Environmental Justice Victory

Shintech, the Japanese chemical company, has thrown in the towel. Last week company officials announced they had abandoned plans to build one of the world's largest polyvinyl chloride plants in the small black hamlet of Convent, Louisiana. Shintech's plans for the site, which sits in the heart of cancer alley, met with fierce local opposition. Residents complained that the surrounding oil refineries, chemical plants and fertilizer facilities had already combined to make the local St. James Parish the most toxic in the nation.

St. James is also one of the poorest parishes in Louisiana and the small towns near the cluster of chemical plants are nearly all black. Less than 50 percent of the children in the area graduate from high school. More than 60 percent of the residents are unemployed. The average per capita income is $7,200. The cancer rate in St. James is among the highest in Louisiana, a state that ranks fifth in the nation in cancer deaths.

These statistics made St. James attractive to the Shintech Corporation. Shintech enjoyed the unwavering support of Louisiana's millionaire governor Mike Foster, whose bank account is flush with funds from the sugar and oil industries. In 1996 Foster offered Shintech an amazing trove of inducements to build its plant in St. James. Most alluring was the $120 million in property tax relief and enterprise zone tax credits--that's nearly $800,000 for each full-time job produced by the plant.

On the verge of defeat, the residents of Convent turned to the Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic for help. The clinic is run by law professor Robert Kuehn and is staffed by law students at the school. Together they crafted a series of law suits and administrative challenges against the chemical plant and the Environmental Protection Agency. Among these filings was the first law suit trying to enforce the high-minded language of an executive order on environmental justice issued by President Clinton in 1994. The first-of-a-kind petition charged that the EPA should deny Shintech a federal air pollution permit because toxic emissions from the factory would disproportionately harm poor folks and people of color.

This act of defiance enraged Governor Foster, who viciously attacked the law clinic. Foster fumed that he would revoke Tulane University's tax status, demanded that clinic lawyers be investigated for "barratry" (vexatious incitement to litigation) and urged the mighty New Orleans Business Roundtable to suspend contributions to the university until the law clinic is brought to its knees.

In a move that sparked protests from academics and legal scholars, the Louisiana Supreme Court earlier this year exhibited its fealty to the governor and his corporate cronies by ruling that law clinics staffed by unlicensed law students could no longer represent low-income communities, such as Convent.

While Tulane University held firm, the Clinton Administration caved in. Under pressure from Louisiana Senator John Breaux, an oil industry Democrat, the EPA ruled that the eight million pounds of poisonous chemicals a year that will fall on the black residents of St. James Parish from the Shintech plant will not violate their constitutional rights

Even so, Shintech and Foster were defeated by a sustained legal assault and hard-nosed community organizing. The chemical giant has retreated from Convent, but not entirely from doing business in the state. Shintech has unveiled plans to construct a scaled-down PVC plant further up the Mississippi River in Iberville Parish, next to a huge Dow Chemical plant. Shintech has at least learned a public relations lesson. They've already recruited the Keystone Center (a Colorado-based greenwashing/negotiating outfit) to come into the new community as an advance team, attempting to pacify potential opposition.

But the Law Clinic remains on the case. "Another battle will be joined as they try to permit the new site, " Bob Kuehn says. "But with our recent victories, we may start to see a change in corporate behavior as a result of community efforts to raise environmental justice issues."