population of enslaved people quadrupled despite their being worked so hard that death rates often exceeded birth rates. Nonconsensual laborers produced a quarter of the world’s cane sugar, which became so lucrative as a crop that, for a time, the nation’s highest concentration of millionaires lived between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Back then, Louisiana was the second-richest state per capita, a staggering feat when you consider that almost half of its residents lacked legal ownership of their bodies.

Drive along the lower Mississippi River today in southern Louisiana, and you’ll see vestiges of that history, though the state now has the second-highest poverty rate in the union. Houses are small and trailers abundant, but more than a dozen plantations still exist, offering tours, meals, wedding venues, and overnight stays, their advertising thick with honeyed narratives about an opulent white lifestyle long gone. Until two years ago, a sign at Rosedown, the most visited plantation in the state, described enslaved people as “happy” with a “natural musical instinct.” Ormond Plantation’s website laments the hard times suffered after “the war between the states.” Only one plantation museum in Louisiana, the Whitney, focuses exclusively on the labor and culture of African and African-descended people. There, visitors can pay their respects at memorials for the enslaved, tour slave cabins, and peek in the overseer’s shed, where the tools of chattel—neck braces, balls and chains, leg irons, and paddles—hang from the walls and ceiling.

The land adjacent to the Mississippi River bears the marks of another brutality, unmissable from a car, barge, or plane. Beside the restored plantation houses and acres of sugarcane that still stripe the landscape, a newer economy chugs and chuffs. More than 150 petrochemical plants operate along the 85-mile stretch of land from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Stadium-size holding tanks, miles-long pipes, and flaring smokestacks create skylines reminiscent of cities, though, aside from the occasional security truck, few humans are visible. Names such as Syngas and American Styrenics make it difficult to tell what each plant makes, but whatever it is, you can smell it, cough it out, and sometimes see it falling, a soft yellow rain from a discolored sky. The sheer quantity of plastics, synthetic rubbers, electronic components, and fertilizers manufactured here is enough that experts call the area “the Silicon Valley of the petrochemical industry.”

The Sunshine Project has an unmistakable doomsday quality. According to a 2020 Pew Research Center poll, about two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government should do more to reduce global climate change, yet Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality has written permits for the proposed facilities to emit more than 13 million tons of greenhouse gases a year, the equivalent of three and a half coal plants. In addition, extensive research on the damaging effects of plastics has spawned a global movement to ban single-use items such as bags, straws, and cups. Despite this, Louisiana’s governor, John Bel Edwards, defends the Sunshine Project, hailing its proposed facilities as an economic win. In addition to tax revenue, Formosa anticipates that it’ll support an estimated 8,000 temporary ancillary positions in the construction and service industries and create 1,200 on-site jobs with an average yearly salary of $84,500, almost triple the median household income for St. James Parish’s Fifth District, where the plants would be located.

Lavigne thinks those numbers are spin. The state has often equated industry with progress, but petrochemical facilities have a documented history of outsourcing labor. Lavigne is doubtful that Formosa will hire people from her community, besides for low-paying security work—a perspective her parish councilman, Clyde Cooper, shares. “These new companies don’t hire anyone from the community,” Cooper told me over the phone. “People come, even from outside of the state, to work in construction and in the plants.” (In 2018, Cooper voted to back the Sunshine Project, on the condition that the company agree to preferential hiring from within the parish, plus funding for a hurricane evacuation route and free cancer screenings for residents of the Fifth District.)

As for taxes, Louisiana’s notoriety for corporate welfare has long made it a haven for refineries and manufacturers. Since the 1930s, the Industrial Tax Exemption Program has allowed a state-level board to make decisions about parish-level property-tax exemption. According to a study by Together Louisiana, a statewide network of community organizers, from 1997 to 2016 the ITEP board approved all but eight of 16,931 corporate-tax-exemption applications. In 2017 alone, those exemptions cost state parishes about $1.9 billion, money that could’ve been spent on local parks, libraries, and schools. In 2016, Edwards issued an executive order returning decision-making power on property-tax exemptions to the parishes, but he backtracked in 2020 when he gave corporations the option of appealing local decisions to a state board.

And yet, taxes and jobs are the least of Lavigne’s worries. What keeps her up at night are emissions. In the entire U.S., only one plant emits chloroprene, an ingredient in wet suits and Koozies that’s linked to liver and lung cancers. That it’s in southeast Louisiana is no accident. As reported by ProPublica, the state has a reputation for having policy makers sympathetic to industry, and lax environmental regulation. Since the 1980s, residents have been documenting high rates of miscarriages and cancer, earning the parishes along the Mississippi River the nickname “Cancer Alley.” “Ask anyone,” Harry Joseph, the local pastor of the 114-year-old Mount Triumph Baptist Church, said during a bike tour highlighting environmental injustice. “There’s not a household here that hasn’t dealt with cancer.” The region has improved considerably since the 1963 Clean Air Act and the 1972 Clean Water Act created federal pollution limits. But in the past decade, hydro-fracturing—the practice of injecting pressurized liquids into bedrock in order to extract fossil fuels—has produced a glut of natural gas that’s fueled the establishment of new chemical plants, and environmental progress is expected to backslide.

Already under scrutiny for allegedly protecting the industry it’s meant to regulate, Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality has proposed an air-emissions allowance for the Sunshine Project that includes: 7.7 tons of ethylene oxide—a carcinogen linked to breast cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia, and miscarriages; 36.58 tons of the carcinogen benzene; and 1,243 tons of nitrogen oxides, which cause and exacerbate respiratory illnesses. (Formosa “has relied on sound science in design of the Sunshine Project and is confident it meets all regulatory criteria,” Parks said in her email. “Protecting health, safety and the environment is a priority in project engineering, design and operations.”) In a still-unresolved 2020 lawsuit, a coalition of environmental organizations allege that these quantities surpass federal air standards and that the Louisiana DEQ failed to consider existing air pollution and disproportionate racial impacts in its assessment. (“Our permits were issued in accordance with all applicable state and federal laws,” Gregory Langley, the press secretary for the Louisiana DEQ, told me by email. “Great care is taken in the site selection process to identify a safe location for the plant that is protective of the adjacent communities and their residents.”)

At the heart of the dispute is the Louisiana Tumor Registry, a project from Louisiana State University’s School of Public Health meant to track cancer risk throughout the state. Although the registry reports no elevated cancer risk in St. James Parish, critics point out that its data neither take into account residents’ proximity to plants nor measure the impact of new facilities. This missing information matters. The 824 residents of Welcome aren’t the only ones in the immediate vicinity of the Sunshine Project. Fifth Ward Elementary is a mile away—nearly all of its 123 students are Black.

It’s not by chance that 158 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, rural Black communities bear the environmental consequences of Louisiana’s biggest industry. Overlay a map of southern Louisiana’s petrochemical and petroleum plants with archival maps of the area’s plantations, and you’ll find that in many cases the property lines match up. “One oppressive economy begets another,” Barbara L. Allen, a professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech and the author of Uneasy Alchemy, a book on environmental justice in the region, told me over the phone. “The Great River Road was built on the bodies of enslaved Black people. The chemical corridor is responsible for the body burden of their descendants.”

Allen’s research examines the extractive economy: how sugar monocropping transitioned to petrochemical manufacturing. During Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau gave land grants to Black maroons and the formerly enslaved along the lower Mississippi, parceling out slivers of large plantations to extended-family groups as part of reparations, while returning the bulk of the land to white owners. The result, Allen wrote in a 2006 article, was “a pattern of large, contiguous blocks of open land under single ownership … separated by communities of freed blacks and poorer whites.” Like plantations, petrochemical and petroleum plants benefit from large acreage and easy access to some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. When the oil industry moved in during the first half of the 20th century, corporations began buying up the intact plantations. More than a century later, the pattern established during Reconstruction is still visible, only instead of plantations, Louisiana’s historic free towns share fence lines with plants.

The proliferation of petrochemical plants along the lower Mississippi is undoubtedly slavery’s legacy. Before the Civil War, the state relied on the plantation economy. Today it relies on an industrial economy, which continues to disenfranchise residents. In her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild observes that many rural white Louisianans believe they must sacrifice environmental regulation in order to have jobs. For many rural Black Louisianans, that sacrifice is much starker. When industry moves in, descendants of the formerly enslaved get neither environmental security nor well-paying jobs. Like the plantations and land owners who came before them, petrochemical plants and their leadership have emerged as a new kind of “boss,” determining what happens not only to the land but also to the people who live there. The court case about Juneteenth access to the Buena Vista cemetery illustrates just how much this is a struggle about ownership of bodies: who decides which bodies go where, who has access to the bodies of the deceased, and ultimately who determines which chemicals Black people are exposed to.

