Environmental defenders from Cancer Alley call for climate reparations at the United Nations

December 2, 2024

Environmental justice leaders from RISE St. James Louisiana traveled to the United Nations in New York to shine a light on the climate and environmental harms linked to the legacies of slavery and systemic racism that affect their communities in southern Louisiana. In doing so, they join an emerging chorus of voices calling for climate reparations in the United States.

RISE St. James is advocating for reparations for intersecting climate and environmental harms during a session of the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent at the U.N. Headquarters in New York from December 2-6, 2024. RISE St. James is accompanied at the U.N. by students and staff from the Georgetown Environmental Law & Justice Clinic. The Clinic teaches students key lawyering and advocacy skills through conducting legal work on behalf of underserved clients and communities in environmental injustice, pollution control, climate, and natural resources matters. This semester, a team of Clinic students supported RISE St. James in preparing a written submission to the U.N. Working Group about the need for reparatory justice to address climate and environmental harms in Louisiana.

The representatives of RISE St. James hail from an area of Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley” due to the disproportionate cancer rates that residents face. Hundreds of fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities operate in Cancer Alley, and they are disproportionately located near Black communities. Many of these facilities are located on the same land where plantations previously exploited the labor of enslaved people.

While Black communities and advocates have long called for reparations for slavery, structural discrimination, and race-based violence—leading to notable recent successes, such as in the cities of Evanston and Palm Springs and the state of California—RISE St. James is among the first grassroots groups to demand reparations for climate injustices linked to legacies of slavery and systemic racism in the United States.

The fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities in Cancer Alley contribute significantly to climate disruption, which exacerbates storms, flooding, and heat-related harms in one of the areas that is hardest hit by the climate crisis in the United States. At the same time, these facilities produce toxic emissions associated with increased rates of cancer, respiratory diseases, and reproductive harms, as well as other health, social, and cultural harms to local residents.

Leading the call for reparatory justice is Sharon Lavigne, Founder and Executive Director of RISE St. James Louisiana and 2021 Goldman Prize winner, who is addressing the U.N. Working Group today.

Lavigne said: “We are fighting for our lives and for the lives of future generations. Our community members deserve justice and reparations for the devastation the industrial buildout has caused in our community.”

Harms associated with petrochemical facilities in Cancer Alley are not limited to toxic emissions and climate-related impacts, as Shamyra Lavigne-Davey, who is the Executive Assistant of RISE St. James Louisiana, points out.

Lavigne-Davey said: “Formosa Plastics seeks to construct a new petrochemical complex at a site where the graves of enslaved people are located, despite fierce opposition from our communities. This serves as an example of how our communities are prevented from participating in environmental decision-making in this area.”

Ahead of this U.N. session in New York, Georgetown Law students worked nearly full time in the Clinic on this matter, while gaining legal skills transferable to their future work as attorneys.

Alyssa-Dean Huie, a student attorney in the Georgetown Clinic, said: “RISE St. James continues to fight tirelessly for environmental justice for communities in Cancer Alley. It is such a privilege to work with them to highlight the importance of considering these complex and interconnected climate and environmental harms as part of reparatory justice at this U.N. session.”

The U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent is mandated by the U.N. Human Rights Council to study the problems of racial discrimination against people of African descent and make proposals for the elimination of such discrimination. At its session this week, the U.N. Working Group will focus on reparatory justice for people of African descent, in light of the “enslavement, trafficking, colonization, torture, and segregation of Africans and people of African descent for the last four centuries.”

Sarah Dorman, Supervising Attorney & Teaching Fellow with the Georgetown Clinic, said: “Climate change poses one of the greatest threats to human rights today, and the impacts of climate disruption and toxic pollution fall most heavily on communities—like those in Cancer Alley—that have historically been subjected to discrimination and marginalization. For these reasons, the U.N. Working Group should center climate and environmental justice in its recommendations for reparatory justice for people of African descent.”

This engagement with the U.N. builds on legal research and analysis on climate reparations that the Clinic undertook in service of RISE St. James, with the institutional support of Earth Island Institute, beginning in the fall of 2024.

Professor Sara Colangelo, Director of the Georgetown Clinic, said: “It is an honor for the Clinic to support RISE St. James members as they fight for environmental justice, and fight for the health and dignity of their families and of the generations that came before and will follow them.”

Scott Hochberg, General Counsel at Earth Island Institute, said: “We hope that the U.N. Working Group heeds the urgent calls for comprehensive climate reparations, both for residents in St. James and all communities affected by toxic linkage of slavery and environmental damage.”

RISE St. James Louisiana previously testified before the U.N. Working Group during its 2021 session focused on environmental justice. RISE St. James Louisiana is a project of Earth Island Institute, an international environmental organization and fiscal sponsor to more than 75 projects that are creating solutions to the interconnected challenges and threats facing our planet.

