Abstract
Never underestimate the change that can be wrought by a few dedicated, thoughtful citizens because that is how the world has always changed. Or so the adage goes. Chronicling through oral histories of women on the frontlines of the grassroots environmental movement in Louisiana, Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement tells the story of how a few dedicated women have fought to change the way business is done in Louisiana in order to protect our communities from harms both social and environmental.
This book recounts the voices of women environmental activists, who worked from 1976 to 1996, to improve health conditions and fight environmental injustices—or the unequal exposure to environmental harms—across the state of Louisiana. In doing so, it highlights the gendered dimension of women as caretakers of their families and communities in advocating for healthier environments and communities. Battling petrochemical companies, municipal authorities, and state politicians, they built from the ground up a movement to defend communities across the state from the negative health and social impacts due to business interests, such as shipping toxic waste across the state and siting both petrochemical plants and its waste in predominantly poor, African American communities in which it was assumed there would be little pushback. Furthermore, citing lack of education, many of these residents were not employed at the plants that their neighborhoods hosted. Through their voices, one hears the ways they navigated the oil boom of the day and adjusted to the challenges of the then recent civil rights movement.
Peggy Frankland has fought for environmental justice in Louisiana for over three decades. In addition to fighting for her local communities, she served as the president of the Calcasieu League for Environmental Action Now. She has worked with many women activists featured in this manuscript to advance goals of improving access to environments free from harm. Susan Tucker served for 30 years as the curator of books and records for the Newcomb Archives at Tulane University. She is the author of Telling Memories among Southern Women and most recently City of Remembering: A History of Genealogy in New Orleans.
Women included in this project intervened to ensure greater environmental justice by running for office, or writing regulation, or testifying in order to establish better enforcement of laws already on the books. Specifically, in order to be included in this oral history, women activists had to meet three criteria. First, they had to work for the environmental movement between 1976 and 1996. Second, they had to create or change a law or have founded an organization. Lastly, their work had to take place without institutional support. Frankland and Tucker decided on an oral history so that women could tell their stories in their own words. Between 1999 and 2012, they interviewed 36 women who met these criteria. They also interviewed eight men and two women, who helped enact the laws and enforce them. Fighting the ways business has always been done in Louisiana—that is with tax exemptions for petrochemical companies, lax pollution regulation, and limited input from the public—these women collectively changed the way business was done in the state; insisted on the state being more accountable to its citizens; and, illuminated, through dogged research and documentation of negative health outcomes associated with polluted environments, the need to change the regulatory system. And finally, this coalition of women working together in and across communities forged alliances between social strata not often known in Louisiana: white, black, and Native American women, both poor and rich, all working together to fight for the health of their communities.
This manuscript does an excellent job of communicating the negative environmental conditions that inspired these women to act. In describing their struggles they clearly articulate, to put it bluntly, how bad things were in terms of environmental pollution and population exposure. At the same time, they demonstrated their power through their grassroots efforts and organizations in order to enact any kind of change. For every success they tell, they have stories of dozens of failures. Beyond inspiring, these women share strategies on how to mobilize, energize, and lobby for environmental changes that serve the interests of their communities.
Although a compelling and ultimately triumphant narrative, there are noted weaknesses of the oral history method. Primarily, oral histories serve the interests of the author in telling the history of the struggle for environmental justice by some of the women who fought for it using their own words. However, this method limits the reader’s ability to grasp the general scope and legacy of the state and its history both environmental and social. Without this kind of introduction, the reader is a little bit lost in understanding the full context in which these environmental justice fights were waged.
Frankland and Tucker have done an exemplary job of collecting oral histories of women activists on the frontlines of the environmental justice movement in one of the quantifiably most polluted states in the United States. Their work highlights the many contributions women have made to write laws, create better regulation, and increase enforcement of these laws to reduce pollution and protect communities from their harmful effects. This book demonstrates and inspires us to remember what a few committed citizens can do to change the world.