They put out recycling bins and picked up cans during and after parades. In the end, this group of plucky nonprofit groups, with support from the city’s Recycle Dat! initiative, tripled the recycling totals for Uptown parades, diverting an impressive amount of trash from the River Birch landfill.
Advocates still hope to block the permits for Formosa’s proposed petrochemical complex in St. James Parish, a community at the heart of new research into the health effects of air pollution.
To rebuild marshes in the Barataria Basin requires terraces of sand, a map of nearby orphan oil wells and miles of pipe to carry dredged river sediment to degraded wetlands.
Some activists worry that the daytime state task force hearings in Baton Rouge on the issue are missing important voices from affected Black communities
In the same week, a judge again barred the parish from making the Greenfield Property industrial. And parish-council critic Joy Banner filed a First Amendment lawsuit.
Banner planned to ask the council why they were retaining a lawyer to defend its president from personal ethical concerns. But she was interrupted by the council chairman, who cited an invalidated statute and warned her that, if she spoke, she could face criminal prosecution.
Though there is still room for mitigation, the cycle of flooding and drought will become more extreme.
Fifty years after the historic 1973 flood, land is still forming in the Wax Lake and Atchafalaya River deltas. It’s held in place by the roots of coastal trees, which protect from flooding and hurricane winds and store carbon dioxide.
As St. John, the nation’s most climate-vulnerable place, opens the state’s seventh Community Lighthouse, other struggling communities try to fight LNG export terminals and open community solar projects.
