The Economic Geography of Waste and Marginalization
This paper examines the counties that stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. This “chemical corridor,” is home to over a hundred chemical plants and oil refineries. Here corporations and a cooperative state have externalized much of the social cost inherent in petrochemical exploitation of the planet. We find here many waste treatment facilities as well as continual, egregious toxic incidents, leaks, and explosions. But this 80-mile stretch of industry was and is also home to those segments of the population considered socially marginal. Here are found a women’s prison, a men’s prison, a psychiatric hospital, and a hundred year-old leprosy hospital and settlement. Based in Carville, on a former plantation, the leprosy hospital was in operation between 1890s and 1980s; patients were literally deprived of personhood: they had to sever all ties to family and community; their names were stripped from them; and children taken away.
Chemical companies bought out large white plantations and turned the land into industrial use, employing working-class whites. Yet there were also many long-standing small African-American land holdings and free towns, dating back to Reconstruction. As larger, white land owners sold out to the chemical and oil companies over the 20th century, blacks found themselves living right on the chemical/oil company fence line. Indeed, scouting reports secured by chemical companies searching for land suitable for industrial expansion usually reported that these areas were uninhabited, “off the map.” I will use scouting and management consultant reports, state documents concerning the building of the prisons legal cases, and federal records concerning the leprosy hospital to consider how corporations define some spaces as suitable for environmental degradation and social confinement.