| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Diamond: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor. By Steve Lerner. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005. xiii + 303 pp. Photographs, notes, index. Cloth $27.95.
The growth of the environmental justice movement in the United States, aimed at ending the disproportionate impact of industrial pollution on poor and minority communities, represents a vitally important chapter in our nation's environmental history. Since the early 1980s, poor people, African-Americans, and other minorities, especially in southern Black Belt states, have been increasingly effective at organizing grassroots social movements to challenge the siting and operation of hazardous facilities in their neighborhoods. Cutting across existing socioeconomic and cultural divisions, as well as bridging the struggle for civil rights, social equity, and ecological protection, the environmental justice movement has evolved into a formidable challenger to the power of the petrochemical industry to contaminate the environmental health of local residents.	1
In Diamond: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor, Steve Lerner tells the inspirational struggle of how a small, poor, African-American community named Diamond, located in Norco, Louisiana, twenty-five miles west of New Orleans on the Mississippi River, successfully battled the Shell Chemical Company to relocate its inhabitants away from the "toxic bouquet" of air pollution that they claimed was making them sick. Like many other river communities in Louisiana's notorious Chemical Corridor (home to over 130 petrochemical facilities, incinerators, and landfills located between Baton Rouge and New Orleans), Diamond residents routinely complained of headaches, allergies, asthma, respiratory problems, skin disorders, cancers, and other illnesses that they attributed to being a "fenceline" neighborhood sandwiched between a giant chemical plant and oil refinery. Additionally, in 1973 and 1988, chemical explosions had killed nine workers and forced residents to evacuate from their homes.	. . .

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