Gerrymandering Louisiana's Electoral & Industrial Landscapes: A Political Ecology of Cancer Alley

Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district is a racially-gerrymandered constituency at the heart of Cancer Alley, snaking from Baton Rouge to New Orleans along the Mississippi River’s petrochemical corridor. It packs within its bounds Black and impoverished residents, along with the hazardous and toxic facilities their communities abut—at the expense of those residents’ political power, as well as their air, water, soil, and health. Long characterized by elite capital hegemony, earlier wielded by sugar barons and now by multinational oil, chemical, plastics, and other polluting firms, the landscapes of Louisiana’s 2nd district are dominated by what Woods (2003) dubs (neo)plantation power. Through an understanding of the region’s political, economic, and social dynamics developed through intensive participant observation, as well as the analysis of rich interview data with fenceline community residents, plant workers, labor leaders, environmental activists, politicians, and public officials, I illustrate through a case study of this gerrymandered constituency how elite capital perverts the political process to both maintain and advance its hegemony with laws like the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Furthermore, I outline one example of a framework for ordinary citizens to promote environmental justice and challenge such hegemony through populist mass politics—specifically, blue-green coalition-building between industrial labor and fenceline communities. By doing so, I put the “politics”—in the colloquial sense—into political ecology.