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30 chapter฀two “We are BLaCk and WHiTe, riCH and Poor” Crossing Boundaries, Remaking Louisiana In Iberville parish of the 1980s, 23.3 percent of the population lived below the poverty level. Oil refineries and petrochemical industrial facilities have released millions of pounds of chemicals into the air and waterways over the years. In 1980 waste associated with these industries was placed in 744 solid waste dumps, 1,000 hazardous waste dumps, 50 hazardous waste landfills, and 4,000 injection wells.1 Approximately 1,300 orphan wells and 10,000 waste pits were created by oil and gas production facilities, and over 1,000 groundwater contamination plumes were documented.2 What would it mean to find that industries near you were evacuating their own workers because of potential dangers without telling you, a nearby resident , to leave the area as well? Let this question stand as a metaphor for this chapter, one that explores movement among people, some positive, some less so. The crossings take place within the soil of industrial waste, within races, religions, local and national governments, local and national news coverage. The women also talk about conversations over fences, neighbors in unison acting together, but also new fences going up in the estrangement that comes when there is fear of inadequate means of support. Decades of racial segregation and the power of white elites, as well as the 1960s civil rights movement, formed the backdrop of such old and new divisions. Others have written on the ways that the environmental movement built a more inclusive community of citizens. The efforts of early and continuing activists extend the concept of justice to include attention to the production and distribution of information; encourage more heterogeneous groupings formed around specific, sometimes temporary, goals; and allow the creation, then, of new ties of people to one another.3 More will be said of such work, especially in chapter 7 in the narrative by Will Collette. The women of chapter 2 tell of more subtle changes, the at-first-invisible changes in attitudes, the slow recognition of shared problems, and yet also the erection ann฀williaMs 31 of ladders of assistance, one to another, older to younger, white to black, educated to uneducated, extrovert to introvert. The women’s successes and their failures show, too, the lapse of time, a short time, actually, in which especially toxic waste dumping and incineration came to the state.The women are willing and even eager to tell of this as a period when the state had simply not learned to care for its resources, when the state had not yet learned to value people enough to take the time to study potential problems. The chapter also takes us from times when New Orleans was the second largest port of debarkation for Europeans and through some of World War I, the Depression, and World War II. As in other sections, we hear idyllic memories of Louisiana as a place where shrimp could be eaten from the Mississippi River, where whole families lived on the bounty of their gardens , and where fish caught from a local river in the early morning could be cooked for breakfast. Oil was always known to be a part of the earth and water here, but it was not until the early 1900s that barrels of this black gold flowed. It would not be until the 1980s that jobs created by petroleum or related industries surpassed those linked to cotton,cane,rice,and soybeans.4 ann WiLLiams Ann Williams, of Buras, Louisiana, recalls such transitions. One of the earliest Louisiana women to take up the crusade to protect the environment, she became active in 1973 after her retirement from teaching.As the founder and president of Protecting the Environment and Ecological Resources (PEER), she worked tirelessly for the protection of the Mississippi River, and she successfully led the fight to stop a proposed oilfield waste treatment plant from locating in Myrtle Cove, Louisiana. On January 5, 1989, she received the Governor’s Award for Outstanding Service and Dedication. The Plaquemines Parish of her childhood and even her adulthood may seem familiar to other Americans. It was a place where farming was an integral part of life even for those who made their income in other ways. Yet Plaquemines Parish is also a very distinctive place, unlike almost any even in Louisiana. Its very name, so thick upon the tongue, derives from the Indian word for persimmon. The largest parish (county) in the...

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