Sierra Club President Aaron Mair, in blue shirt, flanked by Dorothy Felix, president of Mossville Environmental Action Now, and an unidentified local activist; South African human rights activist and Goldman Environmental Prize recipient Desmond D'sa and Advocates for Environmental Human Rights co-founder and co-director Monique Harden at right.
It is the beginning of hurricane season and the nation’s attention is once again riveted by the “new normal” of global warming-influenced supercell storm events wreaking havoc on the Gulf Coast states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Some politicians are seeking to score electoral points by engaging in one-upmanship to appear most responsive to weather-related disasters while intentionally not dealing with the American appetite for carbon-based fuels that drive both climate change and extreme weather events. Our national conversation for more aggressive public policy and legislative action to curtail our dependence on carbon as an energy source has been stalled by sizable infusions of cash into the 2016 election cycle by the coal and gas industries, which hope to elect a 2017 class of Congress that will fail to act on climate change. The result is that we are facing significant global warming-fueled weather events with related damages and loss due to flooding.
This is significant on many levels. There are a currently a number of congressional leaders who not only deny that global warming is happening; they have been also at the forefront in hamstringing our nation’s efforts to adequately fund disaster relief and response, given past events like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. When it comes to climate-related superstorm events, nature pays no attention to political party affiliation, partisan perspective, or race. The irony and tragic reality is that the very policy makers who deny climate change are redlining minority communities out of existence by rezoning them and rolling out the welcome mat to the very carbon-intensive industries that are contributing to the new normal of extreme weather events that are now destroying these communities. With climate change, no one is immune.
Our political leaders should be leveraging this fall’s hurricane season and storm events to build awareness and national consensus about why America must kick its fossil fuel addiction and shift to clean energy. Climate change and extreme weather only tell part of the ugly story of our addiction to dirty fuels. Residents of low-income communities along the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge down to New Orleans, are exposed to cocktail of contaminated air, soil, and water by industries that fuel our addiction to oil and coal.
With Leslie Fields, director of the Sierra Club's Environmental Justice program, I recently drove through Louisiana and toured flooded Calcasieu Parish, where we saw hundreds of inundated homes and farms. The flooding that occurred in southern Louisiana is now being called the worst natural disaster in the U.S. since Hurricane Sandy in 2012. At the invitation of South African human rights activist and 2012 Goldman Prize winner Desmond D’sa (in jacket and red shirt, above and below); Dean Hubbard, director of the Sierra Club's Labor program; Grace Morris, a New Orleans-based Sierra Club organizer; and local leaders and activists, I also visited the western Louisiana community of Mossville, where I withessed a community beseiged by environmental injustice. I was privileged to join black homeowners and one of their strongest advocates and allies, Monique Harden of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, in their decades-long battle to curb toxic pollution—a battle that has become one of the longest-running climate and environmental fights in America.
The Sierra Club's Environmental Justice program collaborated with D’Sa and the residents of Mossville to organize and speak out against what Dr. Robert Bullard—widely known as the “father of environmental justice”—termed “climate apartheid.” Climate apartheid is the confluence of multinational carbon-based industries that deny climate change, like-minded local politicians and zoning officials, and their combined impact on communities that are largely segregated along racial and class lines. The end result is that communities like Mossville receive the burdens of toxic industrialization and none of the jobs or benefits. The twist now is that we have a multinational creature of the South African apartheid system gaining the support of local white officials to do what Jim Crow and segregation could never do.
Local officials have planned an expansion of the South Africa Synthetic Oil Liquid (SASOL) chemical plant—the largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere—that will effectively wipe Mossville off the map. This expansion will isolate and strand Mossville within a massive dirty-energy synthetic fuel plant that will produce more greenhouse gases than any other facility in Louisiana and concentrate toxic land uses around the community, effectively dealing it a death blow. This has already happened in several other predominantly black communities, including five towns originally settled by former slaves.
Mossville, founded in 1790 by a freed slave named Jacob Moss, became one of the first settlements of free blacks in the South. This self-sustaining community survived for generations on agriculture, fishing, and hunting. However, decades of political disempowerment at the county level left the zoning decisions in the hands of white elected officials who allowed the community to become ground zero of the chemical industry boom. Over the last fifty years, Mossville became surrounded by the oil industry and chemical plants, making it quite possibly the most polluted locale in the most polluted region of one of the most polluted states in the country. One EPA study found chemical toxins in the air 100 times higher than the national standard, and another found that 84 percent of Mossville residents have nervous system disorders.
Today Mossville is on the verge of extinction, surrounded by vinyl chloride producers, chemical plants, coal-fired power plants, and now essentially landlocked by SASOL. I have visited this fenceline community several times before with Sierra Club environmental justice organizer Darryl Malek-Wiley, the late Damu Smith of Greenpeace, and Dr. Beverly Wright of Dillard University’s Deep South Center for Environmental Justice to document this community and the region that has become known as “Cancer Alley.” It was painfully ironic to find myself in the middle of flooding that can be attributed to global warming, having come to fight the expansion of a plant that makes synthetic liquid fuel from coal that will contribute more greenhouse gasses and accelerate more global warming-related storms. It is tragic that Mossville has survived the antebellum South, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, voting and civil rights struggle, only to be wiped out by industries that are destroying our planet. The irony and tragedy is that Mossville is not being destroyed by hurricanes or flooding, but rather by a legacy of environmental injustice and a South African petrol chemical conglomerate.
SASOL began as a state-owned company during the brutal era of racial apartheid in South Africa, and is now taking land in Mossville to build hazardous industrial facilities. To make way for its massive industrial development, SASOL developed a program to buy out residents' homes—without the input of Mossville residents or an understanding of the community's needs. Like many other African American communities in Louisiana, many of the families living in Mossville have been here for generations. To pressure Mossville residents into accepting insufficient buy-out offers, SASOL influenced local agencies to change zoning in Mossville from residential use to heavy industrial use, close streets used by Mossville residents, allow heavy truck traffic through the community, and threaten to expropriate properties if owners would not willingly sell. SASOL offers less than what is needed to relocate and resettle Mossville residents and has refused to listen to counteroffers presented by residents. The compensation will never make up for the loss of community, history and culture of this historic settlement.
Unfortunately, the EPA’s Region 6 in Dallas plans to promote the forced land takings within the historic African American community of Mossville without the participation of any environmental justice advocate. SASOL’s unjust land grab should not be allowed to take place, and EPA Region 6 should never allow the forced uprooting of local residents, which will effectively eradicate the town of Mossville, consign its legacy to the dustbin of history, and devastate heritage-based property values due to the oversaturation and siting of toxic industries in the community. Justice demands that the residents be made whole by honoring written counteroffers submitted by local residents and covering the full cost of relocating them to the community of their choice.
TAKE ACTION: The residents and climate refugees of Mossville need our help. Send a message to SASOL telling them this unjust land grab must end. And write to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy in Washington, DC (McCarthy.Gina@epa.gov) asking the EPA to intervene to save the community of Mossville from death by environmental injustice.
