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LA Environmental Activist Dumped For Taking Pictures Of Exxon
Posted by Pile
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[Industry] |
 After touring a local neighborhood with some college students, and taking pictures from a public sidewalk of an ExxonMobil refinery in Baton Rouge last month, Willie Fontenot, a community liaison officer for the Louisiana attorney general's office for 27 years, found himself faced with the option of forced retirement or getting the boot from AG Charles Foti. |
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A longtime environmental-justice advocate, Fontenot had been accompanying a group of master's students from Antioch New England Graduate School's environmental-studies program on a tour of the neighborhood surrounding the facility, which in 1989 was the site of a massive explosion when a 500,000-gallon fuel-storage tank ruptured. He was showing the students an example of a neighborhood buyout -- several blocks of homes near the refinery had been abandoned after the company paid their residents to relocate.
That particular controversy has long since blown over, but the ExxonMobil facility is just one of more than 50 petrochemical plants and oil refineries in the Mississippi Delta region between Baton Rogue and New Orleans, referred to by industry as "Chemical Alley" and locals as "Cancer Alley." Louisiana has among the highest rates of cancer mortality in the nation, and many cases are concentrated in the communities near this strip of plants.
Fontenot has helped citizens in the Mississippi Delta and neighboring states organize more than 400 citizen groups to protect their communities against corporate polluters. "He is one of the most effective environmental-justice advocates in the region," said Paul Templet, an environmental-studies professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. "There aren't many people who have worked as long and hard as Willie to help people who can't help themselves -- the poorest of the poor -- and that scares a lot of people in the government, especially here in Louisiana where the oil and manufacturing industries have a lot of political power." Sierra Club President Carl Pope is also a fan: "Willie Fontenot has been a hero of mine since I met him in a bayou in 1984," he said.
I guess none of this means anything when the LA Attorney General gets a call, presumably from a high-ranking oil executive who wants this environmental guy whacked. |
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| Posted by howie on 2005-05-01 12:50:56 | Nice blog. I, too, have a blog; a very progressive one.
http://educationalvignette.blogspot.com/ |
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