Enough is enough

For decades, Bertha Myles has felt aggrieved by the foul odors besetting her home. Sitting on her porch, she recalls the Friday after Thanksgiving in 2006 when her husband died of prostate cancer. She fondly remembers his love for biscuits. Looking across the street, she thinks of Joyce, her neighbor, who also died of cancer. Myles reminisces about picking pecans and blackberries with Joyce in the forested patch nearby, "just having a good time over there, walking and talking."She mourns the loss of her backyard kitchen garden, which once thrived with peas, okra, turnips, mustard, and collard greens. “You couldn’t raise [the garden] no more because it wouldn’t grow,” says Myles, a 78-year-old retired nurse aide. “It’s got to be what’s in the air.”Myles lives in Alsen, an unincorporated community at the northern edge of what many people call Cancer Alley, a 137 km stretch along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Packed with more than 150 chemical plants and refineries, this industrial corridor has neighborhoods—predominantly Black and mostly low income—facing some of the highest cancer risks in the US. A 2022 study linked cancer rates to toxic air pollution in Louisiana’s most impoverished neighborhoods, including in this industrial corridor.There are few places in the country “with such a concentration of people in close proximity to large industrial pollution sources,” says Larry Starfield, former principal deputy assistant administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency’s office of enforcement and compliance. Myles lives next to an infamous landfill,