November 7, 2024


On the banks of the lower Mississippi River in St. James Parish, Louisiana, on vast tracts of land that break up the vast wetlands, huge petrochemical complexes light up the sky day and night. They have piled up over the past half century, built by fossil fuel giants like Nucor and Occidental. During that time, they replaced farmland with concrete and steel and strung the embankment with pipelines that carry natural gas from as far away as West Texas. When the plants came, the lush landscape of this part of South Louisiana declined.

“The pecans are dry. They’re not giving in like they used to,” said Gail Lebouf, a longtime resident of the region and co-founder of the community group Inclusive Louisiana. “The fig trees, the blackberries – everything I made a living from is no longer there.”

Lebouf is a leading activist in “Cancer Alley,” the 85-mile stretch of land between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where strips of apartment blocks are sandwiched between the region’s more than 150 petrochemical plants. In recent years, she has fought a new wave of industrial development heading toward her parish — especially toward its predominantly black neighborhoods.

The race-based concession practices evident throughout “Cancer Alley” are particularly pronounced in St. James, true 20 of the congregation’s 24 plants are located in the majority-Black fourth and fifth districts – an equivalent of one plant for every 250 people. In 2014, the Parish Council passed a zoning ordinance that marked much of those two districts for industrial use. That same year, the council banned two chemical companies, Petroplex and Wolverine, from building new industrial plants in the majority-white Third District. In 2022, the council gave in to white residents’ demands regarding a moratorium on solar farm development until they had a study done to determine if the project could lower their property values ​​or put their homes at risk during a hurricane.
Since 2018, the congregation has supported the construction of a new $9.4 billion plastics manufacturing complex owned by Taiwanese chemical giant Formosa in the fifth district. On a plot of land roughly the size of 80 football fields, the company plans to build 16 facilities that will release cancer-causing pollutants such as ethylene oxide and vinyl chloride. The nearest neighborhood is about one mile down the road. A study by ProPublica found that Formosa’s emissions could more than triples the cancer risk in some St. James neighborhoods.

Cancer Alley
An aerial view of Louisiana’s “Caner Alley” in 2013
Giles Clarke via Getty Images

In March 2023, the Mount Triumph Baptist Church and the local organizations Rise St. James and Inclusive Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the parish government to end this alleged practice of discriminatory permits. They hope to get a moratorium in place on the licensing of heavy industry “and the corresponding lethal levels of pollution” in the parish’s Black areas. Environmental advocates considered it a landmark case. But last November, a federal judge dismissed the complaint’s racial discrimination claims, tying them to the 2014 zoning ordinance, arguing they are barred by the one-year statute of limitations. “Although plaintiffs’ claims are procedurally defective, this court cannot say that their claims lack a factual basis or rely on a meritless legal theory,” U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier of the Eastern District of Louisiana wrote in his decision.

Lawyers who St. Representing James residents presented their argument on the statute of limitations before the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday. They claim that the parish’s long-standing practice of discriminatory land use decisions constitutes a “continuing violation” that cannot be dismissed simply because the zoning ordinance was passed outside the one-year statute of limitations.

“The congregation’s decades-long policy, practice, and habit of not only sending and attracting deadly petrochemical plants to majority-Black districts, but doing so while enacting protections only for majority-White districts, is discriminatory and illegal,” said Sadaf Doost, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a press release.

The defendant’s lawyers said that the plaintiffs should have been aware of the parish’s discriminatory zoning as soon as the ordinance was passed in 2014 and sued within the year. Judge Karen Hayes, who is hearing the appeal, agreed challenge this reasoningwhich, she said, makes it sound like “if you don’t sue within a year, you could be discriminated against in a bunch of different ways for the rest of eternity.”

Additionally, the plaintiffs’ attorneys, who are from the Center for Constitutional Rights and Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic, pushed back against the district judge’s finding last year that the plaintiffs lacked standing to state a claim under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Religious Land Use Act. Persons and the Louisiana Constitution’s Protection of Historic Linguistic and Cultural Origins.

The wide tracts of land along the Mississippi River that chemical companies bought to build their sprawling industrial complexes were once plantations that used slave labor to grow sugar cane. Louisiana’s state archaeologist, Dr. Charles McGimsey, believes that every former plantation in St. James contains unmarked cemeteries of former slaves. And so the plaintiffs argue that the municipality’s land use decisions are discriminatory, because they allow chemical companies to build plants on land that is culturally significant.

“Indeed, one of the lingering traumas of slavery is the inability of descendants to locate the graves of their ancestors,” the plaintiffs wrote in their original complaint. “But in the cases where cemeteries can be identified, that location has profound cultural, historical and religious significance for descendants.”

Last year the district judge said that any damage to sites of historical, cultural or religious interest was the fault of petrochemical companies – not the parish council. The plaintiffs’ attorneys countered Monday by arguing that the council’s zoning and permitting decisions led to the destruction of the unmarked grave sites.

The congregation did not respond to several requests for comment.

The success of the St. James case will depend mainly on whether the court accepts the plaintiffs’ argument about the statute of limitations, which will apply to four of their seven claims. If the judge also finds the racial discrimination claims compelling, the plaintiffs will have a stronger case. In the current judicial-political landscape, there are fewer legal mechanisms to argue cases of discrimination, especially when it comes to environmental damage.

Historically, environmental groups have had trouble proof of discrimination under the US Constitution’s equal protection clause, as it focuses on discriminatory intent rather than adverse outcomes. “To be able to show that this discrimination is intentional, you have to point to this pattern” – the parish council rejecting a solar farm in a white neighborhood but building a plastic plant in a black one – said Pam Spees of the Center for Constitutional Rights Monday. “They know what they are doing.”

As of August, residents of Cancer Alley — and any other victims of environmental damage in Louisiana — now have one less legal tool to seek redress. After a long battle against the Environmental Protection Agency, federal judge James Cain ruled that the EPA cannot use a civil rights law that allows legal claims based on “disparate impacts” rather than discriminatory intent to combat toxic pollution in Louisiana.

As difficult as such a struggle may seem for residents like Gail Lebouf, St. James Parish, despite itself, is helping their cause: In the time since the residents first filed their lawsuit last March, the parish has approved two more industrial. projects — an expansion of Koch Methanol’s plant and an expansion of the Acadian gas pipeline, which would attach to Koch — both zoned for St. James’s Fifth District.






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