20 a cross was burned Associated Press, "Cross Burning Defendant Speaks Out," KPLC-TV, December 12, 2001, http://www.kplctv.com/story/317803/cross-burning-defendant-speaks-out.
21 Lake Charles had become ground zero for the production of American -petrochemicals Bachael Cernansky, "Natural Gas Boom Brings Major Growth for U.S. Chemical Plants," Environment 360, January 29, 2015 (accessed August 16, 2015), http://e360.yale.edu/feature/natural_gas_boom_brings_major_growth_for_us_chemical_plants/2842.
21 13,000 of these workers were from out of state, including Filipino pipefitters By far the largest plant expansion was that of the South African petrochemical giant, Sasol. It was in the process of buying out members of a long-beleaguered black community of Mossville whose land it wanted for a planned expansion. I attended meetings of Mossville citizens and spent a day with a man living in a trailer surrounded by fields filled with heavy machinery moving about on land now zoned "heavy industrial. His water and electricity had been cut off and the mailman no longer delivered letters to his address. If I could understand why those who suffered the effects of widespread pollution opposed stricter regulation of pollution, or funds for cleaning it up, then perhaps I could understand the opposition to government help in fixing all the other big problems too.
2: "One Thing Good"
26 the second highest incidence of cancer for men and the fifth highest male death rate from cancer in the nation "Cancer Facts and Figures 2015," American Cancer Society, http://www.cancer.0rg/acs/gr0ups/c0ntent/@edit0rial/d0c uments/document/acspc-044552.pdf.
27 whose extraordinary connection to Lee For much of his life, Lee had handled dangerous chemicals that came into being where he worked and ended up somewhere else, only to come back to him indirectly. One of them, ethylene dichloride, was added to other chemicals to form Agent Orange. During the war in Vietnam, this was shipped, Lee said, in fifty-five-gallon drums on railcars to the Alameda Naval Air Station in California. From there, it was loaded onto airplanes and flown to Southeast Asia to be sprayed over the vast jungle. Before being married to Lee, his wife had been married to a flight engineer who repaired leaks in chemical drums during flight. Accidently exposed to Agent Orange, he died a miserable death. His widow married Lee. Through washing her first husband's uniforms, she too suffered from Agent Orange, as did her son, Lee explained. Agent Orange had come full circle.
31 seafood advisory warning people to limit their consumption of local fish Lee's toxic waste dumps were not the only cause of the fish kill. Paul Ringo, a Riverwatcher on the Sabine River, got industry officials to admit to other sources of toxic waste while questioning them at one town hall meeting. Ringo held up a sheet of paper authoritatively, he recalls, and spoke as if reading a number of facts. "We knew the fish were dead. And someone had given me a tip that a large EDC tank was empty. So I acted like a lawyer. 'Is there anything about that tank that's unusual?' Then one admitted 'some EDC spilled' but said he didn't know how much. So I asked, About how much?' 'We're not sure,' came the answer. How much does the vat normally hold?' The answer came in tens of thousands of gallons. 'So is that about how much EDC was lost and unaccounted for?' I faked it and it worked!" This led to a field trip during which officials admitted to other spills that had occurred over a period of time.
32 1,000 crawfish farmers and the 800 commercial fishermen who catch wild crawfish The Louisiana Seafood Marketing and Promotion Board, "By the Numbers: Louisiana's Ecology," accessed April 8, 2015, http://www.louisianaseafood.com/ecology.
32 and the Clean Water Act (1972) On January 1, 1970, in his first official statement of the year, President Nixon said, "The 1970s absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters and its living environment. It is literally now or never." Jonathan Schell, The Time of Illusion (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 74. (This positive step coincided, tragically, with the stealth invasion of Laos.)
32 "front-porch"—or "kitchen-sink"—politics of the 1970s and 1980s Jim Schwab, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York: Farrar Strauss, 2013).
3: The Rememberers
39 It is 1950 A word on nomenclature: a hayou is a swampy river, and a swamp is a forested wetland. A marsh is a grassy wetland or wet prairie.
42 French speakerswere discouraged from attending Sean Cockerham, "Louisiana
French: L'heritage at Risk," Seattle Times, July 6, 2012. In 1921, the Louisiana Constitution forbade the use of any language other than English in public schools.
