OneRouge Community Check-In - Week 105

As the Walls Project gears up to celebrate our 10th Anniversary, we are in the process of creating a new three-year strategic plan. We would greatly appreciate your candid and honest feedback to help elevate The Walls through this process as we look forward to our next decade of creating positive change in our community: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZZGL2RF

Enlight, Unite, & Ignite!

#OneRouge Week #105

Climate Change: the Human &

Economic Impacts, Part 2

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Notes

Dr. Alessandra Jerolleman (Advocate, Disaster Resilience & Hazard Mitigation)

I’ve had the good fortune of working with coastal indiginous communities for over 20 years now. Much of my work is with rural and indiginous communities. Much of our laws here don’t work. I focus a lot around issues of equity and justice. What is asked of someone who owns a nice fishing camp vs what is asked of the indiginous communities in the bayou. The intersection of law, policy and community. What’s the lived experience and the role that empathy has to play. These are real experiences. It’s not an abstract policy. It’s lives. It’s history, and it’s trauma. Sometimes as professionals get taught to leave emotion at the door and I don’t think we can do that.

Colette Pichon Battle (Executive Director, Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy)

I’m in St. Tammany on the traditional land of the choctaw. I’m a daughter of the bayou. Yes there are black country folk. We got that direct hit here. Nothing you can do but deal with that. Disaster is how I got to this game. As a corporate lawyer in DC, I came home to help and then BP oil drilling happened. It was that point that I realized something was happening in our region. My work since 2010 has been focused on climate. Before that it was equitable climate recovery. Now opening that up to BP recovery, which was the same group of people, you see a lot of the problems. IF we’re going to make solutions we’re going to have to make new systems. In 2010 we started doing people’s movement assemblies. We’re not just dealing with a breakdown of systems, we’re dealing with what happens to societies' regions when they’re asked not to participate in their solutions. The solution we’re pushing now is the Gulf Green New Deal. Over 300 organizations are moving to work together on solutions. The work is getting communities to work together so we can have a future we can survive in.

Darryl Malek-Wiley (Senior Organizing Representative, Environmental Justice Organizer at Sierra Club)

I’m a hospital brat. I wanted to be a nurse. My father wanted to be a nurse and this was the time when men were not nurses. I’ve been an environmental activist since 1972. Everybody deserves clean air, clean water, clean land. But there’s some people who make money by making sure those things are not clean and are polluted. When I started this in the 70s, there were not a lot of jobs doing this, so I became a carpenter. I was living in Mobile, and I had a friend who said I need a house painted in New Orleans. And I did that and I didn’t move back to Mobile. This was now in the 80s. There was environmental work happening, but mostly on the coast. I was drawn to the river. The Mississippi River has always drawn to me. So I started listening to the stories that were happening in the communities up and down the river. In 1988 we did this crazy thing called the Great Louisiana Toxic March. For 11 days we marched from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Along the way we stopped and talked to people. We shifted perceptions about the chemical pollution industry by 37%. And I’ve continued doing that. The fights in Louisiana are not small. They’re big and they require deep questioning of who is in power and who is not. One of my allies is Gen Russel Honore. I came back to Louisiana to find out democracy is owned by Exxon and Shell. We have 140+ lobbyists of the chemical industry at the capitol.

COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS

The centering of community has been something we’re hearing more about. How has this shift come about?

Dr. Alessandra Jerolleman - it’s become more and more clear to some professionals that we’re not going to make any headway until we listen to communities. I think community has become a buzzword. It’s easy for agencies to use the words but not do the right thing. That’s something I wrestle with. In the world of emergency management we talk a lot about community and it seems new to them. They struggle to think about community as something more than just a cog to move around the board.

What does policy look like in this space?

Colette Pichon Battle - Many of us are awakening to the long term impacts of settler colonialism. Racism doesn’t just affect the group being targeted, it also affects those in the majority. What we’re realizing now is the health of the planet requires all of us to do our part. To do that you have to understand that we are all connected. And that’s why community as a strategy is emerging right now. What I saw was laws and policy that were discriminatory. After Katrina we saw for whom the system works. As a lawyer your flag goes up. We have to take this to court and we have to change this. In BP, watching that claims process, our federal government negotiated our rights away. Dispersants were being sprayed on people even though they were banned in other countries. More disasters are coming. There are people who make money off of harming others. Now we’re dealing with corporate accountability. Clean up the mess you’ve made and stop accelerating the climate imbalance that will harm us. This is where we have to start making a stand. Even if you are okay, there are over 100 million in our country who are going to be in trouble because they cannot afford things. We have a system that only allows money to go in the hands of some. This is a justice fight and almost all of the issues you know and understand are intersecting on this one. I’m not trying to take away anyone’s job, I’m trying to save people’s lives.

What is the environmental impact of these companies coming in? How are these communities they are in are still impoverished?

