Nine Minutes in Taipei: A Plea from Death Alley

Sharon C. Lavigne carries the dying breath of Cancer Alley to Formosa Plastics’ shareholders, while Louisiana Democrats stand guard for the poison.

Sharon C. Lavigne in front of the AmSty styrene and Mosaic Faustina fertilizer plants. Photo by David Steinman

My friend, Sharon C. Lavigne, winner of the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize for her existential battle against the Goliath known as Formosa Plastics, is flying to Taiwan to speak to the various institutional representatives, top executives, and registered stakeholders at the mega-corporation’s May 27 Annual General Meeting. Formosa has been planning to build what it calls one of the largest and most advanced plastics plants in the world here in St. James Parish, in the heart of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. It is Saturday night, and she is leaving at five in the morning the next day. It’s late. She and I have worked together for almost five years. Part of what we are doing is trying to educate the rest of the world about Cancer Alley — and about how we can curb our demand for single-use plastic and other petrochemicals. We have always placed a great deal of faith in educating consumers to help the movement by making smart shopping choices, especially during these times when the administration is adamantly opposed to regulating chemical pollutants emitted into the air, water, and land.

“It’s my second trip,” she says. “But we’ve got to fight the coming of this plant, or we will die.”

“What will you tell them?”

“I’ll talk with the shareholders to tell them not to let Fomosa come here, and that it will kill us here. I mean, literally, we will die. This is Cancer Alley to some. But it is Death Alley to the people who live here.”

“Are you going with anyone, Sharon?’

“Diane Wilson from Texas will talk about how Formosa is polluting the Gulf with their nurdles [plastic pellets]. Nancy Bui will talk about the victims of that horrible 2016 poisoning in Vietnam when Formosa dumped cyanide and other poisons into the sea.”

“How do you expect to be treated by them?”

“The same way we were the last time.”

“How was that?”

“They never got back to us.

“Cold, hard faces in the audience?”

“Cold, hard faces, I would think. Uh- huh. One of them was looking at his phone. That was last time.”

“Will you let me know what happens when you get back?”

“I sure will.”

“Godspeed.”

Sharon is fighting a battle for civil rights and has formed the group RISE St. James to educate folks about the chemical poisons and the destruction occurring daily, 24/7 in Cancer Alley, and that she sees as an existential battle for survival, stemming from the arrival of one chemical plant after another, starting in the 1960s with Mosaic Faustina. “People are smarter nowadays,” she says. “We don’t get the jobs. Those go to out-of-town workers who stay at the motels all around here. We get the cancers, though.”

WHERE ARE THE LOUISIANA DEMOCRATS?

State Senator Ed Price, State Representative Kendricks Brass, Parish Councilmember Ryan Loque (from top left to right).

Louisiana is the kind of state where its representatives on local councils and planning commissions, and in the state and federal legislatures, all work for the chemical industry. Many national Democrats have proven themselves to be ardent environmentalists, but here in Louisiana, well, no way. The chemical companies pick the candidates and help them get elected.

As part of my work as chief officer at the Chemical Toxin Working Group (dba Healthy Living Foundation), a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., and California, we have pursued and won many legal cases involving chemical toxins and also have published an environmental newspaper in Louisiana. One article we published was called the “Cancer Alley Environmental Hall of Shame.”

Photo source: Healthy Living Foundation

We profiled three typical Louisiana elected officials who just happen to represent Sharon’s community.

State Senator Ed Price. Photo source: senate.la.gov

Ed Price, a state senator representing District 2, which includes Ascension, Assumption, Iberville, Lafourche, St. James, St. John the Baptist, and West Baton Rouge parishes, serves on the Environmental Quality Committee. He’s also a thirty-six-year veteran of BASF, one of the chemical plants here, where he supervised diols manufacturing. He also voted to pass state legislation that could have put Sharon and other freedom fighters in jail when he voted for House Bill 197 in the 2020 session, notes the *Louisiana Illuminator*. Governor John Bel Edwards vetoed the bill, noting that it could have criminalized legitimate public protests on structures such as our levees, which are important public gathering places. Price is a Democrat. But when it comes to toxic chemicals and health, his biggest contributors are the Louisiana Manufacturers Association, BASF, Crescent River Port Pilots Association, Baton Rouge Chamber of Commerce, Marathon Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum, and Entergy Corporation.

Photo source: Followthemoney.org

He has worked along with other Democrats to bring Formosa to Cancer Alley. He was instrumental in supporting the widening of State Highway 3127, which would be needed to accommodate additional traffic if Formosa were actually to begin construction.

“This project was done through a public-private partnership with the Department of Transportation and Formosa Plastics, which is building a site here in St. James Parish on the West Bank,” Price said in a press release from the state Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) when announcing the completion of the widening project.

Price worked with another member of our Environmental Hall of Shame, Democratic State Representative Kendricks Brass.

State Representative Kendricks Brass. Photo source: house.louisiana.gov

His professional experience includes working as an electrical engineer for BASF (like Price). Brass also voted to potentially incarcerate activists when he supported HB 197 in the 2020 legislative session.

“FG is building a new site they are calling The Sunshine Project, and could see the need for road improvements,” Brass said in the same DOTD press release. “This project will have a significant economic impact on the state and local level by creating 1,200 new direct jobs. This is a perfect example of industry and government working together for the greater good of St. James Parish, the River Parishes, and the entire State of Louisiana. I commend FG leadership for taking on this project and for [Department of Transportation and Development] Secretary Shawn Wilson for his willingness to work with others and to make infrastructure improvements across the great State of Louisiana.”