44 Nowadays there's talk of cleaning it up, hut I don't know how they can As early as 1971, according to the files of the Louisiana Stream Control Commission, an agency predecessor of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, mercury contamination of 1.5 parts per million was found in blue crab at a seafood processing facility on Calcasieu Lake. Interview, Willie Fontenot, 2014.
45 a chlorinated hydrocarbon manufacturing facility It binds together various building-block molecules. The company purchases its first building-block molecule (hydrocarbon ethylene) from another company. Then it pumps in brine (a second building-block molecule) to form sodium hydroxide, or caustic soda, which it can then sell. The company also bonds chlorine with hydrocarbons—from which various configurations emerge, such as EDC, perchloroethylene, and vinyl chloride. Waste from this processing lay in the "heavy bottoms" tar Lee Sherman dumped in the canal that connected with Bayou d'Inde.
46 one of the largest chemical spills in North America James Ridgeway, "Environmental Espionage: Inside a Chemical Company's Louisiana Spy Op," Mother Jones, May 20, 2008, http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2008/05/environmental-espionage-inside-chemical-companys-louisiana-spy-op.
46 largest new industrial facility expansion in the United States Chris Pedersen, "Sasol Clears Major Hurdle to Build America's First GTP Plant," OilPrice .com, September 4, 2014, http://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Sasol-Clears-Major-Hurdle-to-Build-Americas-First-GTL-Plant.html. Also Wilma Subra, e-mail correspondence, February 20, 2014, attachment: Sasol Permit.
46 and of the Great Paradox Also see "Hazardous, Toxic and Radioactive Waste Reconnaissance Report (HTRW) Calcasieu River and Pass," Louisiana Dredged Material Management Plan, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District, Prepared by Gulf Engineers and Consultants, Appendix G, maps.
47 on grounds of faith and family values Interview with Kevin Phillips, in New York Times, 1970. James Boyd, "Nixon's Southern Strategy: 'It's All in the Charts,'" New York Times, May 17, 1970, http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-southern.pdf. Also see "Governor Bobby Jindal Says Americans Want a Hostile Takeover' of Washington," TeaParty.org, September 16, 2014, http://www.teaparty.org/gov-bobby-jindal-says-americans-want-hostile-takeover-washington-55848.
47 among them nurses, nurse's aides, medical technicians, public school teachers In 2007, 350 Filipino teachers were brought in by Universal Placement International to teach in public schools under the H-1B Guest Worker program. But they were forced to pay an initial $16,000 fee. Most had to borrow the money and were charged monthly interest. UPI took away their passports and visas until they repaid the loan. The contracts were later ruled illegal, and the agency officials were jailed for human trafficking. Claire Gordon, "Filipino Workers Kept as Slaves in Louisiana, Lawsuit Charges," AOL Johs, November 15, 2011, http://jobs.aol.com/article /2011/11/15/filipino-workers-kept-as-slaves-in-louisiana-according-to-lawsu/20106284; "Lawsuit: Filipino Teachers Defrauded in International Labor Trafficking Scheme," LA.AFT.org, http://la.aft.org/news/lawsuit-filipino-teachers-defrauded-international-labor-trafficking-scheme.
48 won a score ofO on the League of Conservation Voters scorecard "David Vitter on Environment," On the Issues (a website that describes congressional bills and candidate's votes across a range of issues), http://www.ontheissues.org/Domestic/David_Vitter_Environment.htm.
49 for the affluent, a journey to the Swiss Alps Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostal
gia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Also see Svetlana Boym, "Nostalgia and Its Discontents," Hedgehog Review (Summer 2007): 13, http://www.iasc-culture.org/eNews/2007_10/9.2CBoym.pdf.
50 new johs, new money, and new products E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1940); Laura Ann Stoler, "Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination," Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 191-219; Laura Ann Stoler, "Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France," Public Culture 23, no. 1 (2011): 121-56.
51 They put fun into memory http://www.bayousandbyways.com/festivals2.htm.
52 Dominant within that system were men Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, 199—200.
53 They've already waited long enough and nearly despair of politics Just as people of faith spoke of the environment in religious terms, industry spokesmen could too. After the 2013 Axiall explosion, the CEO described it evasively to the company's stockholders as a "Force Majeure"—an act of God or a force out of human hands. Pavel Pavlov, "US' Axiall Declares Force Majeure on VCM from PHH Monomers Plant," Platts, December 23, 2013, http://www.platts.com/latest-news/petrochemicals/houston/us-axiall-declares-force-majeure-on-vcm-from-21990566.
