THE CORRIDOR: Episode 7
The Future
We’ve been telling the story of the petrochemical industry in Louisiana, but this isn’t just a Louisiana issue, or even just an American one - petrochemicals are a global industry with a global impact. In this episode, we think about our collective future, and how we might begin to navigate living with all this plastic.
Guests
REBECCA altman
Rebecca Altman is a writer, environmental sociologist, and a research affiliate at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society at Brown University. Her work explores the environmental legacy and social history of plastics and associated petrochemicals. Recent work has appeared in The Atlantic, Science, Orion, Aeon and The Washington Post. Her first book, The Song of Styrene: An Intimate History of Plastics will be published next spring by Scribner (US) and Oneworld (UK). You can read her work at: www.rebecca-altman.com.
joy banner
Dr. Joy Banner is Co-Founder and Co-Director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit foundation committed to the liberation of the Black descendant community through the dismantling of inequitable and discriminatory economic, environmental, and social systems inherent in the violent legacies of slavery. As part of this work, Dr. Banner is on the front lines of the struggle against environmental racism in the form of petrochemical plants along Louisiana’s River Road, otherwise known as “Cancer Alley.” After earning a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, she taught business communications, marketing, and entrepreneurship at the university level where she advanced to Chair of the Management program. Joy is a proud member of the local descendant community with rooted ancestry that can be traced to the 18th century.
jane patton
Jane Patton (she/her) is the US Fossil Economy Campaign Manager for the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), and her work supports the Fossil Economy program in confronting the harmful impacts and false promises of the broader oil and gas economy, including from petrochemicals, agrochemicals, and carbon capture and storage. A lifelong 6th generation Louisianian, Jane just recently relocated to New Mexico, where she's continuing the fight against climate change alongside CIEL and her new neighbors.
LEnora gobert
Lenora is an avid genealogist passionate about revealing the hidden history of south Louisiana’s ethnically diverse families. She is currently utilizing her many years of researching family history to assist River Road community members in building out their ancestral ties to the parishes along the Mississippi River. Lenora holds degrees in Cultural Anthropology (BA) and Marketing (MBA) from the University of California, Berkeley.
The Louisiana Bucket Brigade's "Gene Team" traces family genealogy to document generational connections to the land, identifies those interred in burial sites, and uses this information to prevent further expansion of the petrochemical industry.
halle parker
melvin whitington
louis landry
Locally known as “The Legend,” Louis Landry is a River Parish native, elder, and community activist. He is a descendant of people enslaved on sugarcane plantations in the area.
Credits
The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is the lead reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. Executive produced by Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.
Transcript
[00:00] INTRODUCTION
AMY: You’re listening to The Corridor, presented by Threshold. To learn more and support our work, go to threshold podcast dot org.
JAY: What do you do for fun growing up?
JOY: We grew up right along the Mississippi River. And so I love walking along the levee. There was a lot of socializing with your family…
JAY: This is Dr. Joy Banner, who we met in our second episode.
JOY: my neighborhood was founded by my great grandparents. And so it's about 125 years old. And so in my neighborhood, my community was my family.
JAY: I’m back with her in LaPlace at Woodland Plantation, which she bought with her sister for their nonprofit, The Descendants Project.
JAY: Like so many people I met in the corridor, Joy’s family has been here for centuries. She’s a descendant of the enslaved people who built these communities. And that history isn’t in the past - it’s very present in her life, and in the way she thinks about her work, her home, and what she wants for its future.
JOY: it started with the love of our community. And the love of our community means the protection of our community.
JAY: Protecting the community. That’s what most people I met in the corridor want. But industry complicates that in all kinds of ways.
JAY: Over the years, industries have bought out most local businesses, leaving residents with few essential services. Gas stations, grocery stores, and other shops have disappeared from a lot of the corridor. This has made living here increasingly difficult, no matter how much you want to build your life here.
JOY: I think we are intentionally being underdeveloped to drive people away from the land that's most valuable for industry. So that's what we're fighting against.
JAY: Joy grew up with industry as a part of her life. Both her parents worked in plants here.
JOY: Shell and Union Carbide.
JOY: Someone will ask me about like, industrial disasters, like, oh, yeah, I know, like I've had an alarm go off and we've had a chemical release and I know people that have been through when plants have blown up, like my dad got injured, you know, in a plant, my mom had to run after a release at the plant she worked in.
JOY: I could have worked at Shell, I could have worked at Union Carbide. Like I saw my parents do it, I didn’t want that.
JAY: A lot of people wonder why residents don’t just move away - why would anyone want to stay in a place that’s actively harming them?
JOY: From the outside looking in, it's a pretty hellish sounding landscape.
JAY: But for many folks here, leaving isn’t an option. Some of them don’t have the money to move, and many others told me they don’t know where they’d go if they did leave. The presence of the plants has also devalued homes, making them hard to sell.
