Trump’s strikes on environmental regulations are now crossing paths with his attacks on DEI. Citing compliance with Trump’s DEI mandates, the Justice Department dropped its lawsuit against a petrochemical plant in Reserve, Louisiana, in an area known as ‘Cancer Alley.’ This week, Alex travels to Louisiana and speaks to the life-long residents directly in harm’s way. Then, a conversation with former EPA administrator Heather McTeer Toney on the larger implications of Trump’s environmental policy.
And a note to listeners: we’ll be off next week and will return with a new episode on March 27!
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View this graphic on msnbc.comNote: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Alex Wagner: I’m driving from New Orleans, heading in the direction of Baton Rouge. We’re getting out into open space, crossing the bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, and the landscape is becoming a lot more rural. But the trees look sick, their tops have no leaves and the branches look withered. There’s vegetation. There are even some cows. But things don’t exactly look right, as if something happened here.
The first sign we’re headed in the right direction, but also the first decidedly troubling sign is an air quality alert that pops up on the navigation screen in our rental car. It comes up the moment we enter Reserve, Louisiana, a small town of just under 10,000 people. The reason for this alert is not exactly a mystery.
Reserve is one of several towns on an 85-mile stretch of land shared by roughly 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations. According to a major study from Human Rights Watch, this is the largest concentration of plants of that nature in the Western Hemisphere. The locals have a nickname for this area.
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Robert Taylor: The area we’re in now, Cancer Alley.
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Alex Wagner: Cancer Alley. Robert Taylor is an 84-year-old lifelong resident of this area. He’s who I’m meeting today.
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Robert Taylor: The rate of cancer, the rate of illnesses, my mother, my sisters, my next door neighbors, my friends from around, they are dying.
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Alex Wagner: Taylor’s wife died a few months ago. She was a cancer survivor. And while he can’t say for sure that her illness was due to the plants nearby, he believes that prolonged exposure to chemicals and toxins in the air contributed to her death.
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Robert Taylor: She suffered terribly. I tried, we relocated her, I got her out. We built us a fine home together when we got married, thinking we got to leave a legacy for our children, and that’s not safe in that home.
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Alex Wagner: Residents like Taylor have been pushing for decades to get someone to help the majority Black towns and parishes in Cancer Alley, local government, state government, federal government, literally anyone who would listen. Progress had been slow. But during the Biden administration, there were finally some signs that the federal government wanted to help.
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Reporter: The EPA has just announced a number of new actions dedicated to curbing pollution in communities of color, including there in Cancer Alley.
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Alex Wagner: That was 2023, the year before President Biden initiated a sweeping and previously unheard of civil rights investigation, looking at the Louisiana agencies that allowed oil and chemical plants to proliferate in majority Black communities, including Cancer Alley.
Taylor took me to a spot that had become a focus of his efforts and that the EPA had paid some attention to, a low-slung brick building, with a parking lot full of cars.
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Alex Wagner: Okay. So this is the elementary school, and where’s the plant?
Robert Taylor: Just right above those trees there.
Alex Wagner: That’s right there?
Robert Taylor: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: So the school is literally next to the plant.
Robert Taylor: Oh, yeah. They built that plant right almost on top of us.
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Alex Wagner: The school was Fifth Ward Elementary, an historically Black school where Taylor attended high school back in the 1950s, before it became an elementary school during desegregation.
The plant used to be owned by chemical giant DuPont, which opened it in 1968. It’s currently owned by the Japanese company, Denka. That’s where the company makes synthetic rubber or neoprene. It’s a material that’s found in everything from wetsuits to laptop sleeves to electrical wiring. Making neoprene requires the use of the chemical chloroprene, which the EPA has stated is likely carcinogenic.
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Robert Taylor: We found out, according to EPA, the information they brought to us, that these children, that they were being exposed to 400 to 700 times what EPA says is a safe level of exposure to this carcinogenic chemical, chloroprene, the children.
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Alex Wagner: Denka has maintained that they are not breaking any laws, and their emissions are not putting people at a higher risk of cancer. But activists like Taylor, along with the national media, spurred the EPA into doing something in 2023.
