Stop the Sasol Land Grab of Mossville: What's a Voluntary Property Purchase Program

Environmental Justice Elders Lead Off Demo at
Sasol Houston Headquarters

Many of you have asked what's up with my blog.  I'm hoping to make a transition to a website with the blog embedded but I don't seem to have the skill or talent to accomplish that.  I'm looking for help.  I'll let you know how it goes. On to the main event!
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Sasol, the apartheid era South African synthetic fuel company is perpetrating an coercive, deceptive and financially unjust grab for the land of people of Mossville Louisiana.  You all have read about Mossville over the years.  This post is about the collusion of the oil and chemical industries in creating something called the Voluntary Property Purchase Program to buyout communities and avoid liability for industrial toxic pollution that drives down property values, poisons the environment and destroys the livelihoods and health of the communities they are "benefitting."

I have found 4 other instances of oil refiners and chemical processing companies using Georgia-based Community Interaction Consultants (CIC) as their front organization in the negotiation of buyouts, all highly contested -- 2 in Michigan, 1 in Arkansas and 1 in 1999 in Baltimore.   The Port of Corpus Christi seems to be taking bids on one now.  John Mitchell, the president and founder of CIC, describes the company at his LinkedIn page as providing  

• "community relocation consulting, program development, and program administration services for heavy manufacturers facing diminution of value claims"... and, 
• "Beginning in 1989, consulting for the development and administration of property programs focused on green belt expansion for heavy manufacturing sites."

Green belts are supposed to be areas protected by zoning policy to maintain wild, agricultural and open space as a buffer between industry and settled areas.  International environmental justice activists have created a Green Belt Movement.  Of course international mega-corporations see these areas as expansion opportunities, greenwashing their buyouts as relocations, property value protection programs, and most egregiously, as voluntary.

Dislocation from ones home and land (especially in Louisiana where multiple generations live and build on the family property under the ownership of one family member) after your property has been polluted by dioxin, oil spills, benzine releases and other chemicals, your family's health destroyed and the concerted effort of community members and their allies to gain the attention of, and action from government, industry and the judiciary ignored -- in the case of Mossville for over two decades -- does not lead to a freely made decision to voluntarily sell one's property to the perpetrator (or the perpetrators' stalking horse) of the harm the community has experienced. 

There is probably need for a Department of Justice investigation into oil and chemical industry collusion in creating the VPPPs in order to avoid the true cost of their egregious disregard for the communities they have driven out and whose land they have come to own. 

The Exodus of the People of Mossville, Part 3: Who Is Sasol?

This is 3rd in a series of posts on the Exodus of the People of Mossville, Louisiana, an historically African-American community founded in the late 1800s by Jack Moss. Sasol, the South African synthetic oil company, is buying up property to build the first North American (fracked) gas to liquids plant.

The following facts are drawn from the Mossville Environmental Action Now website (see website for citations):

Who Is Sasol?

• Founded in 1950 in South Africa, in response to international communities' fuel embargo due to the practice of apartheid. 
• In 1954, Sasol created Sasolburg to supply housing and facilities for employees; it segregated the development into Sasolburg proper (exclusively for white employees) and Zamdela township (for non-whites).
• Zamdela remains marginalized.
•  Despite the presence of a major manufacturer in their backyard, unemployment in Zamdela remains high, 43% as of January 2013 (1). 
• Sasol has been accused of pollution in Zamdela that’s caused sickness and hospitalization, including a chlorine gas leak in 2000, which led to over 200 hospitalized (2).
• Over 42,000 tons of volatile organic compounds are reported to have been polluted into Zamdela (3). 
• Residents of Zamdela began monitoring their air in 2001- finding quickly that the level of benzene in the air was over 8 times the US legal limit (4). 
• Most of Zamdela’s residents earn less than R400 a month (about $40 USD a month); Sasol’s CEO David Constable received a 68% pay increase (5) this year, bringing his salary to R53.7 M for the year ended June 2013. 

What is Sasol North America? 

• Condea Vista (now Sasol North America) was found guilty of "wanton and reckless disregard of public safety” in 1997 for its responsibility for one of the largest chemical spills in the nation’s history, which contaminated the groundwater underneath the surrounding community. The company was charged with dumping an estimated 19-47 million pounds of ethylene dichloride, a suspected human carcinogen, into the local estuary (6).  This local estuary is Mossville, Louisiana. 
• Sasol North America has self-reported releasing dioxins, a cancer-causing highly-toxic group of chemicals in Mossville area (7).
• Greenpeace is suing Sasol North America for spying: "allegedly trespassing, conducting unlawful surveillance and stealing confidential information related to Greenpeace's work in the Lake Charles region of Louisiana," (8) which includes work with the Mossville. 