Politics in Louisiana often revolves around industry. “St. James Parish, on its face, is hunky-dory: fifty-fifty Black and white,” Anne Rolfes, the founder and director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a nonprofit that partners with fence-line communities to advocate for environmental rights, said during the aforementioned bike tour. “However, the African American population is mostly at one end of the parish, in the Fourth and Fifth Districts. And where do you think the land-use plans put all the petrochemical plants?” Lavigne lives in the Fifth District, where nine plants are in operation, two are under construction, and four more, including Formosa’s megaplex—which itself includes 14 unique facilities—are proposed. This concentration of industry is enabled by zoning laws. Typically, land-use plans separate residential areas from industrial ones, but in 2014, the St. James Parish council voted to change river-adjacent sections of the Fourth and Fifth districts from “residential” to “residential/future industrial.” “The council will fight to keep the petrochemical plants out of the white districts, but they roll out the red carpet … when it comes to the Fourth and Fifth” Districts, Rolfes said. “It’s worse than redlining. It’s shocking, really. The council has a written plan to wipe out Black communities.” Councilman Cooper acknowledged “biased consideration” in the council’s zoning, but stopped short of calling it environmental racism. “I don’t think it’s strictly on being racist. They got big plots of unused cane and farmland on the river and there’s a rail there and easier access because it’s not as populated.”

Rolfe’s assessment, however, is backed by the local historical record. In 1987, traces of vinyl chloride were discovered in the blood of children from nearby Reveilletown, a historic free town founded in the 1870s. Following a settlement, Georgia Gulf Corp., the owner of a neighboring plant, bought out the rest of that town for $3 million. Two years later, vinyl chloride had contaminated the groundwater in the historic free town of Morrisonville, and Dow Chemical Company spent $7 million buying out residents. In 2002, yet another free town, Diamond, sandwiched between two Shell Chemicals plants, was bought out decades after two fatal chemical explosions. In each case, Black families had little choice but to leave, giving up not only their houses, which pollution had rendered unsellable, but also their community. This repetition of buyouts has created what environmentalists believe is a dangerous precedent: Instead of remedying safety and environmental concerns, plants that pollute can pay their way out of trouble.

Even before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the river parishes’ nickname had begun shifting from “Cancer Alley” to “Death Alley.” The kinds of preexisting conditions that make COVID-19 especially deadly thrive here, giving one rallying cry against systemic racism—“I can’t breathe”—haunting significance. Still, the environmental-justice movement, which combines a demand for racial equality with the push for environmental protection, has gained traction in St. James Parish during the pandemic. Shortly before Rise’s Juneteenth ceremony, Formosa announced that it would halt construction on the Sunshine Project until COVID-19 rates dropped in the area. The decision coincided with an increase in negative media attention about its handling of the rediscovered grave sites and an impending environmental lawsuit, which was thrown out when the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it was reevaluating Formosa’s wetlands permits. Though the company resumed “preconstruction” activities such as road building and soil testing in October, Formosa said it would defer major construction until a COVID-19 vaccine was widely available. Work on the property is still halted today. (“The significant economic impact of COVID-19 has contributed to difficulty in evaluating construction,” Formosa’s Parks wrote. “Ongoing legal proceedings also contribute to the delay.”) Meanwhile pressure is mounting to shut down the whole project.

Two U.S. representatives, the Democrats Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona and A. Donald McEachin of Virginia, are pushing the Biden administration to permanently revoke the Sunshine Project’s permits. (The congressman who had represented St. James Parish, Cedric Richmond, left his post in January to join President Joe Biden’s cabinet. So far he’s made no comment for or against Formosa.) Experts appointed by the UN’s Human Rights Council have weighed in too, calling on “the United States and St. James Parish to recognize and pay reparations for the centuries of harm to Afro-descendants rooted in slavery and colonialism.” Such support is hard-earned, but how much it will matter in the long run is unclear. “Industry [in Louisiana] has just exploded,” Allen, the Virginia Tech professor, said. “In five or 10 years … I wonder if the region will even be livable.”

Oppression runs deep in southern Louisiana, but so does resistance. On January 8, 1811, a group of enslaved people marched from Woodlawn Plantation in St. John the Baptist Parish toward New Orleans. With each plantation they passed, more people joined, armed with cane knives, hoes, clubs, and guns, until more than 500 people flowed downriver, bent on founding a new Black nation. Within days, the rebellion was quashed. Dozens of Black men and women were killed by federal troops and plantation militia, and many more were sentenced to death, their severed heads mounted on spikes and displayed along a 60-mile stretch of river.

For a time, knowledge of the revolt was lost, a victim of historical amnesia. Over the past decade, though, tours, book publications, and museum exhibits have restored the event to the popular imagination. In 2019, that history came alive when the artist Dread Scott led hundreds of mostly Black volunteers in period costume on a 24-mile march past plantations and petrochemical plants, ending the reenactment at a destination the original insurgence never reached: New Orleans’s Congo Square. “Their rebellion is a profound ‘what if?’ story,” reads Scott’s website. “It had a small but real chance of succeeding.”

In some ways, Lavigne’s work with Rise isn’t so different. When she and her peers organize, the odds are against them. They’re a small group advocating for change in a region shaped by plantations, in a state where politicians consistently choose industry over environment, against a corporation they believe is determined to make plastics no matter the human cost. “We are here to acknowledge the evil of slavery and its aftermath,” Lavigne announced to her online audience and to the few dozen people gathered in person at Buena Vista cemetery last Juneteenth. She placed a bouquet of roses near eight rediscovered grave shafts. “Those were their very bodies. Their very labor,” one onlooker observed. “We honor our ancestors by thriving.” The crowd swayed, singing, “I said, Lord, help me please / I got up singing—shouting!—victory.”  

The stories Louisianans tell about their history matter. The 1811 revolt ended in horrific violence, but today that history is often recounted with a kind of instructional reverence. Here were enslaved people who dreamed and organized and marched so that their children might experience a better life. Here were people who were beaten down and rose up anyway, knowing very well that their greatest hope for survival might end with the loss of their life. They strove—yes, they did—and look at how they nearly succeeded.

Read the article in The Atlantic

One of our main duties as Catholics is to care for God’s creation, the natural world he made for us. It isn’t an optional dictate, or dependent on whether exploiting God’s creation creates jobs, tax revenues or corporate profits. Genesis 2:15 says, “Humans are commanded to care for God’s creation.”

That’s why we were so disturbed to see Formosa Plastics’ local representative Janile Parks’ (column “Walking the Walk, in Deeds and in Truth,” March 12) to make weak economic arguments for building one of the world’s biggest petrochemical complexes in St. James Civil Parish.

We struggle to live in a community near the proposed plant that’s already suffering from destroyed property values and poor health from exposure to industrial pollution in this corridor known as Cancer Alley. Our community is 90% Black, and Formosa Plastics would more than double our toxic air pollution just to create more plastic, or what Parks called “basic building blocks found in everyday products.”   

Pope Francis has been very clear that we must stop exploiting the Earth’s resources just to create more products for our comfort and convenience. In fact, he’s specifically called for environmental justice for poor communities that have endured pollution and criticized our “throwaway” world that’s filling up with plastic pollution – all reasons we cite for opposing the Formosa Plastics project.   

“St. Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us,” Pope Francis wrote in the opening paragraph of his landmark environmental encyclical “Laudato Si,” adding, “This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life.”

Indeed, the sickness of industrial greed and systemic racism is in our soil, our water, our air and now our bodies.  Our local friends and family members have been dying of cancer and respiratory disease.      

When the COVID-19 pandemic came, we suffered and died disproportionately, perhaps because of the pollution we’ve been breathing for generations. Our local leaders must protect our right to life and dignity by preventing any further pollution that will certainly threaten us with death.      

As Catholics, stewardship of the Earth cannot be reduced to an afterthought: rather, it is a requirement of our faith. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops explicitly lists “Care for God’s Creation” as one of the seven themes of Catholic Social Teaching, the church’s official stance on how we are to act in regard to our community. Other principles call for protection of vulnerable communities like ours: “A basic moral test is how our most vulnerable members are faring. In a society marred by deepening divisions between rich and poor, our tradition recalls the story of the last judgment and instructs us to put the needs of the poor and vulnerable first.” 

