The quiet of natural landscapes has a way of resetting my body. As I walk the moss-draped trails of Couturie Forest in New Orleans City Park, beneath the towering sequoias in California, or along the rocky shoreline of Maine, my breath deepens, my pulse steadies, and my nervous system eases into a rhythm that feels instinctual.
Drawing in the forest’s earthy aroma or the saltwater air from the sea, it becomes clear that in places where land is protected and allowed to thrive, nature becomes medicine.
I’m a doctor. Every day I see how healing begins long before a patient walks into a clinic. It starts with what we breathe, where we live, what we eat, and whether we can rest.
These environments remind us of what our bodies crave: clean air, safe water, and space to recover. They aren’t luxuries. They’re the infrastructure that makes health possible. When the planet is wounded, so are we. Environmental degradation and human suffering are inseparable.
I also live in New Orleans, Louisiana, just downriver from Cancer Alley–an 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River where the air does not heal. Part of a region crowded by more than 200 industrial facilities and refineries, the corridor is lined with petrochemical plants pressed up against predominantly Black towns, homes, churches, and schools.
Residents face some of the nation’s highest cancer and asthma rates, with Black Louisianans hit hardest. Infertility, premature births, infant mortality, and other pregnancy complications remain alarmingly high and consistently understudied.
While Black women nationally are more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes compared to white women, added exposure to contaminants and endocrine disruptors makes the risks even higher in Louisiana. While the toxins can be measured via formulas and numbers, the grief that follows exceeds the scope of any data sheet.
This is what happens in Cancer Alley when the environment sickens instead of heals, when policies prioritize industry over people.
And these threats are quickly spreading. In June 2025, Trump-administration officials announced plans to terminate the 2001 Roadless Rule, opening more than 58 million acres of protected national forests to logging, mining, and development across 40 states.
For over two decades, the Roadless Rule had safeguarded watersheds, wildlife, and ecological systems that sustain human health. While this does not directly affect Louisiana, which has no national forest land, there are public health parallels. Some places must simply be left alone for native species, carbon storage, future generations, and the health of communities today.
When nature is disrupted, people must campaign for their very existence. Sharon Lavigne founded RISE St. James in 2018 to combat petrochemical expansion while defending Black ancestral land; her work helped halt construction of a $1.25 billion plastic plant that would have poisoned her community. Dr. Beverly Wright’s Deep South Center for Environmental Justice holds industry and government accountable while building research by and for communities of color. Her decades of work have shaped environmental justice policy nationwide and empowered communities to document and challenge toxic exposures in their own backyards.
The curtailing of the Roadless Rule and disregard for ecological safety in communities like Cancer Alley aren’t separate fights. They reflect the same pattern: environmental health traded away for industrial gain. And the harm is cumulative.
Louisiana has been buffeted by setbacks this year. It started in January when the Trump Administration reversed course on liquified natural gas, erasing a 2024 pause that women in Cancer Alley fought for and won. In February, the Administration revoked consideration of an 11-mile stretch of River Road in Cancer Alley as a National Historic Landmark District, erasing federal acknowledgment of Black heritage sites at the request of Louisiana’s own environmental agency.
The devastation to Louisiana’s environmental wellbeing deepened further in March, as the Trump Administration dismissed a federal lawsuit against Denka Performance Elastomer’s plant, reversing a Biden-era effort to hold the company accountable for alleged cancer risks in a largely Black community. Advocates warned that, moving forward, families would encounter more toxins with less recourse against industrial harm. Concurrently, the EPA proposed repealing greenhouse-gas emission standards for coal and gas plants, a move that only worsens air quality and fuels more climate-driven disease.
By July, the state had cut air monitoring grants, stopping EPA-funded groups from sharing pollution information with residents; this silenced critical community-gathered data that federal monitors miss. And in September, with minimal public input, St. James Parish gave Exxon approval to install pipelines carrying compressed carbon dioxide dangerously close to homes there. The gas is odorless, invisible, and can asphyxiate. Regulations and transparency remain scarce.
Louisiana is not alone. Across the South, federal infrastructure protections are being rescinded in ways that directly endanger health.
In Alabama’s Black Belt, millions of dollars dedicated to installing safe sewage systems were canceled, leaving families to contend with raw waste pooling in yards and the resurgence of hookworm infections. In Virginia’s Aberdeen Gardens, a historically Black neighborhood that floods every time it rains, a $20 million grant to modernize storm drains was rescinded, leaving roads impassable and trapping residents in place.
Pollution doesn’t just cause illness; it can alter growth even before birth. Toxic exposure affects ovulation, fetal development, and pregnancy outcomes. Studies link air pollution to preterm birth, low birth weight, and neurodevelopmental disorders. Yet these connections rarely appear in mainstream discussions about climate or health.
In bargaining for illness, we forfeit investments in healing. Greenspace reduces depression, anxiety, and stress. For children, parks improve attention and resilience. For adults, especially those managing trauma or caregiving burdens, time in nature improves sleep, mood, and immune function.
Unfortunately, access to these benefits isn’t equally distributed. Communities of color, particularly in Southern and urban neighborhoods, are three times more likely to live in nature-deprived areas without trees, shade, or trails. At the same time, as these communities lack greenspace, the few protected forests we all share are being deregulated and sold off, compounding harms for everyone.
Frontline communities understand this and are fighting back. In Louisiana, an appeals court ruled that residents of majority-Black districts in St. James Parish can proceed with their lawsuit seeking a moratorium on the construction of a plastics plant. This legal victory, and the finding that the parish has discriminated based on race for generations, affirms what communities have known all along: environmental racism is not accidental.
Reclaiming health means reclaiming land. Groups like Outdoor Afro, Latino Outdoors, and Native Women’s Wilderness further remind us that reconnecting with the land is both resistance and restoration.
Nature provides our foundation. Stripping it away is not commonsense management; it is the erosion of health itself. This reality beckons us to speak up when protections are at risk, support organizations defending the land, and insist that the places that sustain life remain safeguarded for everyone, now and generations to come.
We don’t need to guess what happens when we choose industry rather than ecosystems. Cancer Alley has shown us the cost to communities resulting from policy rollbacks. What’s being lost isn’t just land or trees or regulations. It’s life.
Rachel Bervell, MD, MPH, is a psychiatry resident in New Orleans and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, in partnership with the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice and Every Page Foundation. She focuses on public health advocacy at the intersection of reproductive and mental health, with an emphasis on health equity.
