Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline examines how local movements have succeeded and failed in Louisiana – a state that has been called a “pollution haven”: a place where companies come to exploit natural resources, cheap energy, nonunion labor, tax breaks, and lax environmental enforcement. We believe that the Louisiana cases chronicled in this book are particularly illustrative of processes at work everywhere; and the stakes in these cases were enormous and national. These cases have pushed politicians and policy at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Department of Energy, and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The combatants have brought their battles to these agencies in Washington, D.C., and to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.

The cause of protecting these tiny Louisiana communities has been taken up by rock stars, celebrities, politicians, international and national environmental organizations, and networks of environmental justice activists and lawyers. Their efforts have been resisted by powerful business lobbying groups in Washington and Baton Rouge, chambers of commerce across the state and nation, probusiness politicians, and highly placed government agency leaders. The cases are illuminating partly because so much of the coordination between business and government in advancing economic development over the complaints of citizens groups is publicly expressed in Louisiana.