That’s not what’s happening in St. James Parish or other poor communities around the world subjected to pollution that corporations profit from. In fact, the environmental racism behind the Formosa Plastics project recently led our secular brothers and sisters at the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights to oppose this project as a human rights violation. 

As Catholics who keep the faith, we know our God won’t forsake us and let this project proceed. We know God has little patience for the representative of a multinational corporation using a local church publication to try to fool a community that has toiled here since our ancestors were enslaved people, some of them seemingly buried in the very soil where Formosa Plastics wants to build its plant.

Local Catholic leaders have stood with our group, RISE St. James, at the project site to signal their support for our campaign. Bishop Michael G. Duca and Father Vincent Dufresne participated in our All-Saints Day service at the site, blessing our buried dead and ailing community. We know the Scriptures support our cause and we urge all Catholics to stand with us in the struggle.  

“Come now, you rich, weep and wail over your impending miseries,” reads James 5:1. “Your wealth has rotted away, your clothes have become moth-eaten, your gold and silver have corroded, and that corrosion will be a testimony against you; it will devour your flesh like a fire. You have stored up treasure for the last days.”

In other words, Formosa Plastics, we won’t let you poison our community over plastic and profits. 

Lavigne is the president of RISE St. James.

Read the article in The Catholic Commentator

In Louisiana, Formosa Plastics Group plans a $9.4 billion manufacturing complex in a largely Black community

The Fifth District of Louisiana’s St. James Parish was never exactly a bustling community — but it was still a community.

Then the local landmarks began to disappear. Woodrow’s grocery closed down. The St. James sugar co-op ground to a halt. The cleaners and post office shut their doors for lack of business.

Heavy manufacturing moved in. Duck’s Grocery sold out to a rail car and crude-oil storage facility. The high school football field was overrun by subsidiaries of a Chinese company and the Koch family’s corporate empire, which teamed up to build a huge petrochemical plant. Buena Vista Baptist Church now worships a couple thousand feet from a methanol plant and asphalt depot.

Against this background, many parish residents feared they had no prayer of stopping a $9.4 billion plastics complex that the Formosa Plastics Group proposed in the district on strips of flat sugar cane fields. Wedged in between other industrial sites along the Mississippi River, the facility would cover an expanse big enough for about 1,200 football fields, while discharging massive amounts of toxic emissions into the air.

Over the past dozen years, the United States has seen a surge of cheap shale gas, one of the principal building blocks for plastics, and Taiwan-based Formosa, one of the world’s largest chemical companies, believes its project can be profitable. Louisiana is the nation’s third-biggest producer of natural gas, and its lower stretch of the Mississippi already has more than 200 chemical plants and refineries. Formosa would benefit from cheap gas and an already highly developed infrastructure, including rail and electric transmission lines, pipelines and ports.

But the company’s prospects here are suddenly far from certain. Most of the region’s plants are close to historically Black communities like Welcome and Convent in St. James Parish, where some people trace their lineage to enslaved ancestors, and the Biden administration’s support of environmental justice has focused new attention on the health and environmental impact of the proposed complex. On April 8, in a symbolic gesture, the New Orleans City Council voted unanimously to declare its opposition.

The plant is being fought for its potential harm to health and the environment. It would be located a mile from the local elementary school and two miles downriver from the Sunshine Bridge, part of an 85-mile expanse from Baton Rouge to New Orleans that’s dubbed “Cancer Alley.” Under state environmental regulations, it would be allowed to emit more than 800 tons a year of toxic chemicals, nearly 6,500 tons of pollutants known to cause respiratory ailments, and more than 13.6 million tons of greenhouse gases annually.

“The plants aren’t building our communities,” said Clyde Cooper, who represents the Fifth District on the parish council. “They’re destroying them, and we have to stop it.”

Several groups of independent scientific experts have rallied on the community’s behalf. One affiliated with the United Nations Human Rights Council concluded last month that the Formosa plant would more than double the parish’s cancer risks, which it said would be skewed toward African Americans. They estimated the combined equivalent of annual carbon dioxide emissions there could exceed those of 113 countries.

The economics of the “Sunshine Project” also have dimmed recently. Tom Sanzillo of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis argues that the plant’s likely construction cost overruns and tight profit margins make it harder to justify, especially given a global oversupply of plastics.

“The case to us is clear that there is no market need for this plant, the state can do without it, and, to a good segment of the population living there, the project is a horrible burden, the poster child for environmental racism,” noted Sanzillo, the institute’s director of financial analysis. “The president recently highlighted Cancer Alley as a real problem, and this is an opportunity to do something about it.”

The 2,400 acres that Formosa owns in St. James Parish were rezoned “residential/industrial” in 2014 by the planning commission and parish council. According to Anne Rolfes of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental activism group based in New Orleans, the result was a land-use plan that “concentrates all industry in the two highest majority Black districts in the parish.” Census data shows the Fifth District is 91 percent Black. About 61 percent of children live in poverty, and median family income is only 60 percent of the state average.

In April 2018, the company unveiled its future plastics plant. The next month, more than 300 people packed into a hearing at the parish council chambers. Cooper, whose father was the first Black person elected in the parish, ultimately voted to give Formosa the go-ahead, but only after he insisted it pay for worker training, hire local businesses, agree to cover health screenings for everyone living within five miles of the complex, install fence-line pollution monitors and beautify the property to hide the facilities.

“Some people think I voted for Formosa because I was for them,” Cooper said Wednesday. “I was hoping they wouldn’t agree and would walk away.” Instead, at the last moment, the company agreed.

Sharon Lavigne, who lives only two miles from the site, remembers the dayher daughter called with the news about Formosa. Its possible health consequences scared her. Before long Lavigne left her job teaching students with special needs and founded RISE St. James, a grass-roots, faith-based organization devoted to opposing the plant.

Mobilizing people has been difficult, especially during the coronavirus pandemic.

“People in Saint James don’t speak up,” not when jobs are on the line, Lavigne said. Formosa anticipates hiring for about 8,000 temporary construction jobs and then hiring 1,200 permanent workers after that.

“I want people to have jobs. Don’t get me wrong,” Lavigne said. “But they’re not jobs when they won’t last, when we won’t be able to live.”

The company disputes the accusations about health problems. It says “there is simply no scientific proof” of inflated cancer rates in the area. Recently, in response to a reference to Cancer Alley by President Biden, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) suggested the state’s higher reported cancer rates were due to higher incidence of cigarette smoking, obesity and viral infections.

Part of the controversy stems from the Louisiana Tumor Registry. Its parish data aren’t specific enough to look at communities closest to the plants. In addition, the real growth in chemical plants took place over the past decade, meaning many ill effects may not have had time to develop.

Yet critics say there are still ways to measure future harm.

Kimberly Terrell, a staff scientist at Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic, calculates Formosa’s plant would emit 95 tons of cancer-causing chemicals a year, including hexane, carbon monoxide and benzene.

“Hexane is something folks might work on in laboratories, but they would wear goggles, gloves, personal protection” equipment, she said on a Facebook video posted by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. The label on a bottle of hexane warns the chemical “may be fatal if swallowed and enters airways” and “may cause damage to organs through prolonged or repeated exposure.” The final line: “Avoid release to the environment.”

“I wondered, how does this bottle compare to the volume of hexane that Formosa would release into the environment?” Terrell said. “It turns out that Formosa would be allowed to release 138 bottles of this … every day.”

Epidemiological studies in the region consistently sound alarms. The University Network for Human Rights found residents of a census tract in neighboring St. John the Baptist Parish face the highest cancer risk in the nation, most likely the result of chloroprene emissions from a facility owned by Japan’s Denka Co. Chloroprene is used to make synthetic rubber.

The network also found cancer risk increased with proximity to Denka’s plant. The local elementary school is less than a third of a mile from the Denka facility. A high proportion of people studied suffered cardiac symptoms, difficulty breathing, headaches, eye irritation, respiratory symptoms, skin irritation and fatigue, the study said.

Still, Gov. John Bel Edwards remains committed to the Sunshine Project, touting it as key to “a brighter economic future for Louisiana,” and Formosa has tried to associate its proposed facility with better lives.

