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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.
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| 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. |
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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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Yet the perception of Norco as a contaminated and dangerous place to live was virtually divided along lines of race and class. For the largely white and middle-class residents of Norco, many of whom were employed by Shell but had homes located farther away from the plants, the company town was considered a great place to live and work. Frustrated by the chronic pollution from the nearby Shell facilities, as well as from being ignored by federal and state regulatory bodies, a small group of residents calling themselves the Concerned Citizens of Norco began to organize in 1990 around demands for Shell to relocate the Diamond residents and improve the health, safety, and job opportunities of those who stayed in the community. Under the dynamic and tireless leadership of a local schoolteacher named Margie Richard, the group initiated a series of highly visible actions throughout the decade, including lawsuits, demonstrations, air-testing, and "toxic tours," that linked their relocation campaign to other environmental justice struggles in the state, nation, and world. |
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Convinced that the fight for relocation had to "go beyond Norco," Richard began traveling abroad to conferences, spreading the word about Diamond's environmental justice struggle and linking it to wider human rights violations around the globe. Eventually, in 2001, her campaign took her to the international headquarters of Royal/Dutch Shell in the Netherlands, where she demanded that Shell's top corporate officials end the suffering of Diamond residents and act on their demands for relocation. Impressed with her courage and convictions, as well as under pressure to end this public relations nightmare, Shell agreed to engage in face-to-face negotiations with the Concerned Citizens of Diamond to purchase their homes and relocate all of those in the community who wished to move. |
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The Diamond campaign and its struggle for relocation represents, Lerner argues, a watershed event in the environmental justice movement. The agreement between Shell officials and residents not only broke new ground in showing how international pressure could help bring one of the world's largest corporations to the bargaining table, but in how it compensated homeowners for properties that already had been devalued by their proximity to two petrochemical facilities. Yet another victory for the Diamond community was achieved when Margie Richard was awarded the 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize (widely considered the "Nobel Prize" for environmental activism) for her thirteen years of grassroots organizing. Lerner concluded that Margie Richard, the first African-American woman to receive the award, "may well be the Rosa Parks of the environmental justice movement" (p. 286). |
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Along with recent studies like J. Timmons Roberts and Melissa Toffolon-Weiss' Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline (Cambridge, 2001), and Barbara Allen's Uneasy Alchemy (MIT, 2003), Lerner's book represents an important contribution to the growing literature on environmental justice conflicts in Louisiana's "Cancer Alley." Expertly written, thoroughly researched, and told from the perspective of key stakeholders themselves, Diamond puts a human face on not just one community's thirty-year struggle with the chemical pollution in its backyard, but the larger environmental justice movement itself. For these reasons and more, it should be considered essential reading for environmental historians and activists alike. |
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Anthony E. Ladd is an associate professor of sociology at Loyola University New Orleans. His teaching and research interests lie in the areas of environmental sociology and controversies, global environmental problems, and social movements. He is currently conducting research on the socioenvironmental impacts and conflicts surrounding salmon aquaculture in the Pacific Northwest, as well as the New Orleans student diaspora surrounding Hurricane Katrina. |
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