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Lester Holt, NBC: We first reported on the Fifth Ward Elementary School in Reserve, Louisiana, located next to a plant emitting what the EPA has long said was a likely carcinogenic.
Reporter: But a glimmer of hope, just as we’re packing up to leave, the EPA sent us an email. They decided to file lawsuit in federal court to require Denka to significantly reduce hazardous chloroprene emissions from its neoprene manufacturing facility.
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Alex Wagner: The lawsuit alleged, quote, “The thousands of people breathing this air are incurring a significantly higher cancer risk than would be typically allowed. And they are being exposed to a much greater cancer risk from Denka’s air pollution than the majority of United States residents face.”
According to the EPA, the top five census tracks with the highest estimated cancer risk are all in the state of Louisiana because of the Denka facility’s chloroprene emissions. So this lawsuit was a significant step. More than anything, it was a sign that the federal government understood the very real, very ongoing threats to this community. That is until last Friday.
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Reporter: The Trump administration plans to drop a federal lawsuit against the Louisiana petrochemical plant.
Reporter: The Denka Performance Elastomer plant is accused of worsening cancer risks. The Biden administration sued. The AP sources say court action is expected in the coming days.
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Alex Wagner: Denka representatives told the Washington Post last week that the decision represented a long overdue and appropriate end to a case lacking scientific and legal merit from the start. The company added that it was still committed to reducing chloroprene emissions at the facility.
For the Trump administration, the choice to drop this landmark lawsuit wasn’t just an extension of the president’s attack on environmentalists and the EPA, all part of the so-called “climate change hoax.” The Justice Department also cited compliance with Trump’s executive order on DEI programs, indicating that trying to protect people, especially people of color from harmful deadly polluters was a form of woke liberalism that had to be stopped.
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Robert Taylor: The whole DEI force or whatever that kind of craziness is, I don’t get where they’re coming from with the DEI thing, whether it was a Black school or not.
Alex Wagner: But it sounds like because it’s black and brown people, and it would be the government acting on their behalf to make sure they’re not disproportionately punished by polluters, that somehow that’s a radical leftist agenda.
Robert Taylor: Yeah. Well, that’s right. But that is a result of a radical rightist agenda. See, that’s them. So I don’t know how they can twist up the facts and the reality. How can it take us off point?
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Alex Wagner: But the end of this lawsuit against Denka is apparently just the beginning of a broader plan from the Trump administration, because later this same day, we got another announcement.
The New York Times reported that an internal memo from Lee Zeldin, who now heads the EPA, was ordering the agency to eliminate the 11 environmental justice offices. These offices and their staff focus on disproportionate and deadly pollution in poor communities all across the country. Most of them, black and brown. Once again, it seemed that for president Trump, clean air is DEI. And then just before we finish taping this week’s episode, we got another huge announcement from the EPA.
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Lee Zeldin: Today, I’m pleased to make the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history today. The Green New Scam ends as the EPA does its part to usher in the golden age of American success.
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Alex Wagner: Zeldin Announced 31 actions to dramatically roll back energy regulations on things like climate change policies, electric vehicles, and coal power.
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Alex Wagner: What do you think is going to happen under Trump with the Denka plant and all these other industrial plants in your neighborhood?
Robert Taylor: Well, I don’t know. That’s going to depend largely on the people here.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Robert Taylor: If we let them have that way, they will kill us all. We will die here.
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Alex Wagner: On this episode of “Trumpland with Alex Wagner,” we’re down in Louisiana, on Cancer Alley, speaking with the people directly in harm’s way.
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Shamayra Lavigne-Davey: It hurts me to hear us pleading and giving our hearts and saying, hey, what about us? They do not care. It’s about what they can make money off of.
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Alex Wagner: As the Trump administration rolls back environmental protections and progress that has been decades in the making.
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Heather McTeer Toney: You don’t need science to tell you and confirm that people have died. We can look in the cemeteries and we can see at the funerals, and we understand what the number of people who are coming through health clinics.
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Alex Wagner: There’s a term to describe areas like Cancer Alley, geographic areas dominated by industry for so-called “development,” but development that ultimately leads to widespread pollution and environmental harm. The United Nations and environmental activists call those places “sacrifice zones.”