54 a man I have already met—Lee Sherman Javier Auyero and Debora Alejandra Swistun, Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 128-29. Residents spent a great deal of time waiting; time was "oriented to and by others."
4: The Candidates
57 curious what differences between the two men would emerge WWL-TV Staff, "Poll: Obama Loses Support in La.; Perry, Romney, Cain Close on GOP Side," WWL-TV, October 13, 2011, http://www.wwltv.com/story/news/politics/2014/08/29/14408560. WWL-TV polled 602 likely Louisiana voters.
57 and voted for the Keystone pipeline Ibid.
57 "If it ain't good for y'all, I ain't voting for it" Scott Lewis, "Boustany and Landry Fight over Obamacare, Medicare, Negative Campaigns and Oilfield Jobs [Audio]," Cajun Badio, October 31, 2012, http://cajunradio.com/boustany-and-landry-fight-over-obamacare-medicare-negative-campaigns-and-oilfield-jobs-audio/?trackback=tsmclip.
59 the EPA listed eight as "impaired" and the ninth as "unassessed" A January 24, 2015, search for Lafayette, LA, using the EPA's "MyEnvironment" tool yielded these findings. See http://www.epa.gov/myenvironment.
59 eighty-nine with "formal enforcement actions in the last five years" This data comes from the EPA's ECHO database, which tracks compliance with various environmental regulations. We accessed it using the EPA's Enforcement Compliance and History Online tool, which yielded these findings. (We searched September 29, 2015, for Lafayette Parish, Louisiana.) See https://echo.epa.gov.
59 many of whom were Tea Party members Stacy Mitchell and Fred Clements, "How Washington Punishes Small Business," Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2015. Many Tea Party candidates from Louisiana—including Charles Boustany, John Fleming, Steve Scalise, and Bill Cassidy—voted "Aye" in the 114th Congress on HR 37, a House bill that rolled back Dodd-Frank restrictions on Wall Street companies. This bill had the counterintuitive title of the "Promoting Job Creation and Reducing Small Business Burdens Act," but in fact, Mitchell and Clements argue, it strengthens big business, placing it in a better position to marginalize small business.
60 Representative Landry did the same See League of Conservation Voters, Public Health Basis of the Clean Air Act, House Roll Call Vote 395 (Washington, D.C.: League of Conservation Voters, 2012), http://scorecard.lcv.org/roll-call-vote/2012-395-public-health-basis-clean-air-act. Sixteen Bepublican senators had voted in 2011 to abolish the EPA in a bill co-sponsored by Louisiana senator David Vitter.
60 Boustany and Landry had earned a lifetime score of 6 out of a total possible 100
Brad Johnson, "Senate Republicans Introduce Bill to Abolish the EPA," Think Progress, May 6, 2011, http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/05/06/164077/senate-republicans-introduce-bill-to-abolish-the-epa.
60 Neither candidate said a word In 2012, Louisiana produced 31.14 pounds of toxic releases (on- and off-site, to air/water/land, all industries) per person (i.e., 143,289,289 pounds TRI divided by 4.602 million people in 2012). By comparison, the United States as a whole produced 11.57 pounds of toxic releases per capita in 2012. Only five states produced more per capita. Alaska produced 1,198.6 pounds per capita. Montana produced 58.9 pounds per capita. Nevada produced 103.6 pounds per capita. North Dakota produced 49.3 pounds per capita. Utah produced 67.2 pounds per capita. The state's own Center for Environmental Health (part of the Department of Health and Hospitals) states on its website: "Louisiana ranks among the top states in the nation in per capita production of hazardous wastes and in the amount of chemicals released into its water, air, and soil."
63 "There's hardly a public dock along if"The Mississippi drains about 40 percent of the continental United States and provides drinking water to eighteen million people. But leaky pipes, spills, chemical dumps, and agricultural runoff along the thirteen parishes that depend on the Mississippi for drinking water have polluted it. The drinking water in one parish was found to contain seventy-five toxins, including carbon tetrachloride, DDT, and atrazine. Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, Petrochemical America (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2012), 143.
63 The site offers a "Cajun Pride Swamp Tour" "Gonzales," LouisianaTravel.com (the official state tourism site), http://www.louisianatravel.com/cities/gonzales.
