Meet the Mothers Fighting Polluting Industries in the Nation’s Worst “Sacrifice Zones”
By Katherine Niemczyk
Mothers are the unsung heroes of the climate movement. They have been front and center in the fight against the polluting industries responsible for the poor health of their children and entire communities. We profile three of them, one from Louisiana and two from Texas, whose children have fallen ill by pollution produced by fossil fuel companies in their neighborhoods, an environmental injustice shared by Black, Brown and Indigenous communities throughout the United States.
THE DOT-CONNECTOR
When Roishetta Ozane’s 10-year-old daughter Kamea was diagnosed with Gianotti-Crosti Syndrome — a rare skin disease that causes an itchy, blistering rash — doctors assured them, she would heal in only a few short weeks. But she didn’t.
“It was just skin condition after skin condition after skin condition,” Roishetta says. Dozens of trips to the health center later, doctors finally confirmed what she already suspected. Kamea’s skin condition — the discoloration and continuous breakouts — was being caused by something in the environment. And with two other children already suffering from similar, ongoing and unexplained ailments, Roishetta put her foot down.
In 2021, she founded The Vessel Project, a mutual aid nonprofit that provides emergency services to vulnerable populations and empowers women of color to provoke change in their own communities. Recognizing that families like her’s don’t always have the resources or time to fight against environmental hazards like pollution, her priority is to “make people whole again.”
For context, her home of Sulphur — a city with a poverty rate of nearly 20% — is located about 200 miles west of Cancer Alley, an 85-mile strip of land along the east side of the state where cancer occurs at a far higher rate than the national average. In 2021, ProPublica mapped out the nation’s sacrifice zones, identifying Cancer Alley as one of the most polluted pockets of the country. But southwest Louisiana, the data showed, is the country’s largest hotspot for cancer-causing air.
The culprits? Producers of ethylene oxide, vinyl chloride, benzene, and liquefied natural gas (LNG), all of which have turned the Louisiana region where Roishetta lives into a “sacrifice zone,” a geographic area impaired by environmental hazards, like pollution and toxic chemicals.
Just recently, Roishetta recalls, a leak at BioLab — a Westlake facility producing chlorine tablets — triggered a shelter-in-place for the surrounding communities, with residents complaining of burning in their eyes, noses, and throats.
“I can’t ask people to fight against this plant, or that industry, if that person is trying to put out their own fires… if they don’t have food, if they don’t have water, if their children don’t have diapers. That’s why I’m trying to meet their needs first.”
Beyond aiding families in her own community, Roishetta and the Vessel Project were among a group of environmental activists and organizations who successfully sued and blocked petrochemical giant Formosa Plastics from building in Louisiana. And she most recently helped to push through legislation in the Louisiana House that would mandate air monitoring at industrial plants.
But with little help from politicians overall, Roishetta has turned her attention now to Big Banks, which are the primary financiers of most LNG facilities. And with more LNG terminals planned in her area, Roishetta believes progress will be made by divesting, and pulling money away from the players that invest in the buildout of extractive industries.
The long term goal, Roishetta says, is to be an agent of change, a “dot-connector” to help policymakers better understand the intersectionalities that plague BIPOC and low-income communities. “We were always a sacrifice… from slavery, to fighting for the right to be recognized as human beings, fighting for the right to vote, fighting for the right to fair wages, fighting for the same basic rights as white people.” And until we can fix systemic racism and the deep financial divide in this country, Roishetta says her work will continue. “I’m fighting so that my children don’t also have to fight like this. And so that their children don’t have to be exposed to the same harmful chemicals.”
THE MAMA BEARS
Friends and allies — Melanie Oldham and Gwen Jones — live in Freeport, Texas, a city in Brazoria County known for chemical plants producing oil and gas.
Melanie, a native of Missouri, moved to the region about 40 years ago, put down roots there and raised three children. Gwen has lived in Freeport all her life, in a historically Black neighborhood known as the East End. Her grandfather — a freed slave — acquired land there in the 1920s to start the first segregated school, shortly after Freeport was established by a sulfur mining company.
Both mothers were triggered into action to protect their children and community.
Melanie’s two youngest children, a set of twins, were adopted at age 6 from Oklahoma. Shortly after the twins moved in, Melanie noticed their health declining and became deeply concerned. Soon both children were diagnosed with severe asthma.
“Every time they went outside, even just to school, they had to use their inhalers,” Melanie says. A healthcare professional for many years, she began investigating her community and the surrounding industries. She discovered that Brazoria County is a “nonattainment” county, meaning that the region has been flagged for having too much of one of several dangerous air pollutants. In fact, Brazoria County is consistently graded “F” by the American Lung Association.
Gwen’s concerns, meanwhile, grew out of decades of health problems. For years, she watched her neighbors, friends and family, including her own children, fall ill to lung diseases, heart disease, and cancer. Residents were aware of the contamination of the air and water supply, but unsure of its impacts on their health, even overlooking the potent smell of sulfur and glowing fish in the community rivers (according to Gwen’s accounts). Neither the factories, nor federal regulators, communicated the dangers of the contaminants, so life continued as normal, until Gwen refused to sell her grandfather’s land to Port Freeport, which has obtained 95% of the land in the East End. That’s when she learned what the plants and Port Freeport were doing to the environment, and public health.
Now Gwen, Melanie, and Better Brazoria: Clean Air & Water are fighting to prevent more industry buildout in Freeport, which in addition to Port Freeport and Freeport LNG, is also surrounded by Dow Chemical and BASF plants — both major suppliers of polyurethane materials. But there’s no shortage of red tape. Following the explosion at Port Freeport last year, Better Brezoria demanded a public meeting with federal regulators to better understand the ramifications of the toxic emissions. After months of no response, they say they were finally allotted a meager 30 minutes to ask questions and express their concerns.
“Nobody knows the effects of this chemical soup that some people like Gwen and her family have been breathing in for decades,” says Melanie. “And sometimes it takes decades for cancer to show up or COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). We have so many friends and relatives dying daily from cancer and other health problems.”
A 2018 assessment of Freeport, Texas found that the number of liver, lung, nose, ear, and stomach cancers were significantly greater than the state average.
Gwen says her goal is to educate her community on what they’re up against. Like Melanie, she worries for her children and grandchildren. And she has many. Over the years, she became the neighborhood matriarch, often taking in children whose parents juggled multiple jobs or passed on from illness.
“I’ve always been like a Mother Goose,” Gwen says of her ties to the community. “My mother always said ‘One man is just an island. But together, you are strong.’”
