Environmental injustice has an unequal impact on marginalized groups, which contributes to high differences in physical and mental health. The defined communities, especially those of color, experience a mix of environmental degradation and systematic inequality, which leads to long-term psychological trauma. This paper looks into the psychological impacts of environmental hazards on disadvantaged communities, such as stress, trauma, and anxiety. Based on case examples, like the Flint Water Crisis, Cancer Alley, and the experience of Indigenous people, this study reviews how environmental injustice permeates physical health challenges to affect mental health on a deeper level. The research combines the literature with qualitative and quantitative surveys, interviews, and environmental evaluations that fail to state the psychological cost of environmental injustice, which is seldom mentioned. To sum up, the paper suggests implementing trauma-informed community planning and policy changes that consider physical and mental health issues of vulnerable populations in terms of both aspects. The results add significance to the necessity of cross-systemic activities that facilitate the promotion of mental health support, resilience, and environmental justice.

Impact of Industrial Emissions on Respiratory Health in Louisiana’s "Cancer Alley

IntroductionLouisiana faces significant environmental health challenges due to elevated air toxicity near industrial sites. The state hosts over 300 manufacturing facilities, more than 150 petrochemical plants, and 15 refineries, which, although economically beneficial, pose significant health risks to surrounding communities. Exposure to industrial emissions has been linked to respiratory conditions such as asthma, reproductive disorders, kidney damage, and various cancers. An 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River, commonly referred to as “Cancer Alley,” has long been associated with elevated cancer rates, particularly among communities with high social vulnerability.MethodsThis study examines the relationship between social vulnerability, cancer incidence, and cancer risk using publicly available datasets, including air toxics data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and cancer incidence rates from the Louisiana Tumor Registry (LTR). Linear regression, interaction analyses, and geographically weighted regression were applied to assess how environmental and socioeconomic factors jointly influence cancer risk.ResultsResults reveal that cancer incidence was associated with elevated air toxins and compounded by social factors such as minority status, low income, and single-parent households. Notably, some regions exhibited a counterintuitive negative association between air toxins and cancer incidence, which may be due to data limitations, including the use of older air quality data, latency in cancer development, or underreporting.DiscussionThese findings underscore the importance of strengthening environmental regulations, real-time air quality monitoring, and community-based public health initiatives to reduce cancer disparities and support affected communities in Louisiana.

In this reflective article, our research team discusses the lessons, tools, and experiences we gained while conducting culturally responsive qualitative research (CRQR) in the Deep US South. According to researchers, CRQR is a research methodology that includes qualitative designs and centers culture. With CRQR in mind, our team takes a look at four different research projects and a graduate class service-learning trip to explore the impacts of qualitative health research on both the participants and the researchers. Moreover, our intercultural team, which is composed of intergenerational researchers, discusses how to conduct research with participants living in the culturally rich, politically diverse, historically complex region of Gulf South. From the rural communities in North Louisiana to the capital city of Baton Rouge to Cancer Alley near our beloved New Orleans, we identified several tools and lessons we gathered at each pedagogical site. We share those lessons as storied data for other emerging researchers in the field.

As southern Louisiana is experiencing one of the highest rates of sea level rise in the world, it is not uncommon for residents to hear that it is “too late” to save their homes from the impacts of climate change. Particularly, in the wake of disaster events such as hurricanes and oil spills, heavily damaged areas are often left behind in the recovery process as few developers are willing to take the capital risk to rebuild a sinking neighborhood. Still, some of these residents refuse to be moved and their resilient spirit is widely celebrated. Cultural resilience alone, however, is not enough to resist the onslaught of climate disasters nor counter systemic disinvestment in their communities. Through combining historical and ethnographic insights from the Black residents in Cancer Alley, the Vietnamese refugee community in New Orleans East, and the Indigenous tribal members of the Grand Bayou Village, this article argues that marginalized landscapes and livelihoods have been structurally made to become untenable within the economic bounds of disaster recovery. Under these circumstances, Louisiana’s coastal communities continue to assert survivance within precarious environments, offering alternative narratives to blind optimism or defeatism for living in an age of climate crisis.

