In a unanimous decision in April, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit gave new life to a hard-fought effort by residents of St. James Parish in Louisiana to seek a moratorium on new petrochemical plant construction and expansion. This reversal of a lower court’s dismissal in 2024 marks a promising moment in the fight for life in a particularly polluted part of the area known as “Cancer Alley.”
Cancer Alley is an approximately 85-mile stretch of communities along the banks of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge where people live on the fence lines of some 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations—reportedly the largest concentration of such plants in the Western Hemisphere. Throughout Cancer Alley, there is clear evidence of a disproportionate burden of harm on the area’s Black and low income residents from the polluting emissions of fossil fuel and petrochemical operations, including elevated cancer rates, among many other health problems.
The lawsuit, filed in 2023 against St. James Parish by Inclusive Louisiana, Mount Triumph Baptist Church, and RISE St. James, alleges decades of environmental racism and discriminatory building of industrial facilities that have concentrated toxic air pollution in predominantly Black neighborhoods. They cite “a legacy of slavery and white supremacy in Louisiana and St. James Parish specifically” that has forced “plaintiffs’ members [to] live in some of the most polluted, toxic—and lethal—census tracts in the country.”
In a major victory for Cancer Alley residents, the Fifth Circuit reversed a district court’s decision to dismiss the case on procedural grounds. The district court had held that plaintiffs lacked standing because their case rested solely on a decade-old zoning plan and thus was time-barred due to a statute of limitations.
Rejecting this view, the Fifth Circuit agreed with the organizations and held that their suit should be understood to target years of allegedly discriminatory decisions reflecting a “longstanding pattern and practice of racially discriminatory land-use decisions” that has polluted majority-Black neighborhoods and destroyed ancestral burial sites of their enslaved ancestors.
The decision, while only one step in a long effort to improve conditions in Louisiana, is one bright spot under a new national administration that has announced deregulation of the fossil fuel industry, gutted the EPA’s ability to address environmental harm disproportionately concentrated within Black, poor, and minority communities, and dropped its own air pollution case against two of Cancer Alley’s largest petrochemical operators.
The fossil fuel and petrochemical industry in the Louisiana area has for years devastated the health, lives, and environment of residents. In 2024, Human Rights Watch documented that residents of Cancer Alley suffer the effects of extreme pollution from these plants, facing elevated rates and risks of maternal, reproductive, and newborn health harm, cancer, and respiratory ailments. Parts of Cancer Alley have the highest risk of cancer from industrial air pollution in the United States.
The global fossil fuel industry has deep roots in Louisiana, which was home to one of the world’s first productive oil wells in 1901. As the plants arrived along the Mississippi River beginning primarily in the 1960s, many took and retain today the names of the slave plantations on which they were built. Many “Free Towns” in the region founded by formerly enslaved people were taken over by industry, their residents pushed or forced out. Operations in Cancer Alley now include oil refineries, petrochemical plants, oil storage tank farms, and fertilizer and pesticide manufacturers that use fossil fuels as their primary feedstock.
As early as the 1970s, residents, workers, and researchers began investigating and exposing toxic emissions and environmental and public health harm from these operations. Today, Louisiana has the worst pollution of any state in the US, with the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries contributing the most pollution. Black residents in Cancer Alley face even higher rates of exposure than white residents, with the most polluting operations disproportionately concentrated within Black communities.
With the lawsuit now cleared of procedural hurdles, the district court can now review the arguments presented by affected communities. This is a critical opportunity to uphold the rights of injured and overburdened communities, stop the reckless expansion of polluting industries, and set a precedent for holding authorities accountable. The revival of this community-led lawsuit offers renewed hope that, even against entrenched industry interests, human rights retain their power to address injustice.
Richard Pearshouse is the environmental rights director at Human Rights Watch.
