My parents raised me in Natchez, Miss.—a small town on the Mississippi River where my school teachers, dentist, mail carriers and mayor were majority Black. Legendary musician Olu Dara and author Richard Wright have called the historic city home.
The knotty soil on our family’s farm provided us with nourishment and soul-enriching traditions, passed along from generation to generation. As a child, horseback riding, martial arts and the caretaking duties of the farm filled my world.
I didn’t have the language for it then when I first witnessed my community’s subjugation to the pollution caused by the rise of industrial plants. Many people fell sick in our Mississippi town, and the culprit was fossil fuels.
Oil and gas extraction has historically been one of the major ineconomies in Natchez, and fossil-fuel production is directly linked to health issues like cancer, asthma, infertility and heart disease. Consistently, Mississippi ranks at the bottom of U.S. states for life expectancy.
I realized it didn’t just stop there—the same things were happening to my mother’s side of the family who lived in Baton Rouge, La. Plants were operating primarily in Black and brown communities, leaving behind toxic waste, noxious smog and chronic health conditions.
Along the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor, there are more than 200 petrochemical facilities and refineries, and cancer rates are nearly seven times higher than the national average. These were my first exposures to environmental injustice.
Growing up, I learned to adapt to the rhythms of the climate, understanding what to plant, when to plan it and how the Mississippi soil would respond. I believed these adaptive skills would equip us to handle almost anything. I was unprepared for the rapid climate changes in our region, and I didn’t realize the way in which our city’s backbeat of fossil-fuel pollution was contributing to climate change.
Air pollution and greenhouse gasses significantly drive the warming of our planet, intensifying storms, droughts, heatwaves and natural disasters. When the Great Texas Freeze struck in 2021, it affected my family’s farm. Many people, including my dad, were without power supply and were facing a type of cold he’d never experienced.
Over the years, hurricane season has become an increasingly anxious time for us, too, for farms like ours. This year’s hurricane season has been both extremely active and abnormal. In communities like mine where there’s great economic inequality, climate change and environmental injustice come together like the “perfect,” awful storm.
‘Fortify Our Commitment to Conserving and Protecting’
As a Black woman from the South, it is important to me that we address these environmental inequities, and providing Black farmers access to critical resources is one way. Black farmers have a long history of not being able to acquire loans for fertilizers, livestock and equipment from the United States Department of Agriculture.
The Biden Administration’s long-awaited payouts to our drastically shrinking population, following years of discrimination, is a start. We also need to build on the promise of the Inflation Reduction Act to provide good-paying, clean energy jobs. So far, more than 330,000 clean energy jobs are being created in nearly every U.S. state, according to the White House.
It is equally important that we fortify our commitment to conserving and protecting the land and water systems that give to us. The Mississippi River provides daily water resources to nearly 20 million Americans and it is drying out. Upholding our environmental regulations, like those outlined in the National Environmental Policy Act is another way that we can address inequality, protect our natural resources and prevent the build out of toxic energy infrastructure on our riverfronts and lands.
Addressing climate change and fostering environmental justice isn’t just about meeting immediate needs, but making sure everyone is fed after those of us here are gone. It’s going to take all of us working in tandem, using our respective expertise and resources, to build a more equitable and sustainable future. That is what community is about. That is the way of the farm.
While change is a constant in life that I embrace, there are some things like our basic right to clean water and access to healthy food, to which we should not have to adjust. Let us not only cherish our resources while they are here, but also make sure they are viable for future generations. And may we all flourish in new soil.
This MFP Voices essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