Abstract This article examines the historical formation of environmental sacrifice zones, using Louisiana's Cancer Alley as a case study by focusing on the relationship between cotton and the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries. Corporate communications before World War II often portrayed cotton as integrated into the growing chemicals industry, positioning petrochemicals as a successor to the plantation economy. By analyzing visual culture within corporate communication, the article investigates how corporate visual representations normalize industrial development despite its creation of toxic landscapes.

ABSTRACT Oil is deeply entangled with art. Through their art, contemporary artists play key roles in community organizing and social justice activism in response to the environmental effects of oil. Systematically considering artworks engaged with science and technology has the potential to add new dimensions to STS studies, including on studies of oil. Ethnographic and aesthetic work concerning the sociotechnical systems around petroleum and petrochemicals is becoming increasingly prominent. In this paper, I adopt tools from the emerging interdiscipline of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS), which takes the art-science phenomenon as its principal subject, for a close reading of artwork exploring the influence of the petrochemical industry on the region known as ‘Cancer Alley’ in Louisiana. Such science and technology-engaged artworks have the potential to reveal the cultural, social and political meanings of subjects like oil and are useful to ASTS scholars not only as examples for analysis but as potential tools of analysis.

Concentrations of the cancer-causing chemical far surpass EPA threshold levels for safety in southeastern Louisiana.

The detrimental impact of toxic chemicals, gas, and oil spills in aquatic environments poses a severe threat to plants, animals, and human life. Regions such as Cancer Alley exemplify the profound consequences of inadequately controlled chemical spills, significantly affecting the local community. Given the far-reaching effects of these spills, it has become imperative to devise an efficient method for early monitoring, estimation, and cleanup, utilizing affordable and effective techniques. In this research, we explore the application of U-shaped neural Network (UNET) and U-shaped neural network transformer (UNETR) neural network models designed for the image segmentation of chemical and oil spills. Our models undergo training using the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) dataset and the Oil Spill Detection dataset, employing a specialized filtering technique to enhance detection accuracy. We achieved training accuracies of 95.35% and 91% by applying UNET on the Oil Spill and the CSIRO datasets after 50 epochs of training, respectively. We also achieved a training accuracy of 75% by applying UNETR to the Oil Spill dataset. Additionally, we integrated mixed precision to expedite the model training process, thus maximizing data throughput. To further accelerate our implementation, we propose the utilization of the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) architecture. The results obtained from our study demonstrate improvements in inference latency on FPGA.

This paper takes, as provocation, Robert Nixon’s proposition that the effects of ecological instances of “slow violence”—that is, brutalities that manifest incrementally across time and space—elude visible registers, and, as a corollary, are rendered image-weak in the context of today’s saturated mediascape. Specifically, through drawing on burgeoning scholarship focusing on the representation of slow violence and its resistance, in conjunction with nascent theory on “mediated forensics” and “militant evidence,” this article positions the devastating manifestations of slow violence in relation to other forms of neocolonial brutality which, it is argued, are likewise systematically structured to impact marginalized communities whose perspectives are persistently underrepresented in the mainstream. Proceeding from this conviction, the representational challenges issued by Nixon over a decade ago are taken up afresh: Eyal Weizman’s calls to explore the rhetorical potentials of the forensic are addressed through an examination of how the emergence of new digital technologies of image production and distribution are reshaping the ways in which ecological activism is practiced in contexts of crises that adhere, at least on first sight, to Nixon’s definition of slow violence. Analysis is foregrounded in the case study of “Death Alley” (once known as “Cancer Alley”), an eighty-five-mile stretch of land which, snaking alongside the Mississippi River in Louisiana, is currently populated by the densest constellation of chemical facilities in the Western Hemisphere, leading it to become the subject of Forensic Architecture’s 2021 investigation Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana.