The plant “will make the plastic building blocks found in everyday products that help make our lives safer, healthier, cleaner and more efficient,” Janile Parks, Formosa director of community and government relations, said in an email. The company’s “products also help make life-saving [personal protective equipment], including N95 and surgical masks needed in the fight against COVID-19.”

Even the dead have played a role in the dispute.

A portion of the project site sits atop ancestral burial grounds, now a grassy field surrounded by a chain-link fence. Last year on June 19 — Juneteenth — RISE St. James had to ask for a court order to be allowed access to the site. During Black History Month this year, a few dozen members gave speeches, played music and danced just outside the fence. “Help us to never forget the history,” a pastor prayed.

Both Formosa and the community group take credit for finding the burial sites, accompanied by sharp rhetoric.

The company says its archaeologists used historical maps to identify two potentially unmarked burial locations. At one, four sets of human remains were found.At the other, two rounds of investigation detected nothing.“Despite assertions made by outside groups about ancestral ties to the site, no archaeologist has been able to confirm the identity, ethnicity or race of the remains discovered on [Formosa] property,” Parks said in her email.

The Center for Constitutional Rights contends there could be as many as five additional cemeteries based on public records requests it filed and the findings of an independent archaeologist. The center asked the St. James Parish Council to rescind its land-use grant to Formosa for failing to disclose the cemeteries while its application was pending. The company, said senior staff attorney Pam Spees, “showed no regard for the significance of the cemeteries and what their discovery would mean to the surrounding community.”

Formosa has taken out large newspaper ads to respond. “Our opponents seek fear and confusion,” one said. “Opponents relentlessly try to misrepresent facts and blame the company for just about anything.”

That’s one of several fronts it is fighting. Its plan has run afoul of environmental groups worried about possible spills of tiny pellets called nurdles, which are used in molds to manufacture plastic products. Last August, a container fell off a ship in New Orleans, dumping hundreds of millions — if not billions — of nurdles into the Mississippi. The regulatory body responsible for investigating the incident remains unclear because nurdles are not classified as a hazardous material.

In 2019, Formosa paid $50 million to settle a case with the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper after billions of the pellets were found in a local bay and creek near its South Texas plant. Afterward, activists loaded a truck with nurdles that had been retrieved and used for evidence and drove them to Baton Rouge. Rolfes and another member of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade left a box of the stuff outside the homes of four chemical industry lobbyists there. They also left notes: “We have delivered this package of nurdles as a reminder — Louisiana does not need any more pollution, plastics or otherwise.”

“We brought their own pollution back to them,” said Rolfes, who was accused along with her companion of “terrorizing.” The charges, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, were later dropped.

For now, the Formosa project is on hold. Just after the November election, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers withdrew thepermit it had granted under the Clean Water Act for excavation and the filling in of wetlands. Further analysis anda public comment period must take place. Still unresolved is a state lawsuit challenging 14 air permits issued by the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

District Judge Trudy M. White initiallyfaulted the department for failing to take environmental justice issues into account or to consider alternate locations for the complex. “Inherent, in the court’s opinion, in a robust environmental justice analysis is the recognition that environmental racism exists, and that environmental racism operates through the state’s institutions,” she wrote.

In March, however, a three-judge appellate panel said White had “abused her discretion” and sent the case back to her to reconsider.

The people who live in St. James Parish have waged similar battlesbefore. In 1998, the United Church of Christ helped residents fight the Japanese-owned Shintech, which scrapped its efforts to build a polyvinyl chloride plant in Convent. In 1993, community leaders thwarted Formosa’s plans to build a wood pulp and rayon plant in Wallace.

Chasity White, a phlebotomist who works in Baton Rouge, hopes such victories can be repeated. She has lived in the Fifth District her entire life, and her home is just across the street from one of the levees that helps hold back the Mississippi. She wonders whether the petrochemical facilities, one of them within walking distance, are to blame for her father’s cancer. She is concerned for her teenage son.

“The smell when you go by certain industries, you get dizzy, nauseous and your nose starts burning,” she said. “I know in my heart of hearts, it hurts to say, that one day eventually I will have to move.”

This time, Biden might come to the rescue.

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Rep. A. Donald McEachin (D-Va.) are urging the president to permanently revoke the Army Corps permit. “This disastrous project is an affront to environmental justice and contrary to your goals to reduce pollution in frontline communities,” they wrote in a March 17 letter.

Cassidy, Louisiana’s senator, countered that the complexmet federal and statehealth and safety standards and that Formosa would install technology to monitor air quality and additional drainage infrastructure to protect waterways.

“These two Democrats, who are not from our state, are not basing this on science,” he said in a statement. “This is someone outside of Louisiana demanding these communities live in poverty, sacrificing Louisiana jobs and economic security to satisfy their conscience.”

Biden has given the task of scrutinizing complaints about environmental justice to the Council on Environmental Quality, run by Brenda Mallory. In her confirmation hearing last month, she pledged to “ensure that the voices of the poor and the powerless — from the most rural parts of America to our biggest cities — are heard as we tackle the environmental and public health crises the nation faces.”

For now, the former plantation fields await as Formosa presses ahead. “It’s not dead yet,” Lavigne said of the project. “But we got them on the ropes. That rope will break, trust me. And they will fall.”

Read the article in The Washington Post

SAINT JAMES, La. — A St. James woman has become a local David and Goliath story as she works tirelessly to save her community from an expansion by the chemical industry.

“The chemical plants have more money than we have so their money talks,” Sharon Lavigne said. “We are just a little old community of people. We don’t have any money to fight this $9.4 billion dollar industry.

A multi-billion dollar chemical company bought 25,000 acres of farmland in St. James Parish.

The company was all set to build a massive new plant until they encountered Lavigne and Rise St. James.

When Lavigne learned about the $9 billion chemical plant was planned less than 2 miles from her home, she immediately was distraught.

“Something happened inside of me,” Lavigne said. “I was angry. I felt so hopeless that we have to move.”

She was so bothered, she raised the issue with her local community group.

“No one wanted to fight it, they said it was a done deal,” Lavigne said.

Although her community thought it was a done deal, they didn’t know who else Lavigne was speaking to about the matter.

“I was sitting out there praying and I was crying and I said, ‘Dear God do you want me to sell my land?'” Lavinge said. “To my surprise, a voice said, ‘No!’ I was startled!”

Lavigne said the voice pointed her in a different direction.

“Then I said, ‘Dear Lord, do you want me to sell the home? The home you gave me?'” Lavigne said. “He said, ‘No!’ so I said, ‘Dear Lord what do you want me to do?’ And he said, ‘Fight.'”

Lavigne said it was a divine revelation that set her course in motion.

She said she didn’t know where to start until a friend suggested she start a community group of her own.

It was an idea she rejected at first.

“I don’t know how to start an organization. When God goes through pushing me and whipping me I started something,” Lavigne said. “When the good Lord gets next to you you are going to do what God tells you to do.”

That is when Rise St. James was born. It was a way for the community to stand up to big industry in their neighborhood.

Lavigne said when the first chemical plant came back in the 60s it was a welcomed development.

“Before you know it they were buying out the farmers. The farmers land with sugar cane,” Lavigne said. “I thought the industry was friendly people and they wouldn’t pollute us.”

The more she got involved, the more she learned about the sickness that had taken hold of her area.

Between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, there are more than 150 chemical plants along the river. It’s called Cancer Alley.

“If you go back and find all the people who died from cancer, it’s coming from something,” Lavigne said.

Cancer Alley is not just a nickname for Lavigne. She showed WDSU pictures of those she had lost and says it is why she is in the fight for her life to save others.

“We filed the clean air act and the clean water act,” Lavigne said.

Lavigne said there are already several chemical plants in her district alone.

“We have 12 in the 5th District,” Lavigne said.

Despite the movement being led by the people, Lavigne can easily list the number of politicians who have joined the cause.

To those who doubted her, she gave this answer.

“You can’t fight that $9.4 billion industry and my answer to them is,” Lavigne said. “I know I can’t but I know God can.”

In November, the Army Corps of Engineers suspended the permits for the plant.

This month, the United Nations issued its report on potential harmful impacts.

Rise St. James and environment groups have even managed to get a letter to the President of the United State.

They want the White House to not only take notice but to take action.

Lavigne, a former school teacher, is teaching everyone a lesson in the power of organizing a community as well as the power of faith.

“The community is behind me. We got People Power,” Lavigne said. “When God has his arms around you there is nothing they can do.”

