Climate Revival at Ground Zero

The Power of Music to Heal and Saving the Planet in Cancer Alley, Louisiana

John Beard Jr., Antonique Smith, Sharon C. Lavigne, Robert Taylor, and the Reverend Lennox Yearwood at the October 10 Climate Revival in St. James Parish, Louiiana.

For once, Louisiana boasts the best weather in the nation. This time, the bad weather, bearing the brunt of human-accelerated climate change in the name of Hurricane Milton, is barreling towards Tampa. It is a blessed evening to be here, safe, among the living with friends.

Here is Cancer Alley, and it’s an early October fall evening with mild perfect weather, not too hot, not too cold, just right.

I am gathered with a kind and loving community of civil rights and climate justice activists fighting for the survival of not their community but the planet — resisting chemical genocide. Here, in a community with a long history of civil rights actions, dating to Charles Deslondes and the 1811 freedom fighters of the river parishes, folks have gathered at the Mount Calvary Baptist Church on Highway 18 in Welcome, Louisiana. Tonight is revival night. Climate Revival night.

Dustin Rabelais, executive director of the Bayou Lafourche Fresh Water District, at the Lockport gate, says saltwater intrusion threatens the water supplies for southern Louisiana.

The church, which is carved out of the cane fields that their enslaved descendants made valuable, is at Ground Zero in the fight against global warming. Cancer Alley is the most heavily industrialized corridor in the western hemisphere and among the heaviest concentrated emitters of industrial pollution in the world. Now a Taiwanese company called Formosa plants to build what it calls the world’s most advanced plastics plant.

Many of the plants already here are outdated when it comes to pollution control, often noncomplying with state and federal regulations, but instead of retrofitting them to reduce their emissions, the state, in a move against the survival of the planet, is permitting more and more in the districts with majority Black populations. Plants like the one planned by Formosa suck up all of the oil and natural gas taken from the Gulf and are perpetuating our reliance on fossil fuels. The result is accelerated global boiling. And Louisiana is where it’s all happening. The Mississippi River is at all time lows and saltwater creeping up its mouth is increasing the levels of sodium. This making its water largely undrinkable and often untreatable.

If we keep perpetuating this cycle, some 1.3 million persons in the state will lose access to healthy drinking water. Already, Louisiana is home to the nation’s first climate refugees. That would be Isle de Jean Charles, in the south, where sea level rise has taken all but 320 of its former 32,000 acres.

The church rises out of cane fields with the flames of the CF fertilizer plant flaring off in the distance and when I look the other way just down the river road yellow mounds of phosphate at the Mosaic plant. Then there’s the Amsty, Nucor, NuStar, Oxychem, and DuPont plants, all nearby, and part of the industrial overload that gives strong strapping folks here cancer in their fifties and sixties and raises earth temperatures for all of us. Do you remember how unbearably hot the summer became? And now Hurricane Milton is following Helene, all greater in effect than they would be without the impact of so much fossil fuel burning. This is the where ovens of Hades burn day and night.

Right now, a small group of activists is fighting with all of their might, day and night, to stop placement of the Formosa plastics plant, which, if built, would emit some 6,000 tons of pollutants each year, including benzene, chloroprene, ethylene oxide, and formaldehyde, and double the amount of current pollution within the parish. It would equal the amount of pollution in three coal plants. And it would perpetuate the worst of our human behaviors, our wastefulness, our throwaway culture that seems to apply to plastic and some people.

The CF fertilizer plant at night.

It’s a fight on so many levels and with so many fronts, and there is no relief. Some of the recent court and administrative decisions have been in keeping with the state’s centuries-long and perpetuating penchant for punching federal civil rights law in its pesky pugnacious nose. The election hovers over all of us. No one knows, at this moment, who it will be, and it matters to all of us.

Antonique Smith, cofounder of the Climate Revival

But, tonight, Reverend Lennox Yearwood and Antonique Smith, cofounders of the Climate Revival, have come to Cancer Alley to inspire hope, faith, and action.