Palliative Care in Cancer Alley: A Discussion on Environmental Racism

This Paper argues that to protect at-risk communities - and all Americans - from the deadly effects of environmental racism, Congress must pass the Environmental Justice for All Act. The Act is intended to "restore, reaffirm, and reconcile environmental justice and civil rights." It does so by restoring an individual's right to sue in federal court for discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or national origin regardless of intent under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, strengthening the National Environmental Policy Act, and providing economic incentives focused on environmental justice.

The Louisiana Purchase created a complex landscape of cultures and ethnicities located at the peripheries of the Early Republic. Some feared that it would threaten (White) American identity while others imagined the frontier as a clean slate on which the nation could reform its core values. Throughout the nineteenth century, axiomatic regeneration through (violent) experiences dominated peripheral-yet-central discourses of the American space. Shedding new light on the role of representation in the placemaking of the West, this article interweaves a reading of James Hall’s “The Pioneer” with experiences recovered from travelogues and diaries, as well as their embodiments in material culture. I argue that violence was not only a hallmark of settler colonialism but also a crucial narrative device that bridged the gaps between reality and fiction as well as center and margin. These dynamics, the article suggests, regularly culminated in representational excesses of conspicuous and consumable spectacles of violence.

Discriminatory outcomes of industrial air permitting in Louisiana, United States

Louisiana (LA) ranks fifth in the United States in cancer mortality rate. LA's infamous “cancer alley” is a well evidenced region near the southeast part of the Mississippi river surrounding the petrochemical hub of the state. LA has also experienced a high COVID‐19 death rate and incidences compared to other states during the recent pandemic. In this study we analyzed publicly available datasets related to health and socio‐economic parameters in LA to determine the factors triggering high incidences and deaths caused by COVID‐19. Correlation analysis was performed to find the impact of different parameters on the outcome of COVID‐19. Our analysis showed higher COVID‐19 incidences in the parishes which are in and around the “cancer alley” with a correlation of r = 0.9. Interestingly, results also indicated a strong correlation (r = 0.9) between the death rates caused by asbestos toxicity to COVID‐19 caused death rate. Furthermore, we found that office‐administration related employment has a positive correlation to COVID‐19 incidences in the “cancer alley.” However, we also found both white and black races are equally affected by the COVID‐19 pandemic in the “cancer alley” region. In conclusion, our analysis strongly suggests that inhabiting “cancer alley” could significantly enhance the chances of getting affected by SARS‐CoV‐2 virus compared to other regions in LA.