Watch the story at WDSU News

United Nations observers said this week that further industrialization in the Mississippi River corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is a form of “environmental racism” against the area’s Black residents and must be stopped despite past failures by the state and federal governments to halt its continued expansion.

The communique from the UN’s special rapporteur on contemporary racism and other officials specifically identifies, as an example, the $9.4 billion Formosa Plastics complex that would be built near the graves of suspected former slaves. The complex is proposed for northwestern St. James Parish near predominantly African American communities. 

“This form of environmental racism poses serious and disproportionate threats to the enjoyment of several human rights of its largely African American residents, including the right to equality and non-discrimination, the right to life, the right to health, right to an adequate standard of living and cultural rights,” E. Tendayi Achiume, the special rapporteur, and other U.N. staffers said in a joint statement issued Tuesday evening.

Formosa said it was building on land recommended to it by St. James Parish officials for industrial development. Activists have challenged the way the parish selected the site.

The UN panel — made up of people the organization deems to be experts on the environment, race and human rights — contend federal environmental regulations have failed to protect people residing in an area they called “Cancer Alley.”

The UN statement also tried to tie the river region’s pre-Civil War history, when enslaved Black people were used as the primary labor force for an agricultural economy, to the industrial operations that have slowly filled the lands near where those slaves’ progeny now live. 

“Originally called Plantation Country where enslaved Africans were forced to labour, the petrochemical corridor along the lower Mississippi River has not only polluted the surrounding water and air, but also subjected its mostly African American residents to cancer, respiratory diseases and other adverse health effects,” the UN statement says.

The new UN statement came after law students in Loyola Law School’s Human Rights Advocacy Project in New Orleans developed a nine-page appeal to Achiume for a human rights investigation during the fall semester. Achiume said visiting the site as part of a probe would require an invitation from the U.S. government. 

Achiume, as a special rapporteur for the UN, is part of the Special Procedures for UN Human Rights system. It includes independent and voluntary fact-finders who are not employees of the UN. 

Achiume, who is a law professor at UCLA, was not immediately available by email Wednesday.

A spokesperson for FG LA LLC, the Formosa subsidiary behind the proposed plastics complex, said the company located in the area because it was on a site the Parish Council had previously designated for industry and came after a rigorous selection process conducted with the Louisiana Department of Economic Development and parish government.

The facility design uses advanced emissions controls and other “extensive measures to protect the environment,” and FG plans “to keep pace with technological advances that may enable the company to further strengthen those measures,” said Janile Parks, a company spokesperson. 

She and a state chemical industry trade group also pushed back against the concept of Cancer Alley, saying there “is no scientific proof that cancer rates” in the river corridor, in St. James Parish or the northwestern area of St. James where Formosa would be built, are higher due to industrial activity.

“In fact, cancer rates and deaths are lower than, or there is no significant difference from, the rest of the state,” Parks said. “Reports issued by the Louisiana Tumor Registry, the state’s cancer data aggregator, clearly establish this point. There is no ‘Cancer Alley.'”

Louisiana industry groups have often made this point through the years, citing the registry’s data. But environmentalists have argued that incidences, which are subject to a variety of factors, not just air pollution, are not the same as cancer risk.

The broadside from the UN represents a direct challenge to one of Louisiana’s bread-and-butter economic engines at a time when the Formosa project and state and federal regulators have faced backlash from local and environmental groups.

Greg Bowser, president and CEO of Louisiana Chemical Association, said racial demographics are not used to site plants.

“We do not know if this group found evidence of such actions, and if they did, the statement they released does not share that information with the general public,” he said.

The Formosa complex would be built in two phases along the Mississippi River and has been seen as a big economic development win for the state, bringing 1,200 permanent jobs, thousands more temporary construction jobs and millions of dollars in sales and property tax revenue for local and state governments. Gov. John Bel Edwards and local officials support the project.

But environmental groups argue it would be major source of toxic air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions in a region where questions about the fairness and justice of placing another new polluting complex near Black communities have often been raised.

The UN statement asserted that the Formosa complex would be one of the largest plastics facilities in the world. It claims the facility would double cancer risks for residents in the area and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions in St. James that would “exceed those of 113 countries.”

The St. James Parish Council granted a key land use approval for the project at the end of 2018, but activists have challenged the complex’s air permit in state court and wetlands permit in federal court.

Both challenges have, in part, raised environmental justice concerns that have forced delays.

Last fall, facing a legal challenge in federal court, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers suspended a wetlands permit while it reviews its analysis of Formosa’s site selection process. Also, a Baton Rouge state court judge, Trudy White, ordered the state Department of Environmental Quality to take a closer look at the St. James Parish facility’s emissions impacts on Black residents living nearby and more properly evaluate the environmental justice questions they may raise.

The Formosa complex will produce the raw materials for a variety of plastics and has been permitted to emit more than 800 tons of toxic pollutants annually: nearly 6,500 tons of criteria pollutants known to cause ground-level ozone and respiratory ailments, and more than 13.6 million tons of greenhouse gases, DEQ says. 

In 2019, a joint investigation by The Advocate, Times-Picayune and ProPublica using U.S. Environmental Protection Agency modeling data found Formosa and other new industrial proposals in St. James since 2015 posed an acute impact on predominantly poor and Black river communities, though white communities hardly escape it.

The investigation found that emissions from Formosa alone would mean that residents in Convent, across the river from Formosa, would face double the toxic levels of cancer-causing chemicals they currently do, while those in the west bank community of St. James would see those levels triple.

The UN officials made a similar point about the increase in toxic emissions expected from Formosa, though they cited different EPA risk data.

“The construction of the new petrochemical complexes will exacerbate the environmental pollution and the disproportionate adverse effect on the rights to life, to an adequate standard of living and the right to health of African American communities,” they said.

In DEQ’s air permit decision for Formosa, however, the agency challenged heavy reliance on federal modeling data used in the newspaper analysis, saying it was simplified and represented a worst-case scenario. DEQ says it did extra investigation, considered actual conditions and found the plant would not adversely affect human health or the environment.

DEQ plans to appeal White’s ruling ordering DEQ to take a closer look at its own environmental justice analysis. A DEQ spokesperson declined to comment on the UN statement Wednesday, citing the Formosa litigation.

Parks, the FG spokesperson, said that “any claim that FG will greatly increase ‘toxic emissions’ in the area is a misrepresentation and inaccurate.”

FG’s own air modeling has found, she said, that ambient air emissions once the plant starts operating would “meet the lower health risk factor suggested by the National Air Toxics Assessment.” That is a 1-in-10,000 chance that a person would get cancer from breathing air in the area over a lifetime.

Jeanne M. Woods, a now-retired Loyola law professor who led the law class project last semester that resulted in the appeal to Achiume, said her students for the past several years have looked at Louisiana and its environment. They decided last year to seek out the UN as a way to bring international attention to the region.

Read the article on The Advocate.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has thrown out a lawsuit challenging the wetlands permit for the $9.4 billion Formosa Plastics complex proposed in St. James Parish.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continues to reevaluate its now-suspended authorization to fill in lowlands on the chemical manufacturer’s Mississippi River site. A Formosa affiliate behind the project remains barred from starting significant construction activities while the permit remains under review, though work on a water line and road widening on La. 3127 can continue.

Still, the new ruling means opponents of the project would have to start over with a new lawsuit should the Corps of Engineers issue a new permit.

The Formosa project, if completed, would be one of largest plastics facilities in the world. It has received backing from Gov. John Bel Edwards and a number of local officials. It promises to bring in millions in new tax revenue, 1,200 permanent jobs and thousands more temporary construction jobs.

But the project has prompted a determined fight from local and national community and environmental groups over the potential pollution impact on minority communities, the lucrative tax breaks for facility and its proximity to historic, potentially pre-Civil War graves of enslaved Black people.

In court and before the permitting agencies themselves, the opponents have attacked key government approvals needed to clear the way for Formosa’s major investment in the nearly 2,500-acre site by the community of Welcome. 

In the Corps of Engineers’ case, four plaintiffs — the Center for Biological Diversity, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Rise St. James and Healthy Gulf — sued last year. They accused the agency of failing to do a deep enough analysis of the potential pollution impacts on poor and minority communities

The groups had fought to keep the litigation pending once the agency announced in early November it was reworking its permit. But the Corps and FG LA LLC, the Formosa affiliate that is building the plastics plant, argued that whatever the Corps would come up with would amount to a “new final agency action” that could make the existing suit moot.

