What a court ruling means for the future of pollution in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley

Many studies have shown that the burden of air pollution in the United States disproportionately falls on racial minorities, especially Black Americans. In August, a federal judge barred the EPA and DOJ from using part of the Civil Rights Act to investigate how Louisiana regulates industrial plants. John Yang speaks with Beverly Wright of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice for more.
John Yang:
A large number of studies have shown that the burden of air pollution in the United States is not evenly shared. It falls disproportionately on racial minorities, especially blacks.
In 2022, the Biden administration began investigating whether Louisiana’s approval of where industrial plants are located disproportionally affected minorities in that state, even unintentionally. But last month, the federal judge said the administration can’t do that and can only investigate regulatory decisions that are intentionally discriminatory.
While that ruling is limited to Louisiana, 23 Republican governors had already asked the EPA to scrap that approach. Beverly Wright heads the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. This case started in St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana. Tell us more about that place, what it looks like and who lives there.
Beverly Wright, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice: It came out of St. John Parish, but the site is the same across what is called Cancer Alley, where we have the third highest cancer rate in the nation and 85 miles stretch of land between New Orleans and Baton Rouge with over 156 petrochemical plants and six refineries, over 200 million pounds of pollution, that number is almost comparable to the amount of pollution in the state of Texas.
All of the research basically shows that it was intentional. And we can show places where white community members were actually moved away from areas while black people were left to languish in pollution as they expanded the plants. St. John Parish was one of the communities that actually brought administrative Reagan down for what he called a journey to justice tour.
And he was able to see with his own eyes, smell and feel the stench of these facilities, and then look at the data that showed, for example, a public school down the road from a facility called Denka that produced very dangerous chemicals. And that was the one that were really working to get not so much shut down, but certainly getting them to reduce the amount of ethylene oxide that they were putting into the air, harming children.
John Yang:
The judge who handed down this ruling also wrote in his order that pollution doesn’t discriminate. But in a separate section, he said, when a decision maker has to consider race, it has indeed participated in racism. In other words, considering the race when you’re talking about where these plants are cited, that’s racism. What do you say to that?
Beverly Wright:
I said it is ridiculous, and it’s a specious argument that they’re trying to use. Everything shows that pollution does discriminate. We can determine almost how long you’re going to live by your address. And the addresses of poor people and people of color are such that we live near the most dangerous polluting facilities. Our air is worse. And that’s why I felt that we should have taken this further.
John Yang:
You’ve been critical of the EPA and the Justice Department here. What do you think they should have done?
Beverly Wright:
Now, I’m not so much critical of EPA. I’m critical of the Department of Justice, because I can imagine EPA doing the amount of work that they did on this particular case, sitting down with the state of Louisiana, coming to an agreement of how these things would be redressed, and then decide not to move forward. And it’s really just exciting, what I would call bad behavior all over. It’s like a kid getting, oh, I can get away with this. Let me spread the word.
And so that same bad behavior is happening across the country, where you have these governors and these departments of environmental quality are making certain that the sighting of these really dangerous facilities are always closest to people of color. And that has happened continuously in our society.
John Yang:
What’s the next step for your group and your organization and people who are fighting this?
Beverly Wright:
So there are a number of ways that it can be attacked. Of course, we can continue to raise our voices and interact with government. That’s how we got. We’ve gotten anything that we’ve gotten done, but there are other ways to deal with it. And I think that the EPA actually found another way, and that’s called the Hanru (ph), where the Hanru (ph) really falls under the Clean Air Act, which basically says that you are supposed to reduce exposure of extremely hazardous chemicals to society in general.
So that’s still on the table, where they still have to follow the rule, but making certain that the rules are followed, that the Clean Air act has within it some protective measures, and we have to identify what those measures are and push forward in that way to reduce exposure.
John Yang:
Beverly Wright of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, thank you very much.
Beverly Wright:
Thank you.