And here in Reserve, Louisiana, I visited Tchoupitoulas Church to talk about life in this particular sacrifice zone. Now, we should say it is very difficult for anyone to know with certainty what caused any particular illness in this community. But what you’ll hear is what this community believes has been happening to them.
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Alex Wagner: How many of you feel like you know people, either in your family or your circle of friends, who are suffering adverse health effects because of the proximity of this plant?
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Alex Wagner: The eight people seated before me all raised their hands.
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Alex Wagner: So everybody.
Rhonda Cox: My dad and I have experienced several generations of illnesses. My mother died of breast cancer. My sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, and my grandmother died of breast cancer.
Alex Wagner: Oh.
Rhonda Cox: So we are directly affected in this community. I’ve also had genetic testing for breast cancer. My mother, my sister, and myself, and all of them came back negative.
Alex Wagner: Wow. So it’s not, but you’re carrying the gene.
Rhonda Cox: It’s not in the DNA. Correct. It’s environmental.
Roxanne Keller: I’ve lost everyone in my family because of it.
Alex Wagner: You’ve lost everyone in your family?
Roxanne Keller: Everybody. And I’m the oldest living relative on my father’s side at the age of 67. I remember growing up on East 30th Street, and remember the days we could sleep with our windows open? Well, a lot of mornings, we woke up with this awful smell in the house. We didn’t know what it was. We didn’t know what chemical we were breathing while we were sleeping. We smelled that all day long. We went to school with it on our uniforms.
Alex Wagner: Can I ask when you say you lost everybody in your family, did they --
Roxanne Keller: Cancers.
Alex Wagner: Was it all cancers?
Roxanne Keller: Cancers.
Alex Wagner: Everyone?
Roxanne Keller: Yes.
Larry Sorapuru, Jr.: EPA came in and told us in 2015, that Denka was releasing a chemical called chloroprene into the air. The state health director came down to the local government to tell us that no one should be breathing chloroprene at any level. We do have a severe problem that needs to be addressed within this community, and we don’t have much time.
Alex Wagner: During the first Trump administration, the EPA came down here and said, these are unsafe levels of chloroprene. Then Biden comes into office and his EPA had Michael Regan, I think, came here. Is that right?
Larry Sorapuru, Jr.: Yeah. Yes.
Alex Wagner: What was that like when he came down here and said, I’m going to check out what’s happening in St. John?
Tish Taylor: It was a great relief.
Alex Wagner: Yeah. Tell me more about that.
Tish Taylor: Well, they gave my dad a call and said they wanted to come out and speak with the community. They knew that we had the highest risk of cancer in the United States. So he walked with my dad and the community. He walked through the neighborhoods. He made a promise to my dad that things were going to be taken care of.
Alex Wagner: Have you guys heard that term “sacrifice zone”?
Robert Taylor: Oh, yes.
Alex Wagner: I mean, what does it tell you that the community in which you live, which has been your community much longer than it’s been DuPont and Denka’s community, has been deemed in certain circles to be a sacrificial zone, that you’re collateral damage effectively, that this present administration has rode into office, dismantled the entire Environmental Justice Division of the EPA, is dropping this lawsuit, has signaled that the health and wellbeing of black and brown communities is not top of mind?
Larry Sorapuru, Jr.: Evil, strictly evil, greed.
Rhonda Cox: Yes.
Larry Sorapuru, Jr.: It’s all about money right now.
Rhonda Cox: I would like to say to them, what if it was your grandmother and your mother and your sister, and so many other family members and friends in the community, when you watch them take their last breath? If it was your family member, how would you feel on the other side?
Alex Wagner: We live in an information divide that falls along political lines. And if this administration says enough times, this community is fine. This cancer stuff, that’s all in their heads. That’s a numbers problem that isn’t real. If they say it enough and they say the plant is safe, stop worrying about the emissions. It’s fine. Part of me wonders whether they can actually succeed in convincing some number of people that, yeah, everything is fine. Stop worrying about it.
Sylvia Taylor: The scientific evidence corroborates that it is happening to us, yet we’re sitting back and letting other people tell us it doesn’t exist. There’s a lot of people here who believe in what we’re saying, but everybody is not going to take a stand. Maybe it’s a hundred people locally that might agree and take a stand on it, but some people just sit back complacently and just don’t do anything. I don’t understand it.
