Earth Day 2015

Today is the 45th Anniversary of Earth Day

This week is the 5th Anniversary of the BP Oil Disaster 

This year is the 10th Anniversary of Hurricanes Katrina & Rita

The View from a Mossville Fenceline.  Photo by R Hudson

Right now, There is a great dislocation happening in southwest Louisiana, the exodus of the people of Mossville Louisiana from the village built by their ancestors over 150 years ago. The community of Mossville is disappearing under the greedy footprint of Sasol, the South African Oil and Gas company, abetted by a complicit state government, indifferent to the needs and wishes of its most vulnerable citizens, those in the fenceline communities, near to oil refineries and chemical processors.  These communities, like Mossville, bear the burden of toxic exposures, and their citizens organize to protect their health as well as the air, land and water where they live.  Organizations like Mossville Environmental Action Now seek to protect all of us from predatory extractive industries that realize obscene profits while leaving devastation in their wake.

In the coming weeks this blog will describe the situation in Mossville and suggest multiple approaches to thinking about the dispossession of one of this country's oldest African-American communities from its land by an apartheid- era South African based oil and chemical processing giant.

Many African-American, Indigenous and working poor communities have disappeared through Louisiana state policies that favor industrial expansion over the rights of its citizens. Mossville, because of the decades-long organizing by its residents, provides important lessons for how we, who believe in the possibility of creating a safe and prosperous environment for all beings, can confront the predation of industry and support the important work of local and grassroots organizing, such as that of Mossville Environmental Action Now.

This weekend watch for a post on The Emergence of an American Petro-State.

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.

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.

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired

There are illnesses that are created and worsened by exposure to industrial pollutants. These are the illnesses we are investigating, that the local community wishes to understand and address.  Ordinary diseases such as asthma, heart disease, and renal disorders are worsened by the dioxin, ethylene oxide, vinyl chloride, chlorine and other chemicals emitted by the chemical and oil refineries that pollute the Louisiana/Texas "cancer alley." 

But it is the cancers and strange blood disorders that most concern and frighten people. Brain, liver and lung cancers.  Anemia, inexplicably falling white blood counts and miscarriages afflict the families of Mossville.  Young people have cancers of the sinuses that one rarely see in anyone of any age. These and other conditions affect residents and plant workers, people in Mossville and all the surrounding communities. It is only the people of Mossville who are organized to hold the industrial zone of Calcasieu Parish accountable.

Our economic system has not held industry responsible for the affect they have on the environment and our health.  Most every manufactured thing we purchase and use includes one or more of the chemicals identified by Wilma Subra as present in the pollution that plagues the people of Mossville.

We all wish to be free from suffering.  The people of Mossville have borne and  continue to bear the afflictions that result from the way we manufacture products both necessary and superfluous.  What is interesting is that similar facilities in Europe are held to a much tougher environmental standard.  As Mrs. Margie Richard told us at our kick off dinner on Sunday, "You don't smell those plants in the Netherlands.  There's no dioxin in the soil in Norway."  So it can be done.  Industry can be held accountable.  Fenceline communities don't have to be sacrificed to industrial production.  Communities of color all over the world are seeking this exact kind of accountability from their governments and the refineries poisoning their lives.  We all need to join in these efforts. These refineries are all of our neighbors, polluting all of our lives, causing suffering to all of our kin whether they live in the Gulf region or not.

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.

Where Electricity and Everything Else Comes From

Do you ever wonder where the everyday things come from?  Things like bacon (not me literally.  I'm vegetarian), the plastic storage containers that keep food fresh in the refrigerator, or the electricity that keeps our fridges running?  I'm not thinking so much of the mysterious nature of the electron, for example, or the amazing complexity of the the grid of generating plants, transmission stations, towers, wires, meters and companies that make it possible for me to turn on my lights or write on my plastic encased computer without much thought.

No, I am thinking about the most basic component of that thoughtlessness -- coal, "pig slurry", petroleum.  Half of the electricity in this country is generated by coal. I don't live in the regions where coal is dug.  Major mines are distant from most Americans, either physically or emotionally.  We don't think about where our electricity comes from until there's a disaster of some kind like here  in New England over the last few weeks as an ice storm brought down power lines and deprived residents of power for as much as two weeks. 

The other time we are shocked into awareness is when some process we didn't know existed causes a disaster we didn't know could happen.  I am referring to the collapse of the coal ash retention pool serving the Tennessee Valley Authority plant in Kingston Tennessee. The TVA was an initiative of the New Deal created to bring jobs and electricity to the rural South.  I had never thought where the by-products of electric production went to, that it was stockpiled in the same way the by-products of pork production are stockpiled, in large, lightly regulated "ponds" of thousands of tons of, well, crap. And it seems the people living near the coal ash repository hadn't given much thought to what it meant to live near a toxic waste.  They took the TVA  at its word that the material was "inert."  Of course the 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash sludge is not.  It is polluting wells, the river, the land of central Tennessee with arsenic, cadmium and other heavy metals. 

Most of us are perfectly willing to ignore how the things of everyday life come to us, whether that is electricity, bacon, or the even that most ubiquitous commodity, plastic.  The South has become a convenient dumping ground for the country's prosperity.  Here I am thinking about the people of  Mossville, LA and the toxic legacy of petroleum refining and plastic production that has become their heritage. Their environmental disaster has been going on for years and our government largely unresponsive.  The organizers of Mossville Environmental Action Now (MEAN) are now parties to a federal lawsuit to force the EPA to do their job and protect them and all the peoples of the Gulf Coast from the toxic outflows-- every year thousands of tons of chemicals (generally known as dioxins)  and proven to be detrimental to our health  -- carcinogens and toxins that affect our blood, brain development, hormones and immune system --  spew forth from the petroleum refining industry.

The people of Mossville  want to be free from the diseases that have caused residents to refer to their town, and a 100 mile stretch of towns and cities as  "cancer alley." The women of MEAN (most of the organizers are women) are in their second decade laboring to protect their health, the Gulf region and by extension, all of our lives against the predation of industries more concerned with their profits than our wellness.  The folks in Kingston Tennessee should pay attention, if only so they will realize what a long, slow trip it's gonna be.