The first thing you notice about this impressive and important book is the title. The word Katrina stands alone. There's no Hurricane in sight. This omission is intentional. Horowitz's concern here is to reframe one of the worst calamities in US history as a product of human histories, rather than as an exceptional meteorological event. Hence the timeline: 1915–2015. The book contains just one chapter, albeit vividly rendered, on the horrors of August and September 2005. What matters is what came before and after. In a bravura act of historical investigation and synthesis, Horowitz skillfully weaves together the political ideologies, cultural values, and economic logics over the previous century that made the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans not only possible but inevitable. He then details the political decisions that may have produced more harm in the aftermath than the barreling winds and surging waters.Horowitz decenters the “disaster” and recasts the story of Katrina as an outcome of human actions over the twentieth century, especially the reckless drilling of oil and gas wells, the building of transportation canals, the overdevelopment of wetlands, and the construction of houses and businesses on low-lying land with scant regard for environmental limits. This is, in part, a story of corporate influence and shady political powerbrokers, a rogues’ gallery of odious oil men and white supremacists, motivated by desire for money and power, aware no doubt that the costs of development were to be borne by the powerless or by future generations. But it is also a messy and ethically complicated tale that acknowledges the inadvertent, though not unpredictable, role of well-intentioned New Deal initiatives (at federal, state, and municipal levels) in sealing the fate of New Orleans. Generous mortgage assistance, flood insurance, and promises of the good life encouraged the expansion of the city into land that was below sea level, protected by a levee system that proved too expensive to complete or maintain.With one eye on the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming, rising seawaters, and the intensification of megastorms, Horowitz contests the popular view of Katrina as a natural disaster, arguing instead that “hurricanes are events in the history of industrial revolution” (13). In a particularly generative turn, Horowitz analyzes Katrina as a case study of “the resource curse,” showing how the extraction and processing of mineral resources has brought massive wealth to industrialists and investors while wrecking fragile ecosystems and damaging the health of those who live nearby (creating that notorious polluted zone along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley” that has disproportionately devastated Black and poor communities) (182). Thus does a book about a hurricane become a book about climate change, extractive hypercapitalism, the hubris of technological development, white supremacy, and social struggles in an age of precarity. “New Orleans’ story,” as Horowitz shows, “is America's story and . . . Katrina is America's possible future” (5).It is this big picture frame that constitutes the book's most significant contribution to the historiography. It is not that Horowitz is original in arguing that “natural disasters” are best understood as effects of capitalist development; this idea has guided many disaster historians over the past two decades, Ted Steinberg's Acts of God (2000) being a particularly influential example. In fields such as feminist ecology, scholars like Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing have insistently substituted the term Capitalocene for Anthropocene to drive home the point that the activities producing the compounding catastrophes of our time have been incentivized by systemic capitalist logics. What Horowitz brings to the table is a beautifully designed case study that adds nuance and texture to a complex story. This leads to some significant findings.Katrina has been interpreted through the lens of race from the beginning, and it is no surprise to find Horowitz confirming that public policies in the aftermath of the storm “reinforced existing inequalities” in New Orleans (5). What is surprising is to discover that the date of a building was more predictive of its susceptibility to flooding than the race of the occupant. As Horowitz notes, suburban development during the twentieth century deposited white middle-class Americans into the only spaces available for expansion, land below sea level. Poorer African Americans were sealed by segregation and redlining into public housing projects that happened, ironically, to be on higher ground in the historical core of the city. Even the devastated Lower Ninth Ward, the symbol of Black suffering and racist neglect portrayed so vividly in Spike Lee's heartbreaking 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke, was new land that had been opened up for the settlement of more-affluent African Americans. This is just one of many aha moments in the book where Horowitz underscores the role of white supremacy in producing vulnerability to disaster, while emphasizing the environmental illogic of governing regimes of capitalist development that pose a threat to everyone.One reason that New Orleans after 2005 was not completely remade according to the neoliberal designs of disaster capitalists was the resistance of working people, who protested in the streets and wielded some influence at the ballot box. To be sure, this book is not a labor history in the classic sense. Unions and workplaces feature only at the margins. But it is most certainly a story about working people, mostly Black, struggling for autonomy and dignity in a system stacked against them. As Horowitz notes African Americans in New Orleans have always understood hurricanes as political events shaped as much by white supremacy and capitalism as by the weather. And Black culture has been a repository of resistance to dominant ideologies, celebrating artistic creativity, play, community, and collective engagement that presents an alternative to business as usual. Horowitz draws on this counter-culture and this counter-narrative to infuse a jeremiad quality into his crisply written, admirably compact, richly rendered study—delivering vital lessons for those seeking viable and just responses to our age of disasters.