The Exodus of the People of Mossville, Part 2: American Petro-State

View of Lake Charles Industrial Zone from Mossville

What was the point of the expansionist enterprise we know as the "Discovery of America"  -- that invasion by the nations of Europe into the Caribbean, North and South America? Extraction of resources.  We learn of the mythic search for gold by Spaniards, Columbus' misdirected search for a new route to the spices of south Asia, the interest of the Dutch in the same.  But once the northern Europeans got over their lust for shiny metals and geographic confusion they realized that the Americas were a gold mine of a different sort.  It had everything that was becoming in short supply in their home countries -- timber and good soil for growing cotton, and the quintessential cash crop, tobacco. Eventually coal would be found as well as other useful minerals.   Soon, Africans would be extracted from the Continent and brought to work the plantations, farms, timber stands and mines of the "new" land.  American colonists understood their role in the beginning.  They were employees of corporations, called variously, The Dutch West India Company, British East India Company, and eventually for Louisiana, the Company of the West or the Mississippi Company as it was also known, under imperial French charter.

What does any of this have to do with an American Petro-State?  

The Louisiana  settlement began in 1699 at what today is Biloxi Mississippi.  The poet, essayist and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson, writing in 1916 to document the strange provenance of the Louisianan term "People of Color (gens de couleur)", suggests there were less than 300 people in the colony by the time the first African slaves arrived. France and Louisiana's economic viability were dependent on the machinations of the Mississippi Company and what became known as the "Mississippi Bubble."  I mention it here because the Mississippi Bubble introduces early to Louisiana one of the key elements necessary for its future as a haven for oil and gas drilling and petrochemical processing -- monopolistic corruption. A Scottish gambler, John Law, convinced the French government that if they gave him control of the Mississippi Company, and all the resources and people of what is now Mississippi and Louisiana, that he could increase the number of White people and slaves in the colony.  The plan went awry, Law had inflated the value of the Mississippi Company stock and when shares were not redeemable it almost bankrupted France and its colonies.  Louisiana would remain backward economically for generations.  But that doesn't mean companies weren't getting wealthy.  Eventually, after the French had given up on the vast territory it controlled in North America, the production of agricultural and other commodities - sugar, salt, cotton, sulphur, rice --would dominate the lives of most of the states residents, regardless of their color or legal status. At the turn of the 20th century the first oil would be discovered at Jennings Field near Lafayette.  This arguably marks the emergence of the American Petro-State. 

What is a Petro-State?  Mostly we think of it in terms of Russia "oilgarchs", Persian Gulf Arab oil states and authoritarian regimes in Africa, South America and Asia.  But North America has regions that function like foreign Petro-States.  Instead of despot rulers there is a history of state government level corruption, lax environmental enforcement and corporate control of land and property rights.  

What characterizes a Petro-State? According to Michael Watts in his reflection on Louisiana and the BP oil disaster (2012):
"Petrocorruption and the shady politics of oil development  were there from the beginning, as the oil industry emerged on the backs of an extractive economy (timber, sulfur, rice, salt, furs). Local businessmen snapped up land and threw themselves into a chaotic land grab backed by Texas drillers and operators with little regard for the law. Wildcatting sprung up with no regulation; leases, especially along the coast wetlands, were allocated behind closed doors. Huey P. Long famously launched his career with an attack on Standard Oil and then proceeded to build his own subterranean oil empire. While senator, Long and his political cronies established the Win or Lose Corporation, which acquired cut-rate mineral leases through the government and resold them at a healthy profit." 

Essential to the profitability of the petrostate is its ability to operate in the shadows, to tamp down dissent and evade regulatory or criminal punishment. The fact that many readers of this post know nothing of these conditions, the economic, geo-spatial, health, environmental and cultural implications of its existence suggests these massive, obscenely wealthy corporations have been successful.

228,000 oil wells have been drilled in Louisiana since the discovery of the Jennings Field (Watts). The oil extracted from Louisiana and Texas, the drilling that has led to the destruction of the wetlands and the chemical processing that has created multiple Cancer Alleys and many Sacrificial Neighborhoods along the fence lines of chemical processors and oil refineries, provides us with our daily needs, from the fabrics we wear to the medical devices essential to our survival.  