JAY: But there’s more to it than that. Even people who do leave often end up wanting to come back. That’s what happened to Joy.
JOY: I was in Austin, Texas for eight years. And as wonderful as Austin is, I was like it’s great but these are not my roots. I don't belong here. I want to go back home. And that's what I did. And I mean, I love it, it’s peaceful, it’s quiet.
JAY: But Joy says that the plants haven’t wiped out everything that she loves here.
JOY: It doesn't completely erase it. The natural beauty and the love of land. You love the green spaces, you love the greenery of it all. And if you grow up around plants, there's a part of living by a plant that you don't even see and recognize.
JOY: This place is referred to as Cancer Alley. And that is true. But if all you're seeing is cancer, if all you're seeing is health problems, and not seeing the way that we have carried forward culture and our resourcefulness and what we're still building, then you are still missing the point.
JAY: For Joy and tens of thousands of other people, the corridor is home. They aren’t giving up on it. And they’re not going to just go away.
JAY: But neither is the petrochemical industry.
JAY: Over the last 25 years, demand for plastics has outpaced steel, aluminum, and cement. Right now, Formosa Plastics is planning to build a nearly 10 billion dollar plant in St James Parish. If built, it would be one of the biggest petrochemical complexes in the world. The oil and gas industry is counting on our dependence on synthetic materials for its future. Even though many countries are switching to cleaner sources of energy, like wind and solar, petrochemicals are still big business.We may not be putting as much gas in our cars, but we’re still wearing petrochemical clothes, washing our hair with petrochemical shampoo, and eating food grown with petrochemical fertilizers. On top of that, in the U.S., the Trump Administration and the Supreme Court continue to roll back many of the rules on industrial pollution
JAY: So wishing for a world without petrochemicals isn’t realistic, at least not any time soon. The things made from them are so enmeshed in our lives that we can’t just stop using them. For the foreseeable future, we all have to do what people in the corridor have been doing for decades: coexist with this industry.
JAY: So how do we do that? And how do we do it better?
JAY: I’m Jaha Nailah Avery and this is the Corridor.
[06:51] A SEGMENT
JAY: Let’s start with the bare minimum — the basic things that people living next to petrochemical plants need and deserve. They want more communication about the risks they face from the plants, stricter monitoring of pollution, and real enforcement of environmental regulations. It’s what people in the corridor have been asking for for decades.
JAY: The state of Louisiana is supposed to be doing a lot of that right now, but as we covered in previous episodes, that doesn't mean they actually are. So the first step here is just following and enforcing the rules on the books. That would improve the health and safety of people in the corridor, and it’s something that industry and lawmakers could decide to do tomorrow.
JAY: But that really is just the beginning, because figuring out how to coexist with petrochemical plants isn’t just an issue for Louisiana. Petrochemicals are a global industry. There are cancer allies like Louisiana all over the world - in China, South Africa, Mexico, Vietnam, France, and many other places. Communities where people are exposed to toxic pollution at really high levels.
JAY: And there have been other Cancer Alleys in the United States, too.
REBECCA: New Jersey, and southern New England, and central Massachusetts.
JAY: This is environmental sociologist Rebecca Altman.
REBECCA: The Northeast was where plastics were made into the World War Two era with a few exceptions.
JAY: She has an old map of the petrochemical industry that doesn’t include Louisiana at all.
REBECCA: They didn't even feel the need to publish anything more than the eastern United States. You can't even see Cancer Alley on the map because it wasn't built out yet.
JAY: Many of those old industrial corridors have shut down, but Rebecca says that wherever plastics and petrochemicals have been made, they leave stories behind… in the communities where plants are built, and in the lives of the people who live next door. And there are a lot of these places. A lot of these stories.
REBECCA: The folks who put bread on the table by working in this industry and the folks who share a fence line with it. There is a full breadth of stories to be passed forward, to go along with all this plastic that we're inheriting.
JAY: These stories aren’t just academic for Rebecca. Her dad worked in the petrochemical industry in New Jersey, making polystyrene plastic.
REBECCA: So my dad worked at Union Carbide. He was as middle as you can get in that industry. He pressed buttons for the industry. You know, I don't think he knew where the stuff came from and he knew very little about where it was going. But he knew enough to ask some questions about all the stuff that was packed into drums and carted off. And he would say, you know, I would wonder where it was all going.
JAY: Her dad left the industry in the early 1970s, but years later, he found out where those drums of chemical waste had gone.
REBECCA: Part of the story of my high school years was that some of these drums, which had turned up before I was born in another town in New Jersey, had seeped into the ground and entered the groundwater. It was all over the news. And my dad understood that the drums that had come off his plant, where he had worked, were still causing problems in another community.