The dispute had lingered before U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss through the holiday break, but the judge sided with the Corps and Formosa on Friday.

“Although a close question, the Court agrees with the Corps and FG that dismissal is the most prudent course,” Moss wrote in a five-page order.

FG LA officials said they were pleased with the ruling and were providing the Corps of Engineers additional information for its reanalysis.

“FG continues to cooperate with the Corps throughout this process and sincerely hopes the permit re-evaluation will be handled in a thorough and expeditious manner so the permit analysis will be even stronger once the re-evaluation is complete,” the officials said in a statement.

Julie Teel Simmonds, an attorney for the plaintiffs, asserted that their lawsuit forced the Corps to suspend the permit for the “super-polluting Louisiana complex” and promised to sue again if the Corps authorized a complex of the same scale in St. James Parish, with the attendant impacts on air, water and environmental justice.

“Our campaign against this project is far from over,” said Simmonds, senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.

Ricky Boyett, a Corps spokesman in New Orleans, declined to comment Tuesday on pending litigation or the progress of the agency’s review, referring inquiries to the U.S. Justice Department.

Before the Corps’ permit suspension, the now-tossed suit was closing in on a likely determinative hearing on the main arguments, possibly early this year. 

But the Corps of Engineers told the court Nov. 4 that it had suspended the permit, one day ahead of its deadline to respond to the plaintiffs’ major pleadings laying out the thrust of their arguments.

In subsequent reports to the court and FG, the Corps of Engineers said it had found an error in its analysis of possible plant sites other than the ultimate location in St. James Parish.

Five possible sites in Ascension Parish were excluded due to an erroneous assumption about air quality limits in that parish. The Corps said it had to review the alternatives analysis required under the U.S. Clean Water Act “and other aspects of the permit decision if appropriate.” 

Read the article in The Advocate

Environmental Groups opposing Formosa locating and building a $9.4 Billion plastic making facility in St. James Parish recently launched a national advertising campaign calls on the St. James Parish Council to rescind Formosa’s land use application and put a stop to the project. According to a press release issued, the Ad campaign titled Protect Our Parish, highlights the tragic impact the toxic chemical plants have had on local families, and urges the Parish Council to stop the Formosa Plastics plant. The television Ads feature St. James Parish resident Sharon Lavigne, who says she has lost more than 30 friends and family members over the last five years, and feels the toxic plants are to blame. Lavigne is the founder of RISE St. James, a faith-based coalition of St. James Parish residents that formed to protect the community from cancer-causing chemical plants, and advocate for investment in healthier, longer-term industries. The release says the goal of the Protect Our Parish campaign is to expose just how dangerous the Formosa Plastics plant would be, and to urge the Parish Council to stop it. The ads are set to air during prime-time and daytime television on top-rated television stations including CNN, FOX, and CNBC. The Protect Our Parish campaign will also be featured in print ads, on billboards, and on radio and digital platforms including Facebook, YouTube, iHeartRadio, and on WWL during upcoming Saints games. The ads will also be coupled with extensive and ongoing direct voter contact.

Article originally published in the St. James News Examiner-Enterprise

A new, community-based activist group in St. James Parish last week launched a massive, nationwide marketing campaign, including a powerful television advertisement, aimed at blocking the construction of a proposed, $9.4-billion chemical plant in an area dubbed “Cancer Alley” because its abnormally high risk rates for cancer exposure are the highest in the country.

Protect Our Parish released the TV ad last Thursday, with scheduled airings on such highly-rated networks as CNN, Fox and CNBC. According to the activist organization, the Protect Our Parish campaign will also include print and billboard ads, as well as placements on radio and Internet outlets like Facebook, YouTube and iHeart Radio. Ads will also be broadcast on WWL radio during Saints games.

The one-minute ad released last week features narration by longtime St. James Parish resident and educator Sharon Lavigne, who recounts the death of her husband, Oliver, from COPD. In the ad, Sharon says that “there’s no doubt that the pollution killed him.”

Like many residents – the majority of them African American – who have been affected physically and psychologically, Lavigne and her family have lived for years in the parish’s Fifth District, where numerous chemical plants are located.

In the ad, Lavigne relates that in addition to her husband’s death, she has attended the funerals of more than 30 friends and relatives in St. James Parish who have died from cancer or similar terminal illnesses over the last five years.

Lavigne’s narration is accompanied by images of her family, including some of Oliver, as well scenes from across Gramercy and St. James Parish. The promo spot features religious imagery, including scenes of Lavigne praying inside of her church.

The ad urges the St. James Parish Council and other civic leaders to rethink the decision to approve the plant, which has been proposed by international company Formosa Plastics.

“It’s too late to bring back Oliver,” Sharon says in the spot, “and I don’t want our children and grandchildren to be next.”

In an interview with The Louisiana Weekly, Lavigne said the goal of the advertisement and the Protect Our Parish effort overall is to prevent the proposed Formosa plant from being constructed, and convince government officials to block further chemical plants being placed in the parish.

“The big step is to see no more are coming in,” Lavigne said. “We want to stop them from ever coming in. We are people. We deserve to live here. We deserve to live.”

Lavigne stressed the stark urgency of stopping the Formosa plant from coming. “If this is built, it’s going to be a death sentence for us,” she said. “We will not be able to live, to breathe the air.”

The St. James Parish Council initially approved Formosa’s land-use application for the proposed plant in January 2019, but RISE members and other community activists say that vote came before news reports broke revealing that the plant would double the community’s permitted toxic emissions.

That revelation, say activists, constitutes a dishonest and evasive effort by Formosa to convince parish politicians that the plant would be safe and allowable.

As a result, Lavigne said, “[w]e want the parish council to rescind their decision. We want them to go back, weigh the facts and re-do it.”

She added that “[t]hey should have evaluated all the plants we already have in the area before they put this one in.”

Representatives of the St. James Parish Council did not respond to inquiries for comment by The Louisiana Weekly.

Lavigne is a member of RISE St. James, a faith-based coalition that came together to protect local residents from the crippling health diagnoses and deaths from cancer and other long-term medical conditions members say have resulted from the pollution from existing chemical plants.

Through the new Protect Our Parish campaign, RISE St. James also wants to “advocate for investment in healthier, longer-term industries” in the parish, according to a press release.

According to the Protect Our Parish press release, more than 150 chemical processing plants already exist in Cancer Alley, a fact advocates say has resulted in cancer rates as much as 50 times higher than average Americans.

The new advertising campaign sharpens RISE’s efforts on the proposed Formosa Plastic plant, which would cover hundreds of acres of land for its production of single-use plastics, which critics note have been banned in more than 120 countries. While Formosa representatives say such plastics continue to contribute to the globe economically, technologically and culturally, critics assert that single-use plastics have outlived their usefulness and become outdated and have seen a decrease in use.

Representatives of the Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics Group, of which the St. James project is a part, said Protect Our Parish and its new ad distort the track record of the company and fail to adequately represent the scope and impact of the proposed facility. The company has dubbed the proposed facility “The Sunshine Project,” or “FG” for short.

Janile Parks, director of community and government relations for FG LA LLC, said in a lengthy statement to The Louisiana Weekly that Protect Our Parish’s marketing campaign presents the company and the proposed plant in an inaccurate, misleading light. Parks said the company has continually complied with all relevant government requirements and regulations, and will keep doing so in the future.

“FG LA LLC’s (FG) is committed to protecting the health and safety of its employees and the community as well as the environment,” Parks said. “The company will continue to follow all rules and regulations set forth by federal and state agencies and will continue to work to build a brighter future for the people who live and work in St. James Parish and across Louisiana. While we recognize there are some who are doing everything they can to stop progress in the parish, including spreading fear and confusion about The Sunshine Project, FG will continue to invite cooperation and truth as well as listen to and work with the St. James community to address real concerns.”

Parks added that the firm has done extensive research of its own showing that the proposed plant will not harm the community and citizens, and that the existing chemical plants in the parish have not caused the harm opponents say the facilities have.

“Simply stated,” Parks said, “there is no scientific proof that cancer rates in the Industrial Corridor, including St. James Parish, or District 5 where The Sunshine Project is located, are higher due to industrial activity. In fact, cancer rates and deaths are lower than, or there is no significant difference from, the rest of the state. Reports issued by the Louisiana Tumor Registry, the state’s cancer data aggregator, clearly establish this point.”

