An Incomplete Solution: Oil and Water in Louisiana

Abstract

June 2012 The Journal of American History 91 A series of major calamities in recent years has placed the national spotlight on the lower Mississippi River industrial complex—a sinuous arrangement of petrochemical plants and working-class communities set amid the sugarcane fields on the alluvial floodplain. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged offshore oil rigs and onshore refineries in 2005, caused oil releases, and increased gasoline prices, thereby exposing the region’s significant position in the energy economy. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon event showcased the environmental costs of extractive activities; and the near-record Mississippi River flood of 2011 disrupted waterborne commerce and raised the specter of levee failures. As those events displayed, this nationally prominent ensemble of industries occupies a location susceptible to a host of environmental forces and a place where industrial activities have produced dramatic consequences. Testing the environment’s capacity to absorb human impacts has been going on for decades and has left enduring traces on the Louisiana landscape. Erection of petroleum refineries in this region began in the first decade of the twentieth century, during a time of almost nonexistent environmental regulation. Yet, even in the early decades of petrochemical growth, the state, its citizens, and industry acknowledged both human safety risks and environmental threats posed by the arrival of this new enterprise. Industry took the position that self-regulation would minimize personal, property, and environmental harm. Government bodies largely consented to this approach until calamities revealed the accumulating human and environmental costs that had turned the lower Mississippi River corridor into an environmental “sacrifice zone.” That term derives from the study of traditional agricultural practices where cultivators deliberately degraded one area to increase productivity in another area, but scholars have begun using the term in explicitly accusatory ways to refer to areas degraded by modern industrial societies in the pursuit of economic and military gain. Environmental degradation in the lower Mississippi River industrial complex was not the result of a coordinated assault; rather it reflected negligent behavior by industries and government authorities. And significantly, those behaviors defied what contemporary trade literature presented as good industry practice. Sacrifice zone here refers to the result of disconnected actions that over time had An Incomplete Solution: Oil and Water in Louisiana