JAY: Industry spends a lot of time and money pushing their own narratives - heroic stories of people and products changing the world for the better. Just think of DuPont’s famous slogan “better living through chemistry.”
REBECCA: A lot of the history about plastics is told…centered around kind of firsts, founders, and its fathers, which is just such a limited way to tell the story about where anything comes from.
JAY: There are many other stories about how this industry touches and shapes our lives, about how its byproducts end up in our homes, and in our bodies. Stories that extend back through generations.
REBECCA: I think there's this larger reckoning that's going on of one generation understanding both what they've inherited and what responsibility goes with making sure that as we involuntarily pass this stuff forward, that we're providing the art, the poetry, the manuals, the history that can go along with it.
JAY: And Rebecca says we’re only just beginning to navigate what living with all this plastic means.
REBECCA: It raises ethical questions that are beyond the capacity of just science to answer, beyond the capacity of the legal system to answer.
REBECCA: Like, what do we do with this information? In this particular moment in history, we have some patterns, we have some red flags. But we've always been in a situation in environmental health where we have to figure out as a society how to act on something in the context of imperfect information.
JAY: Anyplace where petrochemicals are made, there are people trying to answer these questions.
REBECCA: Communities have their own systems for understanding, what does it mean that these things have transgressed the fence line and now reside within me?
JAY: I’d love to tell you about a place where all of this is working perfectly — where petrochemicals are being made, but pollution is under control and people feel safe. But that place doesn’t exist. There are better and worse versions of this story out there, but there are always big costs no matter where petrochemicals are made.
JAY: And while there are things we can do now to help people in industrial corridors, we’re never going to completely solve the community issues if we don’t think about the whole system.
JAY: There actually is an effort to do that — it’s called the Global Plastics Treaty, and the goal is to cut down on plastics and petrochemicals on an international level. Negotiations on that treaty have been slow and frustrating, but they’re not dead.
JAY: And industries can and do change.
JAY: Take lead. It’s been called the plastic of the ancient world, and it was once used in everything from pipes and paint to food and gasoline. In the US, the removal of lead from paint in the 70s and gasoline in the 90s was seen as a major victory for the environment, and public health. This doesn’t mean that lead isn’t still a problem, because it definitely is. But our perception of lead has changed. What was once seen as a valuable and versatile material is now seen as a dangerous poison.
JANE: We consider it a crisis when children are exposed to lead. There have been other things that were quote unquote essential to the economy, to our system that we recognize were harmful, and we changed them. And that is where we have to be with petrochemicals.
JAY: This is Jane Patton, who we met in our first episode of the season. She works for the Center for International Environmental Law in New Orleans, and she says that a lot of what’s happening in the corridor comes down to power. The petrochemical industry has a lot of power because it brings in a lot of money. And that’s driven priorities in Louisiana for decades.
JANE: this is a system has been around for a long time. And, it's hard to get people to recognize that it's bad. And unraveling that is part of what comes with unraveling our dependence on oil and gas, because it's just so embedded in the Louisiana system. And now the oil and gas people are the ones that have the power and the privilege, and it's hard to overcome that, as anybody who's ever fought for any kind of civil rights, human rights, anything will tell you, it is hard, because if people can make money off of it, they're going to do that.
JAY: We can choose a different path, but to get there, we need to break the habit of giving ourselves permission to turn away - to not think about the human cost of our dependency on petrochemicals. Because we can’t change something we refuse to see or hear.
JANE: I mean, it's dehumanizing when you think about the fact that we say it's okay for some communities to be sacrificed so that I can have nicer clothes or better shampoo. I'm sorry, I would rather have dirty hair and living neighbors. I just I don't understand how this is a calculus that we've gotten into.
JAY: And the thing is, even though some communities are impacted more than others, it’s a mistake to think that what happens in the corridor only affects the people who live there.
LENORA: The thing that's so ridiculous is all the pollution that comes out of these plants is not like it's contained in a certain area. Yes, it's worse in Cancer Alley, but that pollution is down here. That pollution is going all over this over south Louisiana.
JAY: : This is Lenora Gobert, staff genealogist with the environmental justice group the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.
LENORA: People just don't realize how contaminated they are. And. You know, I think it's all that Nimby mentality. I don't really see that plant right here, so it couldn't be harming me. Okay. But it is.
JAY: The petrochemical industry depends on all of us not thinking too hard about it, and especially not thinking about the people who live closest to the plants.
LENORA: If they could just get rid of all the people whose communities have been here for generations, nobody would be fighting them, they would love it because they could just build to their heart's content.
JAY: But people are fighting them. In all kinds of ways. And they’re not stopping, despite legal and political setbacks.
HALLIE: I've just watched as a journalist over the past five years, the environmental justice movement just blossom in the number of community groups that are activating around this issue, gain a lot more resources and also have more victories.