Parks asserted that plans for the facility include measures designed to prevent excessive, dangerous levels of by-products, and that such emissions will not only be closely monitored, but also reused and recycled by the plant.

Parks continued by saying that Formosa, especially the staff, employees and executives involved in the Sunshine Project, has gone the extra mile to reach out to the citizenry of St. James Parish and the larger region. That outreach includes a public open house and the creation of a project Web site.

“The company has also maintained open communication and continues to reach out to local project stakeholders, St. James Parish residents, local ministers, educators, workforce leaders and others to seek feedback and address questions and concerns as the project moves forward,” she said. “As a result, FG has developed and implemented community out each programs that meet real needs in the St. James community.”

Parks said that the plant will also provide an economic boost to the parish by creating hundreds of new jobs, and added that the cutting-edge production technology used by the plant will benefit the world as a whole.

However, Lavigne and other members of RISE St. James dispute such assertions by the company. Lavigne said the Protect Our Parish campaign will tell the general public – and its elected leaders – the truth about the proposed Formosa plant and the devastating, toxic effect the chemical industry has had on the local community.

Lavigne told The Louisiana Weekly that in addition to raising public awareness of the situation in her parish across the country, another targeted group is the government at all levels. Not only does she hope the ad will help persuade parish officials to rescind their initial approval of the Formosa plant, but she wants incoming President Joe Biden, Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond (who has announced he will step down from Congress to take a position in the impending Biden administration), and representatives of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, to view the promotion and learn about the plight of the residents of Cancer Alley.

“I would like them to take a tour of St. James to let them see first-hand how this industry has hurt our community,” she said.

In particular, Lavigne said, hopefully Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards will become aware of the situation in St. James Parish and take measures to block the Formosa facility’s construction. Lavigne said state government officials, especially Edwards, have failed to protect Louisiana’s citizenry.

“If [the ad] is shown nationally, it will make him look pretty silly for not stepping up to help the citizens of his state,” she said of Edwards.

She added that Edwards “should have stopped [the plant] before it got this far.”

Lavigne said that the Formosa company’s alleged distortions and cover-ups can no longer hide that the machinations of the chemical industry have had a particularly ruinous impact on people of color and majority-Black communities like the Fifth District of St. James Parish. She said such disproportionate negative impacts on communities of color amount to environmental racism, and she asserted that parish leaders have rejected proposals for similar projects in white communities and allowed the chemical industry to locate its activities overwhelmingly among Black populations.

“They figured that the Black community is poor, so we’re not going to speak up,” she told The Louisiana Weekly.

However, she added, she and other citizens devastated by the chemical industry and its toxic effects have decided to band together and stand against what they view is a system that allows polluting companies to do as they wish, a trend reflected by the number of industrial facilities in the area.

“We won’t let any more [plants] come in,” she said. “Not where I live. Not in St. James Parish.”

Read the article in Louisiana Weekly

Formosa Plastic Group’s plan to build a $9.4 billion plastics manufacturing complex in Louisiana has suffered notable setbacks after federal and state permits for the project were put on hold, pending reevaluation of impacts on wetlands and Black-majority neighborhoods.

Sharon Lavigne, a St. James resident and founder of Rise St. James, a faith-based community group fighting construction of the plant in St. James Parish, believes the recent actions signal the eventual demise of the Formosa project, although that outcome is far from certain.

“This is the beginning of the end for Formosa,” Lavigne told EarthBeat upon learning that a federal permit for the project had been suspended.

On Nov. 18, Judge Trudy White, of Louisiana’s 19th Judicial District Court, returned air permits to state environmental regulators so they can conduct a more thorough evaluation of the impact of the complex’s projected emissions on Black residents living nearby.

That move came days after the Army Corps of Engineers suspended a permit that would have allowed Formosa to build in wetlands. In a notice filed Nov. 13 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., the Corps said that a portion of its permit required reevaluation and that a more extensive review was also possible.

The pause on permits presents new legal obstacles to construction of one of the world’s biggest petrochemical facilities, which has already been delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nevertheless, some work continues at the site. A company spokesperson said Formosa hopes the permit issues are resolved expeditiously.

FG LA LLC, a Louisiana affiliate of Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics Group, plans to build its 14-plant complex, known as the Sunshine Project, in the western district of St. James, within an 85-mile corridor along the Mississippi River that is home to at least 140 petrochemical plants.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and many state and local lawmakers support the project, which they say will bring much-needed jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenues to southern Louisiana.

But local residents, community groups and environmental organizations have persistently fought its construction, saying the complex would pollute a predominantly Black community already overburdened with industrial toxics, and that it would degrade wetlands and add to the ocean plastic pollution crisis.

The recent discovery of an unmarked burial site for enslaved people on the border of the Formosa property has intensified their concerns.

Early this year, Formosa opponents filed lawsuits challenging federal and state permits critical to the project’s construction. In January, the Center for Biological Diversity, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Healthy Gulf and Rise St. James sued the Army Corps of Engineers over its approval of a permit for building in a wetland.

The plaintiffs argued that the permit violated the National Environmental Policy Act, the Rivers and Harbors Act, the Clean Water Act and the National Historic Preservation Act.

Rather than defend its permit in court, the Corps opted for suspension. In its statement to the court, the agency acknowledged that during its review of alternative locations for the Formosa complex, it had incorrectly eliminated for consideration five sites in neighboring white-majority Ascension Parish. Although that reason alone was sufficient to suspend and reassess the permit, the Corps said it “may also consider additional issues as appropriate during the re-evaluation.”

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit have since asked the Corps for a public hearing and expanded analysis of the plant’s environmental justice, wetlands and pollution impacts.

“At a time when Americans are recognizing the role of systemic racism and unconscious racial bias in our country, it is problematic that a predominantly white parish was eliminated based on erroneous information and a flawed analysis in favor of a predominantly Black district in St. James Parish. The project deserves a far deeper and more probing environmental justice analysis than what the Corps has provided,” the plaintiffs wrote in a letter signed by more than 20 groups.

In mid-February, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Rise St. James, the Sierra Club and other groups challenged the air permits that the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality had issued for Formosa a month earlier.

Those permits allow the Formosa facility to emit more than 800 pounds of toxic pollutants, nearly 6,500 tons of pollutants known to cause ground-level ozone and respiratory ailments, and 13.6 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, according to The Advocate, a Louisiana daily.

The plaintiffs argued that the Department of Environmental Quality shirked its constitutional duty to protect the public and the environment, because Formosa’s own modeling showed its emissions would exceed federal air-quality standards.

In late February, St. James resident Beverly Alexander, represented by the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, also filed a legal motion challenging the state’s air permits. Alexander claimed the Department of Environmental Quality used 2011 cancer risk and respiratory hazard data for its required environmental justice assessment of the plant, instead of more recent available data.

Unlike the 2011 computations, the more recent information took into account an influx of new plants into St. James, including Formosa, and showed an increase in air toxicity for the area’s Black-majority communities.

White, the Louisiana judge, apparently was sympathetic to that assessment. In an oral ruling delivered via Zoom, she spoke about environmental racism in state institutions. White told the Department of Environmental Quality and company attorneys that the air permits required better evidence of results and a more thorough environmental justice assessment.

Lisa Jordan, a lawyer with the Tulane law clinic, said White’s ruling “is not a final judgment,” but allows the Department of Environmental Quality to revise the permit before legal actions against it proceed.

“The agency could cross some t’s and dot some i’s, write a new decision document or amendment, or do nothing,” Jordan said.

Janile Parks, director of communications for Formosa’s Louisiana operations, offered a different assessment.

“The Court appears to have ruled on the merits of the case,” Parks wrote in a press release issued after White’s ruling. “The permits issued to FG by [the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality] are sound. FG intends to explore all legal options.”

Parks said that while the company was “disappointed” in the Corps’ decision to suspend its wetlands permit, the federal agency’s action was not unusual.

“Temporary suspension during permit re-evaluation is a common practice utilized by the Corps and FG fully expects the suspension will be lifted, and the permits reinstated, after completion of the re-evaluation,” Parks said.

Julie Simmonds, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, believes the Corps’ temporary suspension of the wetlands permit could result in a complete revocation of the Formosa permit and the end of the project, or relocation of the plant.

“The former without the latter would be highly preferable,” Simmonds wrote in an email to EarthBeat. “This project should not be built, anywhere. Another option is that the Corps purportedly ‘fixes’ its deeply flawed decision analysis and we will be back in court.”

