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Earlier this year, the Trump administration announced plans to close an office at the Environmental Protection Agency, an office tasked with protecting the most vulnerable Americans from environmental harms. Now many of the tools that communities used to figure out where pollution is happening, they've disappeared. NPR's Nate Perez visited one community in Louisiana where the loss of pollution data is already having an impact.
NATE PEREZ, BYLINE: Eighty-five-year-old Robert Taylor drives me around his hometown, Reserve, Louisiana, in his red pickup truck.
ROBERT TAYLOR: This was originally a dairy farm. All of this was cow pastures.
PEREZ: We end up in front of the two-story brick house Taylor built in St. John Parish in 1969. By then, he noticed a change in the demographics.
TAYLOR: The white people were moving out. This area here, which was maybe 10% Black, is right now 99% Black.
PEREZ: Taylor says the white population in Reserve left before the DuPont plant began operating next door. He says there were other changes, too.
TAYLOR: You know, we noticed the difference in the quality of the air, the odors, the plants that would die.
PEREZ: That synthetic rubber plant announced this month it would indefinitely suspend production. Denka, which runs the plant, cites financial losses as the reason. But Taylor says the damage has already been done.
TAYLOR: That house right there, the father survived the first attack of cancer. Ten years later, it came back and killed him.
PEREZ: Robert, you're telling me there, here, there, all affected?
TAYLOR: I didn't go this way.
PEREZ: Oh, my God.
TAYLOR: They call this place Cancer Alley.
PEREZ: Cancer Alley. This is where more than 150 petrochemical facilities and oil refineries operate along the Mississippi River corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Kim Terrell's with Tulane University's Environmental Law Clinic. She says an environmental protection agency tool called EJScreen helped St. John make a big discovery.
KIM TERRELL: EJScreen indicated that that community had more cancer risk than anywhere else in the nation.
PEREZ: A recent Johns Hopkins study found a total of 45 hazardous air pollutants in Louisiana's River Parishes. National emission standards were set for some of those pollutants under the Biden administration. It was a start, says Gail LeBoeuf, a lifelong resident of St. James Parish, which is not far from St. John.
GAIL LEBOEUF: So you had people trying to trying to work within the system that exists to give some help, but we're seeing all that pushback now.
PEREZ: That pushback she talks about comes from President Trump, who signed an executive order earlier this year to end DEI programs. As part of that, EJScreen was removed in February. Then the administration sent nearly 300 letters to staffers at the EPA's Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights Office that they could be fired. Matthew Tejada's a former official at the EJ office.
MATTHEW TEJADA: It was really under President Biden that you saw the government really start to evolve towards being more equitable and more just.
PEREZ: Tejada points to Justice40 as an example. It promised to deliver at least 40% of federal climate programs to overpolluted communities. Tejada says it was an effort to bring benefits to the most vulnerable communities.
TEJADA: Because they're not making it to the folks that deserve those benefits the most because they're the least protected.
PEREZ: But not everyone agrees with Tejada. The EPA's spokesperson, Molly Vaseliou, said in an email that environmental justice has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activist groups instead of addressing specific environmental issues. But many in the River Parishes disagree with that. Gail LeBoeuf says they're going to keep fighting for clean air and water.
LEBOEUF: The fight is about democracy and equal justice under the law.
PEREZ: But without EJScreen, LeBoeuf says that fight has only become harder. Researchers have archived EJScreen, but if the data isn't updated, the tool becomes obsolete. That's why the Sierra Club and other groups are now suing the federal government to get EJScreen and other data back as a federal tool so that people like Robert Taylor and others in the River Parishes can fight for a healthy environment.
Nate Perez, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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