JAY: This is Hallie Parker, an environmental reporter with New Orleans Public Radio. Hallie has done a lot of reporting on pollution and activism in the corridor, and in recent years, she’s seen a lot more people speaking up against the plants at public meetings.
HALLIE: There’s a contentious permit hearing that the state held recently. The only people that were really speaking in support of it were people who were either going to make money off of the plant. Or maybe they worked with some sort of economic development or business development type organization. And those were the people that I heard from in terms of proponents, whereas the people who actually lived in the community, the people who would be closest nearby or sending their kids to a school that would be located next to this plant. All of those people spoke out against the plant. And this was probably packed to capacity. It's just interesting to see how more and more people are speaking out in opposition to these plans.
JAY: And yet despite the opposition she’s seeing and hearing in these meetings, Hallie says permits are still being approved, and plants moving forward.
HALLIE: So I think there's a question of just how much weight is given to resident feedback and public feedback when the state regulators are making their decisions. And what does it truly mean for a project to be in the public interest?
JAY: Hallie says the argument is often presented as a zero sum game between economic growth and public health - as though we can’t have both of those things.
HALLIE: This idea that you can't have a clean environment and have a good economy. That's something that's incredibly prevalent in the state especially, and part of what seems to halt any action to improve the environment down here.
JAY: But that’s a false dichotomy. Yes, petrochemicals are big business in Louisiana, but this whole sector is actually a much smaller part of the economy than it used to be. And even as the state continues to offer big perks to industry, it’s also marketing itself as a “sportsman’s paradise.” Hunting, fishing, birding, boating… all of that brings in a lot of tourism and recreation dollars. And all of it is threatened by industry.
MUSIC
JAY: Everywhere I went in the River Parishes, I saw and heard about the beauty of this place. Giant live oaks, hundreds of years old, with their gnarled branches and broad canopies strung with moss. Just upriver from Baton Rouge, there’s a cypress tree that’s more than a thousand years old. In every patch of swamp and forest, I could see the richness that allowed people to flourish along the Mississippi for millennia.
JAY: Industry hasn’t completely taken all that away but the corridor was once an even more lush and verdant place… full of wildlife.
JAY: Man-made levees protect the area from floods now, but before they were built, regular flooding created some of the most fertile soil on earth. Before all the industry, before sugar, and before Europeans arrived, people thrived on the bustling, abundant life around the river. Bison grazed here. Fish swam up and down the river in huge, shimmering shoals. Water birds highstepped through bayous, and crustaceans burrowed in the mud. Turtles sunbathed on logs. Black bears and red wolves wandered the forested wetlands.
JAY: You don’t have to go that far into the past to find this natural abundance, though. There are people who remember it.
MELVIN WHITINGTON: I'm originally from St James. I've been here about sixty-six years.
JAY: This is Mr. Melvin Whitington. He invited me to his home on my first trip to Louisiana, where he spent some time reminiscing about his childhood in St. James Parish.
MELVIN WHITINGTON: Growing up was great, you know, you name it, we didn't have it. We made what we couldn't buy…coming up, as a kid, I realize that, uh, St James was maybe the place to be at that time…you knew when it was spring…if they would blindfold me and I walk up the street, I could say, ‘I just passed a persimmon tree, I just passed a pecan tree, because it was that strong.
MUSIC
MELVIN WHITINGTON: When we were younger and growing up, for extra money, we picked blackberries, we picked the corn, and we would sell them.
JAY: But Mr. Melvin watched things change as the petrochemical industry grew.
MELVIN WHITINGTON: But now, since the pesticides and the chemical companies were erected. They kill the berries that we picked. The pecan tree doesn't bear like it once did. And if you make a garden in your backyard, it's just not working.The vegetables don’t grow to maturity. And it’s not like it once was, because of the pollution that is occurring because of the industrial plants.
JAY: Another elder I met, Mr. Louis Landry, told me what he remembers from his childhood in Donaldsonville.
LOUIS LANDRY: Three miles out of Donaldsonville on the East bank of bayou Lafourche.
LOUIS LANDRY: We had cypress trees. We had pecan trees. Peach trees, you name it. Pluck a peach off the tree and bite into it and the juices run down your sleeve. I couldn't ask no better.
JAY: Donaldsonville is now home to the largest ammonia plant in the world.
JAY: In between all the industrial development, abundance remains. If you go to the corridor today, you’ll still see wildlife, wetlands, fruit and nut trees. Not to mention the music, art, and culture lovingly nurtured over generations. And you’ll find people who love this place, and know it’s worth fighting for, in spite of it all.
LOUIS LANDRY: When God created this area, he created a touch of heaven. And that's why I'm here. And that’s why I’ll fight for it.
Credits
AMY: The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is our reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. I’m executive producer Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.
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