The Sunshine Bridge over the Mississippi River in St. James Parish, Louisiana. The Sunshine Project, based nearby, is named after the cantilever bridge.
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.”
“They have decided it’s okay to poison us just because we are Black and poor, as if our lives are worth less than those of white folks.”
Named the Sunshine Project, the $9.4 billion operation is set to comprise sixteen separate facilities that would produce ingredients for products we use every day like plastic bottles, grocery bags, and antifreeze. Slated to cover 2,400 acres, the sprawling complex would be the largest in the parish, which already hosts more than thirty industrial plants and several oil and gas terminals and pipelines. It would also put a further burden on the health of Lavigne’s community.
St. James Parish, a patchwork of farmed fields and small communities encompassing a little more than 21,000 people, sits in the middle of an eighty-five-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where more than 150 petrochemical plants dot the banks of the lower Mississippi River. The area has been known, since the 1980s, as Cancer Alley.
The designation stems from the prevalence of cancer among the area’s residents, which many in the state have been arguing for years has been caused by the toxic chemicals released by the region’s plants—a link that the state Department of Health and other official bodies have yet to prove exists.
Seven of the ten U.S. census tracts with the highest cancer risk in the nation reside here. None of those tracts are in Lavigne’s parish—six are in neighboring St. John the Baptist Parish, and one is in St. Charles Parish. But Formosa’s proposed megacomplex would singlehandedly double the amount of cancer-causing chemicals currently being released into St. James’s air.
The Sunshine Project is among a raft of petrochemical developments that are pushing into the 5th District after the Parish Council quietly rezoned much of the area from “residential” to “residential/future industrial” in 2014.
Lavigne, who was born in St. James during the Jim Crow era, views the siting choice as “a sheer example” of the pervasive racial and environmental inequality that has marred her community—and dozens like it across the United States, where Black, Indigenous, and low-income communities have been, for decades, more likely than white ones to live near polluters.
While the population of St. James is racially pretty evenly split — 49 percent Black, 49 percent white — the parish’s toxic facilities are largely concentrated in the 5th District, where Black people make up more than 90 percent of the population and about one-third of residents live below the poverty line.
“They know the petrochemical industry and people cannot live and operate side by side,” Lavigne says. “So they have decided it’s okay to poison us just because we are Black and poor, as if our lives are worth less than those of white folks.” She notes that the local government has in recent years barred two companies from building plants in the parish’s majority white 3rd District.
“It’s a decision based on race,” says Lavigne. “That’s what it comes down to.”
Lavigne lives on twenty acres of land that have been in her family for generations. Growing up, she recalls, her father raised hogs, chickens, and even a bull in the yard. There were fig and pecan trees, and her grandfather caught fish and shrimp in the Mississippi River that was flowing nearby. The excess was sold at the famous French Market in New Orleans.
Sharon Lavigne on the planned Formosa site.
The first facility opened down the road when she was in the eighth grade. It was the mid-1960s, and the community was hopeful that the plant would bring higher wages and steadier employment.
“My daddy, my mom, everybody was happy back then,” Lavigne explains. “People in school began saying they wanted to work in the plant one day.”
But as years passed and more facilities sprouted up throughout the parish, often built on plantations that were once worked by the enslaved people who were the ancestors of many of the area’s current residents, cancer and respiratory illnesses started to set in.
Lavigne, like many of her neighbors, at first didn’t think about air pollution. “I knew people were getting sick. But I didn’t think it was because of the plants,” she says. “I just thought it was because, you know, that’s the way life is as you get older.”
Five years ago, after Lavigne was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis, she began reading up on the chemicals emitted from nearby facilities, including such known carcinogens as ethylene oxide and benzene.
“That’s when it all flipped,” recounts Lavigne. “It’s a shame it took me that long to realize it was the stuff we were all breathing that was killing us.”
In early 2018, after learning that Formosa was coming to her area, Lavigne began attending Parish Council meetings and permit hearings, asking her neighbors what they could do to stop the project. She was dismayed to learn that, while Formosa had yet to receive formal approval, the consensus of the group was that the plant was already a done deal. The best the community could hope for, they maintained, was a buyout.
“That didn’t sit well with me,” Lavigne says. A deeply committed Catholic from a young age, Lavigne prayed on what to do. One afternoon, while reading the Bible on her porch, she got the answer she sought: Stand up and fight. And so she did.
In October 2018, Lavigne rounded up nearly a dozen people in her living room and together they marched to a local park to protest the plant. That was the day RISE St. James was born.
The group has since grown to a few dozen members, mostly Black women, and around a hundred people have become involved in the effort. They have staged protests and held marches, drawing support from state and national environmental groups, which have helped with everything from providing legal expertise to taking Lavigne to Capitol Hill, where she testified before a Congressional subcommittee in 2019.
The group’s goal is straightforward: no more petrochemical plants in the parish.
This is not the first time that residents in this part of the Deep South have engaged in a long-shot struggle to keep the petrochemical industry out of their community.
In 1998, a grassroots campaign led by Lavigne’s cousin, Emelda West, managed to block a polyvinyl chloride plant from being located in the parish. Two years ago, a handful of local groups—including RISE—convinced the Chinese plastic producer Wanhua to pull its application for a proposed industrial project to be built in the parish’s 4th District.
Lavigne sees those successes as a sign that stopping new industry is possible. She’s confident that Formosa will also be defeated, though she concedes that it’s a harder battle. But, she argues, “This time we’re not fighting one single plant, we’re fighting to free ourselves from the oppression of the industry once and for all. We can’t afford to lose.”
The opposition has already delivered Formosa some blows. In November 2020, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers temporarily suspended Formosa’s construction permit and committed to re-evaluating its permit decision in response to a lawsuit by RISE and other activist groups that alleged the agency had failed to look at alternative sites in the nearby predominantly white Ascension Parish.
Then, a month later, in response to a second lawsuit last year challenging the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s decision to approve Formosa’s air quality permits, a state district judge ordered the department to take public comment and redo its environmental justice analysis.
Janile Parks, spokesperson for the project’s operating company FG LA LLC, said in an emailed statement to The Progressive that the permits issued to the project “are sound” and that “any claim that FG will greatly increase toxic emissions in the area is a misrepresentation and inaccurate.” Parks also said FG specifically selected the site “due to its remoteness from all residents.” She said the permits remain in effect and that FG plans to construct the facility as set out in the land-use approval.
But with the plant not expected to become operational until 2024, Lavigne and the rest of the activists in St. James are not letting up. “This is our land—our home—and we will stand up together to defend it as long as need be,” says Lavigne. “St. James is rising.”