Meanwhile, Lavigne, of Rise St. James, is optimistic.

“Formosa will soon be gone,” she said. “They call themselves the Sunshine Project. They will not see sunshine.”

Read the article in National Catholic Reporter

A new, community-based activist group in St. James Parish last week launched a massive, nationwide marketing campaign, including a powerful television advertisement, aimed at blocking the construction of a proposed, $9.4-billion chemical plant in an area dubbed “Cancer Alley” because its abnormally high risk rates for cancer exposure are the highest in the country.

Protect Our Parish released the TV ad last Thursday, with scheduled airings on such highly-rated networks as CNN, Fox and CNBC. According to the activist organization, the Protect Our Parish campaign will also include print and billboard ads, as well as placements on radio and Internet outlets like Facebook, YouTube and iHeart Radio. Ads will also be broadcast on WWL radio during Saints games.

The one-minute ad released last week features narration by longtime St. James Parish resident and educator Sharon Lavigne, who recounts the death of her husband, Oliver, from COPD. In the ad, Sharon says that “there’s no doubt that the pollution killed him.”

Like many residents – the majority of them African American – who have been affected physically and psychologically, Lavigne and her family have lived for years in the parish’s Fifth District, where numerous chemical plants are located.

In the ad, Lavigne relates that in addition to her husband’s death, she has attended the funerals of more than 30 friends and relatives in St. James Parish who have died from cancer or similar terminal illnesses over the last five years.

Lavigne’s narration is accompanied by images of her family, including some of Oliver, as well scenes from across Gramercy and St. James Parish. The promo spot features religious imagery, including scenes of Lavigne praying inside of her church.

The ad urges the St. James Parish Council and other civic leaders to rethink the decision to approve the plant, which has been proposed by international company Formosa Plastics.

“It’s too late to bring back Oliver,” Sharon says in the spot, “and I don’t want our children and grandchildren to be next.”

In an interview with The Louisiana Weekly, Lavigne said the goal of the advertisement and the Protect Our Parish effort overall is to prevent the proposed Formosa plant from being constructed, and convince government officials to block further chemical plants being placed in the parish.

“The big step is to see no more are coming in,” Lavigne said. “We want to stop them from ever coming in. We are people. We deserve to live here. We deserve to live.”

Lavigne stressed the stark urgency of stopping the Formosa plant from coming. “If this is built, it’s going to be a death sentence for us,” she said. “We will not be able to live, to breathe the air.”

The St. James Parish Council initially approved Formosa’s land-use application for the proposed plant in January 2019, but RISE members and other community activists say that vote came before news reports broke revealing that the plant would double the community’s permitted toxic emissions.

That revelation, say activists, constitutes a dishonest and evasive effort by Formosa to convince parish politicians that the plant would be safe and allowable.

As a result, Lavigne said, “[w]e want the parish council to rescind their decision. We want them to go back, weigh the facts and re-do it.”

She added that “[t]hey should have evaluated all the plants we already have in the area before they put this one in.”

Representatives of the St. James Parish Council did not respond to inquiries for comment by The Louisiana Weekly.

Lavigne is a member of RISE St. James, a faith-based coalition that came together to protect local residents from the crippling health diagnoses and deaths from cancer and other long-term medical conditions members say have resulted from the pollution from existing chemical plants.

Through the new Protect Our Parish campaign, RISE St. James also wants to “advocate for investment in healthier, longer-term industries” in the parish, according to a press release.

According to the Protect Our Parish press release, more than 150 chemical processing plants already exist in Cancer Alley, a fact advocates say has resulted in cancer rates as much as 50 times higher than average Americans.

The new advertising campaign sharpens RISE’s efforts on the proposed Formosa Plastic plant, which would cover hundreds of acres of land for its production of single-use plastics, which critics note have been banned in more than 120 countries. While Formosa representatives say such plastics continue to contribute to the globe economically, technologically and culturally, critics assert that single-use plastics have outlived their usefulness and become outdated and have seen a decrease in use.

Representatives of the Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics Group, of which the St. James project is a part, said Protect Our Parish and its new ad distort the track record of the company and fail to adequately represent the scope and impact of the proposed facility. The company has dubbed the proposed facility “The Sunshine Project,” or “FG” for short.

Janile Parks, director of community and government relations for FG LA LLC, said in a lengthy statement to The Louisiana Weekly that Protect Our Parish’s marketing campaign presents the company and the proposed plant in an inaccurate, misleading light. Parks said the company has continually complied with all relevant government requirements and regulations, and will keep doing so in the future.

“FG LA LLC’s (FG) is committed to protecting the health and safety of its employees and the community as well as the environment,” Parks said. “The company will continue to follow all rules and regulations set forth by federal and state agencies and will continue to work to build a brighter future for the people who live and work in St. James Parish and across Louisiana. While we recognize there are some who are doing everything they can to stop progress in the parish, including spreading fear and confusion about The Sunshine Project, FG will continue to invite cooperation and truth as well as listen to and work with the St. James community to address real concerns.”

Parks added that the firm has done extensive research of its own showing that the proposed plant will not harm the community and citizens, and that the existing chemical plants in the parish have not caused the harm opponents say the facilities have.

“Simply stated,” Parks said, “there is no scientific proof that cancer rates in the Industrial Corridor, including St. James Parish, or District 5 where The Sunshine Project is located, are higher due to industrial activity. In fact, cancer rates and deaths are lower than, or there is no significant difference from, the rest of the state. Reports issued by the Louisiana Tumor Registry, the state’s cancer data aggregator, clearly establish this point.”

Parks asserted that plans for the facility include measures designed to prevent excessive, dangerous levels of by-products, and that such emissions will not only be closely monitored, but also reused and recycled by the plant.

Parks continued by saying that Formosa, especially the staff, employees and executives involved in the Sunshine Project, has gone the extra mile to reach out to the citizenry of St. James Parish and the larger region. That outreach includes a public open house and the creation of a project Web site.

“The company has also maintained open communication and continues to reach out to local project stakeholders, St. James Parish residents, local ministers, educators, workforce leaders and others to seek feedback and address questions and concerns as the project moves forward,” she said. “As a result, FG has developed and implemented community out each programs that meet real needs in the St. James community.”

Parks said that the plant will also provide an economic boost to the parish by creating hundreds of new jobs, and added that the cutting-edge production technology used by the plant will benefit the world as a whole.

However, Lavigne and other members of RISE St. James dispute such assertions by the company. Lavigne said the Protect Our Parish campaign will tell the general public – and its elected leaders – the truth about the proposed Formosa plant and the devastating, toxic effect the chemical industry has had on the local community.

Lavigne told The Louisiana Weekly that in addition to raising public awareness of the situation in her parish across the country, another targeted group is the government at all levels. Not only does she hope the ad will help persuade parish officials to rescind their initial approval of the Formosa plant, but she wants incoming President Joe Biden, Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond (who has announced he will step down from Congress to take a position in the impending Biden administration), and representatives of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, to view the promotion and learn about the plight of the residents of Cancer Alley.

“I would like them to take a tour of St. James to let them see first-hand how this industry has hurt our community,” she said.

In particular, Lavigne said, hopefully Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards will become aware of the situation in St. James Parish and take measures to block the Formosa facility’s construction. Lavigne said state government officials, especially Edwards, have failed to protect Louisiana’s citizenry.

“If [the ad] is shown nationally, it will make him look pretty silly for not stepping up to help the citizens of his state,” she said of Edwards.

She added that Edwards “should have stopped [the plant] before it got this far.”

Lavigne said that the Formosa company’s alleged distortions and cover-ups can no longer hide that the machinations of the chemical industry have had a particularly ruinous impact on people of color and majority-Black communities like the Fifth District of St. James Parish. She said such disproportionate negative impacts on communities of color amount to environmental racism, and she asserted that parish leaders have rejected proposals for similar projects in white communities and allowed the chemical industry to locate its activities overwhelmingly among Black populations.

“They figured that the Black community is poor, so we’re not going to speak up,” she told The Louisiana Weekly.

However, she added, she and other citizens devastated by the chemical industry and its toxic effects have decided to band together and stand against what they view is a system that allows polluting companies to do as they wish, a trend reflected by the number of industrial facilities in the area.

“We won’t let any more [plants] come in,” she said. “Not where I live. Not in St. James Parish.”

Read the article in Louisiana Weekly