Despite longstanding concerns about environmental injustice in Louisiana’s industrialized communities, including the area known as Cancer Alley, there is a lack of environmental health research in this state. This research gap has direct consequences for residents of industrialized neighborhoods because state regulators have cited a lack of evidence for adverse health outcomes when making industrial permitting decisions. We investigated how cancer incidence relates to cancer risk from toxic air pollution, race, poverty, and occupation across Louisiana census tracts, while controlling for parish-level smoking and obesity rates, using linear regression and Akaike information criterion model selection. We used the most recent cancer data from the Louisiana Tumor Registry (2008–2017), estimates of race, poverty, and occupation from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2011–2015), and estimated cancer risk due to point sources from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s 2005 National Air Toxics Assessment (accounting for cancer latency). Because race and poverty were strongly correlated (r = 0.69, P < 0.0001), we included them in separate, analogous models. Results indicated that higher estimated cancer risk from air toxics was associated with higher cancer incidence through an interaction with poverty or race. Further analysis revealed that the tracts with the highest (i.e. top quartile) proportions of impoverished residents (or Black residents) were driving the association between toxic air pollution and cancer incidence. These findings may be explained by well-established disparities that result in greater exposure/susceptibility to air toxics in Black or impoverished neighborhoods. Regardless, our analysis provides evidence of a statewide link between cancer rates and carcinogenic air pollution in marginalized communities and suggests that toxic air pollution is a contributing factor to Louisiana’s cancer burden. These findings are consistent with the firsthand knowledge of Louisiana residents from predominantly Black, impoverished, and industrialized neighborhoods who have long maintained that their communities are overburdened with cancer.

Being Black Causes Cancer: Cancer Alley and Environmental Racism

The objective of this study was to compare the cases of COVID-19 deaths and cases in the United States and Europe. The area selected in the United States was parishes (counties) in Louisiana along the Mississippi River which is globally known as "Cancer Alley." These parishes have been investigated in the past due to high levels of air pollution. The relationship of air pollution and COVID-19 was evaluated. Data from the Louisiana Department of Health was abstracted for the 11 parishes and infection, mortality, and case-fatality rates were calculated and compared to the remainder of the state. The racial distribution of deaths, and mortality and case-fatality rates were determined in the 11 Cancer Alley parishes. Additionally, risk ratios of infection and mortality were determined. Results indicated that infection, mortality, and case-fatality rates were higher in the 11 Cancer Alley parishes where chronic exposure to air pollution has occurred. The COVID-19 cases and deaths were higher in the 11 Cancer Alley parishes when compared to the remainder of the state. When stratified by race, infection, mortality, and case-fatality rates were higher among Blacks in the 11 Cancer Alley parishes. The risk of infection and mortality was higher in the 11 Cancer Alley parishes, as well as among Blacks in these parishes. Our research adds to others that document the effects of air pollution on COVID-19, as well as the historical patterns of health disparities and environmental injustices in Cancer Alley. We offer a set of progressive policy recommendations as a pathway to actions for sustainable change, which can inform risk mitigating strategies worldwide.

Background: Residents of census tract 708 in St. John Parish, Louisiana, face the highest nationwide cancer risk from air pollution due to chloroprene emissions from the Denka Performance Elastomer facility. The University Network for Human Rights worked with residents of this predominantly Black community in Cancer Alley to design and implement a survey-based health study of the area. The study aimed to (1) assess the relationship between household proximity to the facility and reported illness, and (2) advance the advocacy objectives of the community. Methods: The survey area consisted of households within a 2.5-km radius of the Denka facility. Sixty percent of the households within 1.5 km of the facility (“Zone 1”) and 20% of the households between 1.5 and 2.5 km from the facility (“Zone 2”) were randomly sampled. Survey implementers collected information on cancer diagnoses about all residents of each surveyed household. Information on chloroprene-linked medical symptoms was collected about respondents (those who took the survey) only. Results: Cancer prevalence among the survey sample is (1) significantly higher than what is considered likely using Monte Carlo simulations based on Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results prevalence data (p = 0.0306); and (2) associated with proximity to the facility, with significantly higher-than-likely prevalence in Zone 1 (p = 0.0032) and lower prevalence in Zone 2. Levels of medical symptoms among respondents are high and also associated with proximity to the facility. Discussion: Our findings highlight the need for action to compel Denka to reduce chloroprene emissions to Environmental Protection Agency-recommended limits. Conclusion: Our findings are consistent with Cancer Alley communities' lived experiences of the debilitating health consequences of the area's industrial emissions. The burden of proof must shift to polluting industries.