As an environmental lawyer with close ties to Louisiana’s ever-growing community of local activists fighting on the same issues, I’ve been sounding the alarm about the state’s so-called Cancer Alley — the web of massive petrochemical plants lining the lower Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to below New Orleans — for years. The small river towns between those two cities —...
Please don’t frack Louisiana
I’ve traveled a lot, for work and for pleasure, and I’ve yet to see a state as beautiful as Louisiana — or as environmentally sensitive. And yet because the state is so rich with resources — not just oil and natural gas but salt and other chemical building blocks — there is always intense pressure to exploit our ecology, often with disastrous consequences. The...
Something stinks at the end of La.’s “Cancer Alley”
Louisiana is a state of contradiction — earning its official nickname of “Sportsman’s Paradise” with shimmering waters and miles of vibrant swampland, yet often in the shadow of so many strench-emitting oil and chemical plants, more per square mile than anywhere else in the world, that it gains the alternate nickname of “Cancer Alley.” Sadly, it’s not...