By Alexis Young
This piece originally appeared in People over Plastic.
In Calcasieu Parish, a little more than three hours away from New Orleans by car, sits the city of Sulphur, Louisiana. The more than 85-mile stretch of oil and gas and petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River includes the Calcasieu and Cameron parishes surrounding Lake Charles.
Founder of The Vessel Project of Louisiana and Gulf Fossil Finance Coordinator for Texas Campaign for the Environment Roishetta Sibley Ozane lives in Sulphur with her children.
“Sulphur is surrounded by good people, good music,” said Miss Ozane. “It’s a beautiful country place that, unfortunately, is surrounded by several petrochemical facilities and a new LNG [liquified natural gas] facility that’s been proposed and approved.”
In People over Plastic’s conversation with Miss Ozane at her Sulphur home, she discussed the multi-pronged degradation her community faces as well as an ongoing legacy of oppressive systems disproportionately impacting Black, Indigenous, and low-income residents in her community.
Facilities like those operated by Westlake, Sasol, and Chevron, only minutes from Miss Ozane’s home, don’t just build facilities on acres of land that impact wildlife. They pollute unsafe amounts of methane and other greenhouse gasses that overwhelm air quality and contribute to high cancer and asthma rates and extreme weather conditions while stripping away natural protections to severe coastal storms.
“We are seeing hurricanes hit each end of the state in one year. So folks started talking and wondering what is happening, what’s different? When we started looking at it, the climate in Louisiana has warmed significantly in the last several years,” Miss Ozane explained.
“We were like, ‘What is contributing to the warming of the climate here in Louisiana that’s also contributing to how massive these storms are and how soon they’re coming back to back like that?’ We looked at what we’re overflowing with in Louisiana, and that’s fossil fuel extractive industries, whether it is petrochemical facilities, LNG facilities, or any other facilities that extract fossil fuels.”
Miss Ozane and community residents in Sulphur aren’t the only ones connecting the dots between climate change and over-industrialization. The Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ), founded by Dr. Beverly Wright, published “The More Things Change, the More They Remain The Same: Living and Dying in Cancer Alley” in May 2023. The report is an update on maps drawn by the DSCEJ 30 years ago and primarily “illustrates proximity of petrochemical facilities to Black communities in the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor” and several outcomes from that proximity.
According to Miss Ozane, one of those outcomes is wetland erosion. Wetlands act as buffers during storms, allowing the severity of the winds and rain to hit the wetlands first before moving into more populated areas.
“For the Gulf South, our wetlands are a natural storm-surge protection. That’s one of the first things you learn when you live in a Gulf state, that the wetlands are what protect you from whatever is coming in the water,” said Miss Ozane.
But Miss Ozane also revealed a lesser-known history of the wetlands that suggests a deeper significance for Black and Indigenous folks in Sulphur, especially those with deep-rooted ancestral and generational ties to the land.
“Our ancestors lived in those wetlands and in those swamps, so that’s very sacred for especially Black and Indigenous people back during slavery,” Miss Ozane pointed out. “A lot of times we only hear about the Underground Railroad, and we don’t think about the path to the Underground Railroad. They protected themselves and made lives and made communities within those wetlands and those swamps.”
Now, it seems the very industry that is eroding what were once sites of refuge for enslaved people is the same industry that replaced the oppressive industrial system enslaved people escaped from. The state’s petroleum industry shows how slavery laid the groundwork for environmental racism.
“Only a few people owned massive amounts of land; you would have maybe one family that would own acres and acres and acres of land where that plantation sits. It was always located near the water because this is where cargo and different things would come in and out,” Miss Ozane described passionately.
“Here in the 20th century, 21st century, when folks are coming back and they want to buy that land, they only have to talk to a few people. When the fossil fuel industry started coming here to Louisiana, they looked at where plantations were sitting because they knew only one family owns all of this land.”
And just like that, one system of oppression begets another.
PoP is the only multicultural media platform of its kind, publishing stories by BIPOC for BIPOC. We focus on uplifting our people’s environmental justice stories, and we do so in a way that is both nuanced, sensitive, and in depth. Our approach is to build community relationships first.