Darryl Malek-Wiley- It goes back to Louisiana plantations. The petrochemical plants in the 80s bought the plantations. They are the new plantations. Chemicals in our blood. Chemicals in women’s blood. Chemicals are in babies' blood. We have gone for so long thinking we’ll just put it in the air and it will not hurt anybody, but the truth is, it’s there. We’re starting to get the proof now. They are heavily impacting us. Causing all of these diseases. It’s not a myth, it’s a reality. Cancer-death ally is real. It’s dying because you’re not able to breathe. Carbon capture is the new phrase. They want to trap all this under the state wildlife refuges. If these pipelines break, you get a Co2 cloud that will cause your death, even though you can’t see it. They’ve been doing this since 1901. They’ve been treating this state as a way to make money off us. This whole system is broken. It’s geared toward people getting the short end of the stick. It’s time for us to stop. Newsletter called Above the fold. Give it a look.

How did oil get in all our clothes?

Colette Pichon Battle - Half of the things in your home are byproducts of these things. This was marketed to us. There used to be a process by which we didn’t just throw things away. Cheaper products have all kinds of products that are bad for us. And then this gets to mass consumption and mass production. When we’re dealing with the climate crisis we need big, bold moves. Let’s talk about cotton. There’s a movement to rematriate land, and a new way to regrow cotton. How do you keep the soil healthy when you grow cotton? Who is making money? Why certain people can and cannot get in a certain industry. They are telling you they are investing in things but they are not. They are pushing laws that prevent people from doing the things until they get control over the market. We are in a system that is absolutely broken. It is our democracy and we’ve never reached it. We have to do better, we have to be more sustainable. Clothing, agriculture and transportation, we’re going to have to make some big moves.

Manny Patole - I do a whole couple weeks on fast fashion and people don’t understand why I’m talking about this in urban sustainability. How are you going to have a sustainable urban environment if you’re not going to understand energy. Post disaster, where people are living is where you see the most equity. If you don’t step back and see the big picture it’s hard for people to start connecting the dots. When you think about fast fashion, 25 years ago the industry only had 2 cycles. Now there are 50. When we’re talking about a lot of these things here, our choices matter and how we look at them matters.

Dr. Alessandra Jerolleman - Hurricane Ida was a depressing microcosm about how indiginous communities are an afterthought at best. With Ida what we saw was a lot of interest in New Orleans, but the eye went right over point aux chien. It took three weeks for the tribe leader to be in touch with leaders. The first deliveries of water were driven down by volunteers. They had no access to government resources. Displacement is an important question. It is one thing to work together and it is another to watch your lands get stolen. Someone made a lot of money off of camps. People who accept buyouts are at equal risk in the places where they move.

Darryl Malek-Wiley - In Baton Rouge you can drive up Scenic Hwy. Exxon is extracting millions of gallons of waters from the Baton Rouge aquifers. That’s going to cause salt water intrusion. We made a sweetheart deal and we need to shine light on those deals. We need to look at both pictures. We need to get these big massive industry to really cut back on their emissions on air, water and land. Where is Southern University located? Right in the middle of toxic system. Where is LSU? In the clean part of the city. If that’s not racism, I don’t know what is. There’s no mass transit.

Colette Pichon Battle - If we want to be honest, which is not always the easiest thing, then you have to be courageous enough to the blatant things. Who do these things serve? We are all upholding this system. The climate crisis is rolling right over the middle and cracking all of the systems. The worst situation will be for the people in our society that we have valued the least. We have come up with systems of devaluing. Socially, through our silence, have allowed for that system to occur. The last 7 years are the hottest on the planet. We are creating because of our own comfort a situation that is untenable to those who do not have. There are millions of people who do not have this ease of access to very basic things. The climate impact is not the heat, but what will happen when these people are pushed to the brink and forced to fight for their survival. There is one system at play here, and it is our energy system and Louisiana is number 2. This is part of our accountability to a global population that will not survive if industry does not stop. In order to have the courage to address climate, we’re going to have to deal with this other stuff. And the impact will not be on the most vulnerable, they were targeted. Its not going to harm just them, it’s going to harm you too. It is a terrifying and exciting moment. If we lean into that ridiculous notion of exceptionalism and individualism, then we will all perish.

Community Announcements

Hello friends! Please make sure to give a listen to our new podcast. It’s called Walls Plus One and it features so many of the topics and people you’ve heard on this call. Here are all the ways you can listen. https://linktr.ee/wallsplusone

East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition will host its monthly general meeting on Thursday, May 19th at 6 p.m. on our Facebook page EBRPPRC.

Hi everyone! I wanted to invite everyone to Mayor-President Broome’s State of Housing Panel next week which will be publicly unveiling Alfredo’s housing study. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-state-of-baton-rouge-housing-tickets-337545657147

Mayor's Office event:. State of BR Housing. Tues. May 17 @ 6 pm. Downtown library. Register here:. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-state-of-baton-rouge-housing-tickets-337545657147

KidzFEST in Scotlandville

Saturday, June 11

BEEC park at Badley Road

8:30 registration

Event - 9-2

If you have capacity to host a young person at your organization or business this summer, fill out this interest form for the Mayor's Youth Workforce Experience! https://www.brla.gov/FormCenter/Mayor-President-Office-17/MYWE-Business-Engagement-Interest-Form-181

HB 298 End Slavery bill will be heard in the Civil Law and Procedure Committee on Monday, May 16th at 9:00 a.m.