Environmental Documentary:

I dedicate this page to the memory of Declan Haun: Photographer, Editor, Creator, Thinker, and Mentor to many. Our all too brief time spent "talking pictures" had a profound impact on my appreciation of the beauty and power of photography and individuals. Thanks.

Strangled by decades of encroaching polluting industry, entire communities are disappearing. I am engaged in a longterm effort to document a little known trend: the buyout and displacement of small town America living along the fence lines of petrochemical industry.

Good Hope no longer exists. The African American community of Revielletown is gone, bulldozed and blanketed now so thoroughly by grass and asphalt-it's as if it never was. Until the time when they were displaced by a little-recognized trend, residents of these small Louisiana towns lived close along the fences of oil refineries and petrochemical plants, inescapably subjected to the blaze of burn-off flares, the smell of sulfur, and the rumble of industry. Former residents speak of lives clouded, not just by fumes and filth, but by uncertainty and fear. At any time, day or night, factory tanks and pipes might unleash toxic gases or explode. Neighbors could be-and sometimes were-forced to flee.

In desperation, residents complained, established committees, demonstrated, and demanded that companies change production processes or improve safeguards. In response, corporate executives in Good Hope and Revielletown resorted to a strategy increasingly pursued by industrial America: they would buy their neighbors out, creating a buffer around the plants and offering a license, of sorts, to conduct business as usual without the press of local liability. The industrial complex might even be expanded onto turf where houses, trees, and playgrounds once stood.

I first became aware of the buyout strategy in the late 1980s, while photographing the environmental impact of industry in Texas and Louisiana. At the time, residents explained that the buyout, in principle, might rescue them from an intolerable toxic environment. But it also comes at a price. Long-held communities are broken up and torn apart. Lives and livelihoods are shattered; friends are separated; families lose their neighborhood safety nets.

More extensive examination revealed a toll on the surrounding region-in lost employment productivity and revenues, taxes, health care and social costs, and crime-that's incalculable.

Over the past fifteen years, I've been introduced to many such endangered communities, some of which are generations old. Their origins and locales vary. Some were founded long before industry moved in, by settlers drawn to regional assets like rivers or farmlands. Others were lured to the shadow of industry by the promise of jobs, after oil refining and chemical production supplanted the traditional agriculture base.

The issues are complex, and sometimes paradoxical. The petrochemical industries provide hundreds of thousands of jobs, but force their small-town neighbors to confront an uneven trade-off. The same plants that offer employment security produce more than half the toxic manufacturing pollution on record in the U.S. Many of the chemical by-products are documented causes of cancer and birth defects. Risks to quality of life-and life itself-are posed daily by hazardous waste trucks rolling past front doors, chemical flares burning the night sky bright, and odors drifting through doors and windows.

Houses subject to these daily intrusions are almost impossible to sell on the open market. Property values plummet to immeasurable lows. And often the only takers are the government or the neighboring corporations who may instigate the buyout. Even then, the depressed prices offered for these homes probably fall short of what's needed to relocate in a cleaner, safer neighborhood.

Buyout negotiations can take years, often while the residents of these once-cohesive communities clash with each other. Some don't want to abandon homes that may have been in their families for generations. Other hold-outs may worry that the compensation won't cover relocation costs. When the battles are resolved-some to better result than others-the buyout may proceed in an organized or a haphazard fashion. In some instances, one street of residents may be relocated while those around the corner remain.

I believe documentary photography is capable of illuminating the intricate web of community, corporate policy, and human condition enmeshed in the buyout process. I hope to document the complex impact of the buyout process on individuals and communities, before their extinction forever alters the face of America.