There are people who are elected local officials who grew up here and they have cancer in their families, but they ignoring it. Why? I don’t have the clue because I’m not the one. I’m known to say what I have to say because I’m a part of this community, but they got tired because nothing has been done about it. So that’s what’s going on.
Alex Wagner: It sounds like there’s an enormous amount of pressure to stay quiet, right? You guys are out here and talking to the press because you believe that your voices matter. And you’re courageous to stand up and say, you can’t do this in my backyard. Are you worried that it’s going to get harder and harder to do that with this current government that we have?
Tish Taylor: It’s always been hard. This man is diabolically just eliminating everything that was set to protect us and to protect our air. We are burying family members every week. People are suffering 20 and 30 years before they pass. That’s real. We live our life every day, wondering what’s going to happen at our next doctor’s visit. That’s how we live.
Larry Sorapuru, Jr.: We’re going to continue to speak up, continue to follow science, and continue to expose the negligence and the stupidity that’s here within this chemical cart that we have.
Sylvia Taylor: The irony of the situation is there are technologies that could make the plant safer. I’m not anti-industry. I want all the industry I can have, but I want clean industry. If there’s technology that can do that and if it’s costly, too bad. Our lives are costly. I am not anti-industry. My people worked in the industry, et cetera. I want clean industry that’s not killing us. Is that too much to ask?
Alex Wagner: What about people who say, well, if you don’t like it, just move? Why are you still there?
Larry Sorapuru, Jr.: Most people have family members that are here. The thing is your family is here. They’ve been over here for over 200 years’ generation.
Leroy Cox: Hey, our family lives here, you know.
Robert Taylor: That’s insulting to me for somebody to say to me, well, hey, this plant wants this place. You get out of here. Besides that, my fight with this is that house is dangerous. What family would I want to put in that house that I myself don’t want to live in?
Rhonda Cox: We have a beautiful 4,500 square foot, seven bedrooms, four bathrooms, two car garage home, two driveways. If you want to buy it and move in, we’ll leave. Move your family there or shut up.
Alex Wagner: I’m so struck by the fact that the Denka-DuPont plant is on the grounds of a former plantation. I mean, obviously, plantations, we hold in our memory as one of the most traumatizing deadly institutions in America. And now, you have a plant on the same patch of grass. I just can’t get past the irony of that.
Sylvia Taylor: We meant nothing then, and we mean nothing now.
Shamayra Lavigne-Davey: I think Trump is doing exactly what Trump said he was going to do.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Shamayra Lavigne-Davey: So it’s not surprising, and I don’t think we have enough money here for him to care about what’s going on with us. He cares about the wealthy people. And if there was some way that we could make money off environmental justice for him, he would prioritize it. But it’s actually conflicting with the money that he’s making. So that’s a thorn in his side.
Like the Energy chief, Chris Wright said that environmental justice is a side effect of modern business in the economy. So it hurts me to hear us pleading and giving our hearts and saying, hey, what about us? We’re dying. Watching my family members die, and knowing that it’s not being heard by this administration, they do not care. It’s about what they can make money off of. We all are entitled to clean air, but if you make enough money, he’ll overlook it.
Tish Taylor: The more you know, the harder it is to just go through your life, your daily life. I love flowers. I love my yard, and to go out and prune my bushes, and everything is supposed to make me feel all good inside. And then you’ll just get this thought, how much chloroprene is being emitted right now? How much poison is in the air?
Larry Sorapuru, Jr.: And when you wake up in the morning, it’s not just about yourself. It’s probably too late for all of us on this panel right now. We’ve been exposed to levels of chemicals, but it didn’t happen overnight. I worry about the next gen. What will the history books show to our grandkids and the younger kids who live in this community? People are dying. People have funerals every week. Sometimes I go to three funerals in one day.
Tim Keller: Yeah,
Larry Sorapuru, Jr.: Pretty much three times a month. So the alarm is going off, but nobody is home at the big house.