63 Gonzales seems to be a one-term ongoing party In Norco, Louisiana, along the Mississippi, beautiful, white, billowy clouds are nicknamed "Norco cumulus" because they contain volatile hydrocarbons. Misrach and Orff, Petrochemical America, 4.
63 top 3 percent of U.S. counties in reported toxic releases, according to the EPA See the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) Explorer. According to the EPA TRI, Calcasieu Parish—home to Westlake, Lake Charles, and Bayou d'Inde—ranked in the top 2 percent of polluted counties in the nation in 2013, the latest data available (ranking 34th out of 2,428 reporting counties). In 1990, Calcasieu was ranked 24th in TRI emissions of 2,315 reporting U.S. counties (so almost in the top 1 percent of counties nationwide). Environmental Protection Agency, TBI Explorer [Data file], 1990 and 2013 (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Protection Agency, 2015), http://iaspub.epa.gov/triexplorer/tri_release.chemical. Information about toxic releases is based on what facilities in certain regulated industries report, not on independent monitors—a practice Congress established in 1986 when it set up the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act.
64 "because they've got stricter regulations than we do" In 2000, Robert D. Bullard found that nearly 60 percent of the nation's hazardous-waste landfill capacity was in five Southern states (Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas) and that four landfills in minority zip code areas represented 63 percent of the South's total hazardous-waste capacity, although blacks made up only about 20 percent of the South s total population. See Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (New York: Westview Press, 2000). According to the Right to Know database, in 2011 (latest available) Louisiana ranked third of all states in how much hazardous waste it manages (waste it receives from elsewhere). This does not include ten of the fourteen kinds of wastes from petroleum. Right to Know Network, Biennial Reporting System Quantities by State for 2011: Waste Received and Managed (Washington, D.C.: Center for Effective Government, 2015), http://www.rtk.net/brs/tables.php?tabtype=t3.
as of 12/24/2016, the above links shows the data for 2013, under state, Select Louisiana and then change the date to 2011
64 worrisome studies had occasionally appeared in the press Abrahm "Lustgar-ten, "Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us," ProPublica, June 21, 2012, https://www.propublica.org/article/injection-wells-the-poison-beneath-us.
64 25,000 miles of underwater pipelines connect offshore drilling platforms to onshore refineries in Louisiana and Texas Ken Silverstein, "Dirty South:
Letter from Baton Rouge," Harpers, November 2013, 45—56.
65 "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced" "Remarks by the President to the Nation on the BP Oil Spill," White House Press Release, June 15, 2010, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-nation-bp-oil-spill.
65 Crab traps were soiled Mark Hertsgaard, "What BP Doesn't Want You to Know About the Gulf Spill," Newsweek, April 22, 2013. The manual provided by Nalco, the producer of Corexit 9527 and Corexit 9500, the disper-sants BP sprayed over the water, describes the effects of excessive exposure to it (nausea, vomiting, injury to the kidney or liver). BP did not distribute manuals or inform cleanup workers of potential hazards or provide them with safety training and protective gear, according to interviews with dozens of cleanup workers. They were given body suits and gloves but no respirators or air monitors. The Corexit was sprayed from a plane onto workers in boats and on shore, and workers were told the toxic dispersant was "as safe as dishwasher soap." Kate Sheppard, "BP's Bad Breakup: How Toxic Is Corexit?" Mother Jones, September/October 2010; http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2010/09/bp-ocean-dispersant-corexit. Also see "Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling," Report to the President, National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, January 2011, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-OILCOMMISSION/pdf/GPO-OILCOMMISSION.pdf; Hertsgaard, "What BP Doesn't Want You to Know About the Gulf Spill."
65 other marine mammals, including whales, washed ashore Scientists estimate that the mortality of marine mammals in the wild was sixteen to fifty times higher than that in the collected count. Rob Williams, Shane Gero, Lars Bejder, John Calambokidis, Scott D. Krauss, David Lusseau, Andrew J. Read, and Jooke Robbins, "Underestimating the Damage: Interpreting Cetacean Carcass Recoveries in the Context of the Deepwater Horizon/BP Incident," Conservation Letters 4, no. 3 (2011): 228—33; Natural Resources Defense Council, "The BP Oil Disaster at One Year" (Washington, D.C.: Natural Resources Defense Council, 2011).
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right Page 29