Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement

Chapter One. “HOW COULD I STAND BY?”: PROTECTING ONE PLACE, PROTECTING MANY

3 chapter฀one “HoW CouLd i sTand By?” Protecting One Place, Protecting Many In 1997, Marine Shale agreed to pay more than $10 million to settle federal and state allegations that it incinerated hazardous waste without a permit and planned to sell the contaminated ash as fill material to the public. Sally Herman, Fernell Cryar, Catherine Holcomb, Barbara LeLeux, and Monica Mancuso were the 1995 recipients of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) award for their role in ensuring the safety of their community in the closing of Marine Shale’s waste operations in Morgan City. We begin with a group of seven women, united in one place, Morgan City in Saint Mary Parish, Louisiana. Their stories may seem familiar: like so many others, these women made a leap from the household and schoolroom to public arenas, passing petitions, writing press releases, and testifying at permit hearings. Their work united caretaking for children with caretaking for the environment. We start with them since they tell not only of horrors but also of appreciation, a garnering of strength that rested primarily on education and values located in their families, churches, and, indeed, Louisiana itself . Their stories are those of great sorrows redeemed through action. Their stories are an awakening to the tragedies within their own families and beyond , to others of excluded groups, to even finding themselves among these excluded groups,and,of course,too,to deadly serious issues in the industrial pollution of their hometown. Morgan City is not a large place. With only some twelve thousand residents , their parish (“county” elsewhere) is also small, with only some fiftyfour thousand people. The city sits on the banks of the Atchafalaya River, and its people’s livelihoods have always been tied to this river, as well as to the land itself, the trees, and the nearby Gulf of Mexico. In some ways, it is a typical Louisiana community, known for its annual blessing of the fleet that comes within the festive Shrimp and Petroleum Festival. The combination of these two products in an annual celebration, complete with a ritualistic ceremony of thanksgiving and prayer for safety, 4 Protecting฀one฀Place,฀Protecting฀Many calls forth the richness of natural resources. Salt, water, oil, and natural gas are celebrated in good food, booths of handicrafts, decorated boats, music, and dancing. The women in this chapter, as elsewhere in the book, value this honoring and its foundation upon jobs based on seafood and oil. Many in the community shape their lives around such products. Residents are generally proud of the state’s natural resources and grateful for industrial growth. A government website lists seventeen industries for the state, and first on this list is the fact that “Louisiana has the greatest concentration of crude oil refineries, natural gas processing plants and petrochemical production facilities in the Western Hemisphere.” Second, Louisiana is“America’s third largest producer of petroleum and the third leading state in petroleum refining . . . [pioneering] offshore oil and gas exploration and drilling.” Third, the state also holds the distinction of hosting “the first [oil] well ever drilled out of sight of land.” These are the categories the residents associate with prosperity. Tenth out of seventeen industries contributing to this feeling of plenty is shrimping.1 Enriched earlier with the timber business,Morgan City has at times,then,been among the centerpieces of the state’s industrial growth. In other ways, Morgan City has been somewhat different, somewhat unique. Even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its Morgan City women: Front row, from left, Helen Solar, Barbara LeLeux, Monica Laughlin Mancuso, and Miriam Price; and, second row, from left, Fernell Cryar, Sally Herman, and Catherine Holcomb sally฀HerMan 5 population was more in flux than most other communities in the state. English-speaking migrants from the Carolinas were the first fishermen here; later came the Acadians, Creoles, and others who followed the dredging of the Atchafalaya to allow for ocean-going vessels. Still later, in the 1930s through the 1970s, came those from within Louisiana and from across the United States who participated in the drilling of the first successful offshore oil well. In the early 1980s a downturn in this work occurred. Then the city looked to another employer,Marine Shale Processors,which had established an incinerator to process non-hazardous oilfield wastes coming from other places. Waste—the very word, unknown at first except domestically to these women...