And the cartography of the American Petro-State is no longer limited to Louisiana and Texas. See that big red scab up by  Ohio?

Edgar J. Mouton, MEAN Co-Founder, Passes at 76

Mr. Edgar Mouton speaking to Sarah Lawrence College Health Advocacy Students

I have been reluctant to write this post.  Death, of course, is a part of that wheel of stress we trudge, and old men die all the time.  So that's not the issue. Black men die of unnatural causes with disturbing frequency, as this blog has sometimes documented.  To live to be 76 can be a blessing.  But Mr. Mouton was not an ordinary man and his death probably not natural.

Edgar Mouton, co-founder of Mossville Environmental Action Now, passed away last Thursday.  He was 76 years old. I only knew Mr. Mouton for four years. I met him post-Katrina (how I still count time in Louisiana) in my role as a trainer with the Environmental Support Center (also of happy memory).  He had worked in the refinery zone in a number of different plants.  I remember him telling me he had handled benzine and sulphuric acid.  His age was a mystery to me as exposure to all those chemicals brings illnesses and conditions that wear a body away.  Mr. Mouton had dedicated 30 years of his life to revealing the injustice of favoring the interests of industry over humanity.  The people of Mossville were being sacrificed to our consumption and the profits of the oil and chemical industries.  He worked tirelessly to hold them accountable, for federal Superfund designation for the land, owned by black folk since the end of the Civil War (another way to count time), now lost to pollution and to reclaim the health of his people.  

Like most of the people I have had the privilege to work with in Mossville, Mr. Mouton had a mordant sense of humor and infinite patience.  One of my last memories is of him, Dorothy Felix (MEAN's other co-founder), Wilma Subra and Sanjay Gupta of CNN being stood up by the head of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.  It was spring, it was hot, they wouldn't let these two elderly people into the state office building in Baton Rouge.  (I suppose the CNN cameraman was a problem for them). They were standing around cracking jokes.  They knew that in some fundamental way, LADEQ had already lost the war.


Goodbye Mr. Mouton.  I'm happy to know you have joined the ancestors in a high, and much less toxic, place.

The Kelly Air Base Struggle: Building A Grassroots Movement Against Military Pollution

I have the privilege to attend the Environmental Justice Encuentro in Houston, sponsored by TEJAS Barrios.  The connection between environmental justice and health is abundantly evident.  Hearing from the Southwest Workers Union and their community campaign in San Antonio TX to close Kelly Air Force Base and have the shallow aquifer, poisoned by TCE (tri-chloroethylene) and PCE (a related chemical),  underneath cleaned up.

Purple Cross Campaign

Here's an awful fact: One out of two households in near Kelly have someone who died from cancer.  These victims of the toxic soup in the aquifer ten feet below their homes are commemorated through the Purple Cross Campaign. The whole campaign for closing, cleaning up and addressing the health effects of military pollution has been based on a popular methodology that the organizers from SWU describe as "We Speak For Ourselves".

San Antonio residents believe the aquifer has been accumulating military toxins since the 1950s.  They have been documenting health effects and organizing for change since the early 1990s.

Louisiana DEQ Should Be Ashamed of Itself

There are a bunch of environmental justice groups gathering throughout the Gulf Coast this weekend before Earth Day.  An Environmental Justice Encuentro is being hosted by TEJAS in Houston. Communities struggling with oil refinery violations are  meeting with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade organizing a refinery neighbors accountability campaign. And Mossville Environmental Action Now went to meet with DEQ, as respondents to a CNN interview, and weren't allowed into the building.

Yup, citizens of Louisiana made to stand in the sun for hours,  locked out of a publicly owned building at their own state capital.  Because the director of the Department of Environmental Quality couldn't face citizens who are suffering from the state of Louisiana's refusal  to admit to the environmental pollution its citizens (did I mention that these folks are citizens of the state of Louisiana) endure on a daily basis.

Mr. Edgar Mouton (left) & Mrs. Dorothy Felix (above) were among the MEAN members locked out by DEQ.