As with Price, Brass counts the Louisiana Manufacturers Association, Marathon Petroleum, and Entergy Corporation as his top contributors, according to Followthemoney.org.

Photo source: Followthemoney.org

St. James Parish Councilmember Ryan Louque. Photo source: https://www.stjamesla.com/

Ryan Louque, a district Councilman in St. James Parish, was the third member of our local Hall of Shame. Louque, who has worked at facilities including Marathon, ExxonMobil, Shell Chemical, CF Industries, and Motiva, makes no bones about his stance on chemical pollution. There is none, he says. Louque told me he couldn’t comment because of a lawsuit filed in 2023 by Sharon’s group, RISE, against the parish council. The lawsuit alleges that the council engages in discriminatory practices, particularly in land use. In a blatantly racist move, the parish council devised a land use plan in 2014 that zoned the fourth and fifth districts as residential/future industrial, reports The Lens, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public-interest newsroom covering the New Orleans area.

“We are not Cancer Alley. That’s a misnomer to start with,” Louque said during a phone interview with *Gas Outlook.* “I’m sure you’re reading studies that claim to be peer-reviewed, alluding to the fact that we are the worst place in the country when it comes to pollution, and we are oppressing people of color. I completely dispute that. Any study that’s done, you can learn it anyway that you want, and they don’t look at the facts from the other side.”

In April 2018, Formosa officials flew from Taiwan to join with Democrat Governor John Bel Edwards, Brass, and other state officials to announce their $9.4 billion Sunshine Project at Rose’s Catering on Frontage Road in St. James Parish. Rose’s Catering is a small, sand-colored building with white columns in front, set in the cane fields near the Mosaic Faustina fertilizer plant, just up the road by the Sunshine Bridge. The cane fields once were part of the Buena Vista Plantation. If constructed on some 2,500 acres of former plantation land, including burial sites of the enslaved, the facility will include 14 petrochemical plants and generate $500 million in local spending in St. James Parish — making it one of the largest plastic complexes of its kind in the world, according to The Lens.

The untold story, though, is that the workers who toil at the plants largely come for the workweek, staying where I do at the Best Western SureStay or the Quality Inn. Then they go back home to Texas, Mississippi, Florida, or whatever state they drove from in their outsized pickups with rearview mirrors that extend another foot on each side of the cab when I try to park my economy rental in the motel lots.

When the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality granted Formosa its air permits in 2019, it authorized the plant to release 13.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year, the equivalent of 3.5 coal-fired power plants, reports New Orleans Public Radio. The agency greenlit the release of more than 800 tons of toxic air pollutants per year, including chemicals such as benzene and ethylene oxide, which studies have linked to various cancers, according to Lilian S. Dorka, deputy assistant administrator for External Civil Rights at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in an October 12, 2022, letter to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

“The plant will be too much,” Sharon tells me that night before she leaves. “It will kill off the entire Black community.”

Sharon’s friends are dying in their sixties and early seventies. Her friends are mine too. It has been that way since I first arrived. One of the first folks I became friends with was Melvin Whittington, whom I met at Juneteenth in 2023. We just lost Melvin, a football star at Southeastern Louisiana University who played briefly for the Oakland Raiders. He was only 68. Melvin died of cancer. Albert Broden, a friend, passed away from cancer in his early seventies. Albert lived down the road from Sharon, along Highway 18 in an area known as Burton Lane, surrounded by enormous petroleum storage tanks of Nustar and other companies, some of which leak volatile organic chemicals that drift down to ground level and can be measured at high concentrations, according to an EPA inspection report. Ground level — that is the human level, the level where Albert lived. Koch emits methanol (CH3OH), an alcohol used to make plastics, paints, and other products, according to EPA monitoring data.

Most recently, Koch Methanol became his neighbor. The company purchased the high school that Sharon’s father, a proud Black farmer, integrated. In the 1960s, he was head of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “Someone set his truck on fire after that,” Sharon tells me. “And he couldn’t find buyers for his crops. And we got death threats.” And now it belongs to the enemy.

The Reverend Lennox Yearwood, John Beard Jr., Antonique Smith, Sharon C. Lavigne, Robert Taylor, and Albert Broden at the Climate Revival in St. James Parish in October 2024. Photo by David Steinman.

Today, Sharon lives downwind of Mosaic’s Faustine fertilizer plant and the AmSty plant, which manufactures toxic styrene. It is just one plant after another. They are like a water-loving hydra, packed in along the river.

Formosa wants to put in the final dagger. So Sharon flies to Taipei.

It isn’t easy to be smart and Black in Louisiana — and then add on being a Black woman who must speak out or die.

So she flies to meet with the shareholders. She will tell them that the plant will kill off their community.

Then she will go home, she says.

I sigh. I tell her she will win.

“Oh, we already have,” she says.

“Tell me what happens.”

And so I wait to hear the results of her talk before the Formosa shareholders. She tells me they have allotted her three minutes, the same as the three given to Diane and Nancy each. Nine minutes. That’s all that we have,” she says. “Nine minutes. Then we will go home.”

“And once home?”

“I hope I won’t be too tired. I have to get back to work, organizing. There is so much to do.”

“Tell me how it goes. So I can let everyone know.”

— 30 —

My new book, *Raising Healthy Kids: Protecting Your Children from Hidden Chemical Toxins*, featuring a foreword by Sharon C. Lavigne, is available at Amazon. Subscribe to my mypodcast on YouTube and to my newsletter on Medium.