(Music Playing)
Alex Wagner: We reached out to Denka for comment on the complaints and concerns that these residents have. They referred us to a statement made last week, where they claimed, quote, “No emergency can exist when the facility’s emissions are at a historical low, and that the Trump administration’s decision to drop the federal lawsuit against Denka marked a long overdue and appropriate end to a case lacking scientific and legal merit from the start.”
We’re going to take a quick break.
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Alex Wagner: Our next guest has a deep understanding about how the EPA works and what the Trump administration’s drastic reversal on environmental policy might mean for communities around the country beyond even Cancer Alley. Heather McTeer Toney served as the regional administrator for the EPA’s Southeast region based in Atlanta. She was appointed by President Obama in 2014. She’s also the author of “Before the Streetlights Come On: Black America’s Urgent Call for Climate Solutions.” She is currently the executive director of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Beyond Petrochemicals campaign.
I am so appreciative of your time and thank you for doing this. I don’t know if you know, but right before we got on this podcast recording, there’s news breaking that the EPA, under Lee Zeldin, is announcing 31 historic actions in the greatest and, quote, “most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.” This on top of the news in the last 24 hours, that they’re basically shuttering the Environmental Justice Division of the EPA. And then, of course, on the heels of the news we got last week that the Trump administration is going to drop this lawsuit, that began under the Biden administration, to really focus on polluters in and around Cancer Alley.
So first, just give me your thoughts on where we sit today, as a country, when it comes to protecting some of the most vulnerable communities from deadly toxins.
Heather McTeer Toney: Yeah, Alex, I took a look at that list of 31 actions and the first thing that came to mind for me is, wow, we are really debating whether or not we should have clean water, clean air, and clean land in this country. And that’s just for humanity, for American citizens, period. That’s what’s on the table, just the question of whether or not we should have it and have access to it is I think the breadth and scope of attack on environmental protections today. That’s where we are. So we are now far past what are the considerations of just poor and vulnerable populations. This is all Americans --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Heather McTeer Toney: -- and it should cause us all extreme concern.
Alex Wagner: I was in Cancer Alley. I was in the St John and St. James parishes and talking to people who have seen their entire family die of cancer or rare diseases. The fact that these plants are on former plantations isn’t a coincidence.
Heather McTeer Toney: It is not a coincidence at all. So the lands that the plants overlap and you’re right, it’s acre by acre. It is the exact footprint of plantations that enslaved family members of people who are living there today, worked on. So the history of not only oppression and redlining, and health and safety are far beyond just the past 5 to 10 years. This is legacy in its legacy pollution. It’s also legacy environmental land pollution because the ecological impact to these spaces is something else that must be accounted for.
So the same spaces that people hunt on and fish on, and that they want to go and enjoy the things that make the communities and lands who they are, that’s so far beyond just DEI. It cannot be reduced to three letters when it is an embracing of culture, of community, of the lands that all of us enjoy, that are now being put at risk for policy that is deeply dangerous and impactful.
Alex Wagner: This isn’t just a story about Denka and DuPont. This is also a story about what happens in the future with these big industries.
Heather McTeer Toney: Right. So think of it like this, deregulating emissions and deregulating the industry, and letting corporations go unchecked, it’s like getting rid of breathalyzers for drunk drivers.
Alex Wagner: Right.
Heather McTeer Toney: So imagine if the government decided that police no longer needed to use breathalyzers and they should just take a driver’s word for whether they’re drunk or not. It sounds ridiculous, right? I think our society does not like drunk drivers. But that’s exactly what’s happening when we’re deregulating so much of the environmental community, environmental policy. We’re just trusting now corporations to say they aren’t polluting instead of actually checking them.
So now let’s take that a step further. Imagine if the police only gave breathalyzer tests to people who drive older cars. But if you have a luxury car, you go by without a check. That’s what happens when admissions go unchecked and pollution enforcement is inconsistent, and the worst pollution always ends up on those who are least able to defend themselves and least able to have the money.
And so that’s what we’re talking about. Getting rid of these emissions regulations, it means that corporations can pollute without oversight, and it’s just like letting a drunk driver on the road, without testing. In both cases, the people who are paying the price are the people who don’t have any control over the damage that’s being done. And I think we have to think about it in this same way, right? We have to recognize what are going to be the societal impacts in the future if we allow this to go unchecked and unabated. It is just as dangerous as saying, it’s okay, we’re going to let drunk drivers on the road with our teenagers.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Heather McTeer Toney: That is perfectly okay and fine.