Reverend Yearwood, founder of the Hip Hop Caucus in 2004, a former Air Force officer and chaplain, and longtime leader in the climate change movement, stands before us, upon the stage, speaking into his microphone with his booming voice, asking the congregants if they’re ready to go to church.

“There’s nothing like church in Louisiana,” he says. (The Reverend Yearwood is also from the state.)

Reverend Yearwood, who describes both of his parents as activists, hands the microphone to Antonique Smith, the Grammy-nominated singer/song writer/actor. The day before Smith went on a toxic tour of Cancer Alley. She wears a white dress and reassures the congregants.

“We’re going to make sure the world knows about cancer happening here, because we cannot allow this to happen to human beings anymore,” says Smith, her soft voice filled with pain, indignant at what she sees happening to Black Americans. “The Bible says, Jesus said, actually, that the two greatest commandments are to love God, and to love yourself. What’s happening here… It is not love. It’s not love. It’s not… You know that the pollution giving you cancer is also causing climate change. So, I’m so glad y’all are here tonight. Because we need, we need to come together, we need to make this thing together. So, thank you so much, I just wanna say that. That’s that’s why we’re here tonight. I love y’all so much, I got your back. We’re going to make sure that the world knows about Cancer Alley.”

Then came survivors turned activists , one after the other. So many members of the community have succumbed that there often seems to be more deceased persons in graves than living who can testify to the horrors they face.

Everyone raised their hands when asked if they or their loved ones had been impacted by cancer. Many left their hands raised when asked if they had to deal with cancer personally.

Albert Broden spoke about his own cancer. “I share what I went through because they don’t want us to talk,” he tells the congregation. “My wife took care of me through these trying times. But I’m here and talking about my cancer because that’s the only way that change is going to come.”

Albert Broden shares his cancer story at the Mount Calvary Baptist Church at the Climate Revival in Saint James Parish, Louisiana

Sharon C. Lavigne, the founder of Rise St. James who helped to bring the Climate Revival to Welcome, shared with us her health challenges involving a form of hepatitis that she links with her chronic exposure to the pollutants coming out of the smokestacks and distillers that surround her community.

Robert Taylor of nearby Reserve in St. John the Baptist Parish told us about the children of the Fifth Ward elementary school and how they are being exposed to chloroprene from the adjacent Denka elastomer plant. He didn’t talk about his wife with breast cancer or daughter with autoimmune disease.

John Beard Jr., an ex-councilman from Port Arthur, Texas, and 38-year veteran of the petrochemical industry, told us nothing is more important to him than our fight, one that goes from Cancer Alley in a broad crescent of more and more pipelines along the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Texas. And communicating to the Black audience is particularly important, Reverend Yearwood told me

The Reverend Yearwood’s work in Lousiana is especially important where Black voter turnout was barely above 30 percent in the last election. In order for the state to reach a more sustainable future, proposed plastic plants like Formosa, that will produce so many useless throwaway plastic items like polyester suits and polyethylene bags, must be stopped, but it will take a grassroots effort. Increasing Black participation is vital to the battle. A Yale University study found that only 12 percent of Black Americans knew of the term “climate justice,” but when they learned that it meant their equal right to clean air and water some 70 percent said they would love to work towards this relatively newly recognized form and ideal in civil rights. Some 68 percent of Black Americans live within 30 miles of a coal- fired power plant, notes the Climate Revival website.

Antonique Smith brought the Revival to a close with a soulful rendition of “Here Comes the Sun” by George Harrison. The composer of the song heard her every heavenly note.

We start with our hearts and then we learn how to make our lives follow our hearts seamlessly.

Learn more about the Climate Revival and when they will be visiting your community here.

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After a year of interviewing some of the most heroic parents in America today, I’m delighted to announce presale copies of Raising Healthy Kids: Protecting Your Children from Hidden Chemical Toxins are available. Be sure to visit your independent bookseller to purchase your copy or https://tinyurl.com/4a9ctywu.