For more information, please contact:

RISE St. James Louisiana

Gary Watson

Communications Director for RISE St. James

Gary@garywatsonllc.com

Georgetown Environmental Law & Justice Clinic

Sarah Dorman

Supervising Attorney & Teaching Fellow

sarah.dorman@georgetown.edu

Sara Colangelo

Associate Professor of Law & Director, Environmental Law & Justice Clinic

sara.colangelo@law.georgetown.edu

Earth Island Institute

Raquel Trinidad
Communications Director
rtrinidad@earthisland.org

Clinic Students Take On Environmental Injustices of National Importance and Local Necessity

Environmental justice is at the heart of the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic’s work as students identify and engage with environmental injustices across society. This semester, ELJC students will work on matters of national importance and local necessity as they immerse themselves in the role of an environmental attorney.

Professor Sara Colangelo participated in the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic as a Georgetown Law student. Now, she is entering her second year directing the ELJC with environmental justice centered at the heart of the Clinic’s work.
The Clinic’s mission includes working for underserved communities disproportionately affected by environmental burdens—specifically legacy pollution—or marginalized in the environmental decision-making process. The second piece of the Clinic’s mission is student training: helping students build client-facing skills and develop habits relevant to professional practice.

The Clinic stands on the deep foundation laid by three decades of work by Professor Hope Babcock, whom Colangelo learned under as a Clinic student. Through her clinical experience and subsequent work in environmental law, Colangelo realized how foundational and important the experience is to students, regardless of whether they hope to work in the private sector, government, or public interest field. One priority for the Clinic is to expose students to work tackling environmental injustices spanning litigation, regulatory, and advisory practices.
“We offer different types of projects for different teams because we really want to foster students’ ability to identify and engage with those environmental inequities across different types of work,” Colangelo said.

The Clinic uses three analytic lenses to influence its work: environmental justice; client-centered lawyering; and the role of the lawyer within the administrative state, which emphasizes thinking about how the administrative process may exclude groups in decision-making that affects people’s health and quality of life. These lenses shape every part of the Clinic’s work, from learning goals to project selection.

Colangelo said that one of her most significant goals is for the Clinic to participate in matters of both national importance and local necessity, which the Clinic is already accomplishing. Last year, the Clinic filed amicus briefs before the Supreme Court and litigated a challenge to government agency approval of pollution standards for industrial chemicals threatening Maryland waterways and the subsistence fisherpeople who rely on them, among many other projects. This semester, students will file briefs in two high-stakes Clean Air Act cases before the D.C. Circuit focused on pollution with a disproportionate impact on communities with environmental justice concerns.

Through a local, ongoing community lawyering project, students have also filed comments on proposed nuisance regulations and are developing a comprehensive environmental justice action plan for a DC neighborhood. The Clinic hopes the plan can serve as a model for other wards across the city to use and adjust for their specific concerns and how they might advocate for change. Additionally, students are partnering with a national environmental organization to work on behalf of tribal communities on the frontlines of climate migration in Louisiana.

Students work in teams and typically begin projects by scoping out the matter. This involves interviewing the client, community members, or environmental groups to identify concerns and goals. Next, students proceed to fact and legal investigation. Throughout their project, students use a collaborative and iterative problem-solving process called “rounds” to identify and discuss challenges they face in their representation. Students finish the semester with a significant writing piece, which varies from project to project: some students complete a report, strategic advocacy roadmap, petition for rulemaking, or brief. Additionally, students give a final oral presentation to their clients.

Former Clinic student Mariah Heinzerling worked with her team to write a petition for regulatory rulemaking, aiming to protect vulnerable populations, including prison laborers, who clean up oil spills. The paper explained how the law worked, how their suggestions would change it, and an overview of what else was needed to affect the change their client hoped to see.

“I think the most shocking part to me was how small a change could be while still affecting a meaningful difference,” Heinzerling said.

The Clinic has twice-weekly seminars throughout the semester, which begin with foundational lessons on environmental justice, administrative law, and other key facets of environmental practice. As the semester progresses, the seminars focus on skills the students can take into their future practices.

“I felt like every single seminar was actually geared toward making me a better lawyer and an effective lawyer—especially in the environmental law context, but more broadly, as well,” Heinzerling said. “I always felt like I was learning something practical, as well as something that made me more excited to pursue environmental law.”
In addition to the seminars, students meet with clients and lead weekly meetings with their supervisors and peers. In sum, the Clinic models a full-time job, with students working roughly 42 hours a week.

“We want our students to feel completely immersed in the role of an environmental attorney,” Colangelo said.

All eight of last semester’s students now work in environmental law or related fields. One past student wrote in their anonymous course evaluation that the experience felt “slowed down and zoomed in”—which is exactly what the Clinic is aiming for, Colangelo said.

“We want students to have an experience where they can slow down and be reflective in their thought process,” she said. The Clinic wants students to have the opportunity to think through their decision-making process—considering why they pursued a certain research strategy or asked the client specific questions over others, for example—because they likely will not have the opportunity to do so with significant feedback from supervisors in the future.
The slowed-down and zoomed-in process can sometimes face challenges in the inherent urgency of the work. One of the challenges with a clinic focused on issues such as climate change and public health is that people come to the field and want to get the work done, Colangelo said.

“Environmental justice issues impact the way people live their lives every day: the sights, the smells. What is the quality of air that children are breathing?” she said.

“The types of projects we do are important for our local communities and for our national safety in a lot of ways, but the clinic process isn’t just churning out work,” Colangelo said. “It has got to be reflective, and it has got to really help students develop skills through experiences that they can translate into practice.”