The Run up to Overexposed on CNN and other MEAN updates

This morning and tomorrow morning at 7:30 a.m. Sanjay Gupta talks with Ken Cook from the Environmental Working Group about the industrial sources of toxins with Mossville as the background.  Check it out. Also the recent victory by MEAN.  The OAS will hear their case against the US for allowing the poisoning of their community as an act of environmental racism.  And join the Mossville Environmental Action Now facebook page.

The Calcasieu Parish Sheriff's Department, Part 2

This is what happened next:

We left the Sonic Drive In having lost our appetites.  We went back to the retreat center to find the most aggressive of the cops leaving the parking lot in front of our humble bunk house.  Most of the students seemed fairly upset -- wigged out might be a more apt description.  I knew I had to call the college and I knew we had to leave the retreat center.  It was fairly isolated.  I didn't expect anyone would try to do physical harm to us but remembered all the ways emotional distress could be inflicted when someone had decided a boundary had been crossed.

So we packed a few things and left for the safety of Sulphur and real, adult queen size beds. Mossville folk kept checking in with us, making sure we were ok.  They had tried to mount a rescue mission, complete with video camera to document our treatment.  We were allowed to leave before they could get to us.  Their motives were two fold -- to protect us and to use our treatment for organizing.  And that is how it should be.  We had been invited in, to join Mossville Environmental Action Now in their struggle.  Police harassment comes with the environmental justice organizing territory.  The refineries are an important part of the local, state and regional economy.  Their products are a key indicator in our nation's gross domestic product and cost of living indicator.  Their profits are astronomical.  Grassroots communities from many countries and on every continent have tried to force oil companies to clean up their act (and the air and the water and the soil)  and those companies have successfully resisted most of their efforts. Local officials have a vested interest to aid that resistance.  MEAN knew this, and now we knew it too.

There wasn't time to feel sorry for ourselves but we did take precautions.  No more photography on PPG Road.  We took extra care to make sure our interview teams were structured in ways that would not expose anyone to scrutiny or harassment.  We had to be on our way back to Sulphur before dark.

But no worries.  On our last day two interview teams still managed to get kicked out of a trailer park. 

Mossville Dispatches by SLC Students

Check out the student blog Mossville Dispatches.  Let them know what you think.

Getting to Know Calcasieu Parish Louisiana Law Enforcement

I promised the administration at Sarah Lawrence College I wouldn't write about this until all the students were safely back home.  That promise will show the difference between how an environmental justice organization thinks about the events I am about to describe and a college with its multiple concerns about student safety, public image and recruitment, not to mention the high cost of bails bondsmen these days (that's a joke, SLC!).

On the evening of March 23rd I left the students to finish up at the base we had established at Mt. Zion Baptist Church.  I went in a desperate (and fruitless) search for a washateria.   I had seen a laundry facility with that name in Moss Bluff near our accommodations at the St. Charles Retreat Center.  Have you heard the song Down in Mississippi on the No Turning Back CD by Mavis Staples?  She describes integrating a washateria.  I wanted a photo of the lit up sign and I wanted clean underwear.

By the time I got there the washateria last load time limit had passed.  So then  crankiness arose, especially as I discovered that all local laundry facilities closed quite early.  That crankiness was dispelled when I received a panicked phone call from my students.  They had taken the scenic route -- along PPG Drive that runs between the mostly abandoned Bel Air neighborhood and the CONOCO refinery.  The area wells had been poisoned by a toxic plume from the refinery into the ground water supply.  The Health Advocacy students had interviewed the few remaining residents who were holding out for a fair relocation settlement from the refineries.  They had stopped to take photos of the refinery at night.

Illuminated by the otherworldly  yellow glow of thousands of sodium vapor lamps, the Calcasieu Parish refinery district after sunset feels like our worst dystopian nightmare.  I suspect that this  part of the county is visible at night even from the space shuttle since refinery district is so large and the sodium lamps so bright.  But given that reality their are those in the county who prefer the refineries not be photographed, starting with refinery management.

As the students traveled away from the refinery and towards their humble retreat center accommodations they realized they were being followed.  It was pretty obvious.  The car in pursuit was a red Malibu with rims.  Big shiny spinney silver rims.  It tailgated and pulled up along side.  It pulled in front and tried to slow them down.

They called me during what was an understandably frightening experience.  They finally seemed to have managed to shake the Malibu.  I abandoned my search for a laundromat and met them at a Sonic Drive In about 2 miles from the turn off for the retreat center.  We didn't want the red Malibu to know where we were staying.

