Saving St. James

Marcello Rossi
MARCELLOROSSI.NET
Published in
1 min readMay 4, 2021

--

The Progressive, May 2021

In the sixty-nine years that Sharon Lavigne has lived on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Louisiana’s St. James Parish, she has seen more than three dozen petrochemical plants turn her community from a rural place with sugar- cane plantations from the state’s history of slavery, tin-roofed shacks, and unspoiled wetlands into an industrial hodgepodge of billowing stacks, bulky tank farms, and noisy railroad tracks.

That’s why, a few years ago, when she heard that the Taiwanese manufacturer Formosa planned to build yet another hulking petrochemical plant in the parish’s 5th District, a mile and half upriver from her house, she decided to retire early from her job as an educator and start RISE St. James, a grassroots organization to push back against industry expansion in the area.

“These plants have popped up around here for decades and it’s always the same story,” Lavigne says. “They come to the parish, promise us jobs and economic growth. Instead they pollute and make us sick, like we’re not human beings. And that is why I am fighting back.”

[Continue reading on The Progressive]

--

--

Freelance writer. My works appeared in National Geographic, The Economist, The Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeera, Nature, Smithsonian, Reuters, among many others.