Alex Wagner: And the cars we’re driving with our children, right?
Heather McTeer Toney: Absolutely.
Alex Wagner: Everyone is affected, everyone on the road, just like everyone in the country is going to be affected by this.
Heather McTeer Toney: Everybody is affected.
Alex Wagner: I got to ask because part of the way the Trump administration seems to have gotten away with this and Republicans more broadly is by debunking the science, whether it’s calling climate change hoax or denying that these cancer rates are what they are and that the emissions are what they are. I know you’ve been involved in measuring, in a really data-focused way, the impact of this pollution. How challenging do you think it is right now to actually get the real numbers out there, to actually get the real science mainstreamed?
Heather McTeer Toney: The key word in that sentence is “real” and it comes to what people believe and how we’re able to show and model that to them. At Beyond Petrochemicals, we’ve worked with our partners at Johns Hopkins University who’ve been monitoring pollution levels across Cancer Alley since 2022. They continue to observe that levels are still not sufficient to sufficiently protect health. And even before the Denko lawsuit, even before 2023, this is not the first time that there have been concerns at that particular facility, nor was this first action, the first take of trying to reduce these emissions. So the monitoring, the awareness of what has been going on there has taken place for years.
It begs the question of why are we not believing what we see, what we hear, what people know. You don’t need science to tell you and confirm that people have died. We can look in the cemeteries and we can see at the funerals, and we understand what the number of people who are coming through health clinics. So this is not hard.
What has happened is it has been siloed and kept as a, oh, that’s just a Louisiana problem. That’s just those poor people over there by the river. That won’t ever hit me. When reality is it’s not only hitting us, it’s hitting people in their pockets. It is increasing healthcare costs and allowing it to continue to be unabated throughout corporations in this country. It means eventually it does get to your doorstep.
Alex Wagner: Yeah, it does.
Heather McTeer Toney: And it does impact you. That’s the reality I think that we have to impress upon people, that this is not just a problem that is impacting poor black and brown people in the south. It impacts all of us. And historically, these are communities that have been hit first and worse. If we acknowledge that, then we’re able to start and continue to improve for all of us in this country, and really in the world.
Alex Wagner: Let me just say, though, I mean, just the moral stain of doing nothing, even before it reaches your immediate doorstep is real. I want to close by asking you, you have an extraordinary resume and one of the things you’ve done in addition to serving in the EPA and doing the Bloomberg work is you are the first, I think, female mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, the youngest mayor, and you know the south, right? You understand the way of life down south. I mean, it is like a really specifically regional life, the south.
Heather McTeer Toney: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: And I say that as someone that has deep admiration for a lot of parts of Southern culture. When I went and visited these folks in Reserve, in St. James, in St. John Parish, I was so struck by the fact that they refused to give up on this land, right? There are so many people that would’ve packed up and been like, wherever I’m going, I’m going.
Heather McTeer Toney: Right.
Alex Wagner: They believe in this land, though their blood is in the soil and their ancestors in the ground. This is their home.
Heather McTeer Toney: Yes.
Alex Wagner: And part of me is like deeply saddened by what is happening to them in the present. But also part of me is like, man, this community has lived through slavery and Jim Crow. And now, they’re up against the petrochemical industry in the time of the Trump administration. But don’t count them out.
Heather McTeer Toney: Right.
Alex Wagner: They will have their homecoming. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that deep, deep, deep connection between the people and their land, and whether you’re betting on them like I am.
Heather McTeer Toney: Oh, it gives me chills because the energy and electricity, and the faith of people in the south speaks to the resiliency of why we are here today, because it’s so much not about just one of us, it is about an entire community. I come from a space of faith, a family of faith, and when I’m there, it always resonates with me. How deeply ingrained survival, resilience and compassion for all of humanity is seated in the south. It is seated in the place that says if nobody else is going to make it, even if I don’t make it out, I hope that you make it.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Heather McTeer Toney: And that is an attitude of gratefulness and of hope that it will take to solve the climate crisis. We often think of a climate crisis as something so big and it’s so beyond any of us, that there’s nothing we can do that could solve the problems as they are described. But it’s different in the southeast. It’s different with people who have been through struggle and who have been through tough times, because people in the southeast and particularly the area of South Louisiana have lived through, and they are the embodiment of what it means to survival.