The students described what had happened as we were parked in the Sonic parking lot.  I was standing between their two cars.  We were just deciding to order some delicious cheese tots when a police car pulled up, then another, then two more.  The students were instructed to stay in the van.  I handed them my cell phone. 

The first cop was belligerent, demanded to see the camera and threatened us with violating Homeland Security laws.  It's illegal to photograph the refinery at night.  Could blow a hole the size of Texas if it was attacked.  What were we doing?

I politely refused his demand for the camera.  Another car pulled up.  The supervisor.  After more questioning it became clear they had nothing to charge us on.  They asked to see the photos.  I consented.  The first seven were the worst night shots ever taken.  He laughed. 

I am not sure if they ever filed a report of suspicious activity or turned our names into the Dept. of Homeland Security.  I am beginning to doubt it since they never called SLC to inquire into the reality of our existence.

The sheriff asked me if I wanted him to check the students' i.d.'s individually or as a group.  I chose as a group.  They asked for all the badge numbers and the supervisor's name.  They complained about being followed.  The sheriff assured them he would check it out.

As we left the Sonic we saw, on the other side of the parking lot,  the occupants of the red Malibu watching us pull away.

Tomorrow: What we learned from our encounter with the sheriffs.

What's Missing From This Picture? Day 2 in Mossville

Back home in Boston, Pat has planted our moon bed with jerry variety of spring oats (we call them Jerry Springer Oats) as a fast growing cover crop and source of green manure for the bed and compost pile. Maybe this weekend the weather will be dry and she will plant peas in the square bed.  I am very conscious that I am missing a prime gardening moment -- the first crops go in, the ones that are cold hardy but make the early delicious fixings of spring salad or stir fry.  Pea tendrils, tender early spinach, kale and arugula, turnips and mustard greens. 

There are no gardens in Mossville.  Varieties of rosaceae and pear are blooming, the live oaks budding.  But no land is turned, no sturdy tomato plants providing hope of a profitable harvest from the acres of land that make up this semi-rural part of Calcasieu Parish.  The Sarah Lawrence College Health Advocacy students and I have been driving around "cutting turf," that is, mapping and sectioning the community for interviewers to conveniently travel on foot.  There are beautiful little ponds, many wooded tracts and expanses of mowed fields. People clearly care about their property.  There's lawn furniture and children's play sets but no food growing, no truck farms or back yard gardens. "It's the soil," the residents say.  The soil here will make a body sick. The food one might grow will be full of dioxins. 

I have never lived in a place where you couldn't garden.  And because of the air pollution, even if you put in raised beds with a thick barrier between the bed and the soil it rested on the food would still be contaminated.  Whether you were were raised "Up South" or down vegetable gardens are part of the fabric and character of African-American communities.  CONOCO and the other toxic refineries have stolen this  important cultural, economic and social activity.  What's wrong with this picture?

Affliction to Others, Affliction to Self

I am a full moon cycle behind on the study part of the Integrated Study Practice Program unit on Wisdom.  But that's ok.  I am in Mossville, LA this week, with 8 grad students from Sarah Lawrence College Graduate Health Advocacy Program, and right intention (for the full moon period that began  Feb. 28) seems particularly important.

We are here to assist Mossville Environmental Action Now (MEAN) assess the health care needs of a community made very ill by the toxins spewing from the stacks and "accidental" releases of the 40+ refineries and chemical processing plants within their parish (county).  Thirteen of these plants are within a 1/2 mile of Mossville.  CONOCO, the largest, is right in their backyard, the dangerous and irresponsible neighbor unresponsive to the demands of common decency not to mention justice.

I've written about MEAN before.  You can read about their situation in their own words as well.  But this morning as the sun is just coming up over the bayous and smoke stacks of southwest Louisiana I am conscious of the affliction everyone suffers down here, whether one is an environmentalist or not, whether one is black, white or brown, regardless of income, despite denial and evasion.  The air (and probably the water) and soil are killing people. 

Even though I live in a state and a region where I don't feel the air stinging my eyes, burning my throat, calling up all kinds of alarm in my immune system; even though I get to leave here at the end of the week, this affliction is my permanent affliction as well.  And yours.  Right intention for now is to know the affliction of others is affliction of self.  Engaging in wholesome actions that limit or relieve that affliction -- seeking environmental justice, working compassionately for change -- will yield results that benefit all of us.  If not in our lifetime then in the lives of our children.