What is it about?

Majority black and brown communities in the US experience disproportionate levels of pollution and economic insecurity connected to extractive industries like oil refineries. However, despite visible and highly documented impacts, environmental justice movements have not yet adequately considered environmental impacts from a racial justice and equity lens. In this article, I think about environmental impacts through a more historic, and place-based perspective, considering the continuation of extractive industries in Louisiana from the plantation economy to the petrochemical industry today. Following these different and changing forms of extraction raises questions about the shape of racialised violence in an increasingly toxic and environmentally unstable world.

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Why is it important?

The climate crisis is amplifying and accelerating the uneven environmental impacts that vulnerable, majority black communities face. Developing new perspectives that recognize the historical and structural patterns of racism and forefronts the lived experience of impacted communities is crucial to ensure that the climate crisis does not reproduce racial violence.

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This page is a summary of: Intimate extraction: Geological matter, extractive afterlives, and the denial of a Black sense of place in Southern Louisiana, Area, November 2022, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/area.12847.
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