Whether you are black, white, Creole, if you are a visitor, if you are a family member or friend, then you too have value. And recognizing that to me, gives hope for why this work is so important and why even in the midst of insurmountable odds, you have folks like Mr. Taylor and his daughter, and Ms. Sharon Lavigne and her daughters.
Alex Wagner: And her daughter.
Heather McTeer Toney: Right. Shamyra, and Shanell, and families who say, no, this is home. This is us. This is who we are. And if we don’t stand up for what’s happening, then my God, what happens to the rest of the world? I’m grateful for people like that.
(Music Playing)
Alex Wagner: Heather McTeer Toney mentions Sharon Lavigne and her daughter Shamyra Lavigne Davey, both prominent environmental activists in Cancer Alley. Shamyra was actually at the church gathering in Reserve, that we heard tape from earlier in this show. At the end of that event, Shamyra asked if she could show us one last place in Cancer Alley. So we followed her the roughly 30 miles up the Mississippi River to the St. James cemetery.
(Begin Video Clip)
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: This tree is incredible.
Alex Wagner: Incredible.
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: This is very gothic.
(End Video Clip)
Alex Wagner: The cemetery sits on the banks of the river and not surprisingly, it also sits across the street and in the shadow of a refinery.
(Begin Audio Clip)
Alex Wagner: Do you think that there are people buried here, who died of ailments relating to the petrochemical industry?
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: Absolutely. We just buried three community members who died of cancer last month, in the same week, all matriarchs of their family. Yeah, all of them. And one of the ladies lived next to one of the facilities. She lived on a fence line of Koch Methanol.
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: When I come here and I feel that we have to fight for everyone that’s here.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: And I just hope that they’re proud that we’re fighting for our community and our town. They were alive when the first industry came in in the ‘60s. It’s just the ‘60s, so not that long ago.
Alex Wagner: Right. That’s not so much longer.
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: Right.
Alex Wagner: It has such longer deeper history than that.
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: Exactly. If our ancestors can make it through 400 years, then we can make it through the next four.
Alex Wagner: That’s I think why people feel like this fight can be won, right?
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: Because there’s history, there’s ancestry here.
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: That’s right.
Alex Wagner: That’s so much longer and deeper than --
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: Absolutely.
Alex Wagner: -- whatever the petrochemical industry has decided the future of this place.
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: That’s right. So they thought it was a good thing when they came. They said, hey, we’re going to bring jobs in. So they thought it was okay. But here we are now, cancer-ridden, overburdened. Now, they want us to leave.
Alex Wagner: Right.
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: This is our family. This is all we ever know. People don’t typically move in here. You usually live here because your grandparents lived here and their grandparents lived here.
Alex Wagner: Right.
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: It’s a lineage here, and so I can’t turn my back on this community. This is --
Alex Wagner: This is your people.
Shamyra Lavigne Davey: This my people.
(End Audio Clip)
(Music Playing)
Alex Wagner: Thanks for listening to “Trumpland with Alex Wagner.” I’ll be on vacation next week, fancy that, so you won’t catch us in your feeds on the 20th. But we will see you the following week for a brand new episode.
But before I let you go, I have a favor to ask. If you’ve been enjoying the show and you want to make sure others can too, please rate and review us. Your reviews help other people find our work. And as always, you can get this show and the other MSNBC podcasts add-free by subscribing to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts.
“Trumpland with Alex Wagner” is produced by Max Jacobs, along with Julia D’Angelo and Kay Guerrero. Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez. Additional production support comes from Hannah Holland. Our crew included Bill Hennessy on audio, and Liam Lee and Andrew Dunn on camera. Our audio engineers are Bob Mallory and Katie Lau. Bryson Barnes is head of audio production. Matthew Alexander is the executive producer of “Alex Wagner Tonight,” and Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. And I’m your host, Alex Wagner. We’ll see you again on Thursday, March 27th.