Hobbling the EPA and the Making of Trump’s “Cancer Alley”
Merrill Singer
“Cancer Alley” refers to an area stretching from Baton Rouge to New Orleans populated by poor people who live alongside numerous industrial plants that pump pollutants into the air and waterways, and onto the land. The 400,000 people living in Cancer Alley face the greatest cancer risk from pollution in the United States, as much as 50 times the national average. In a 2021 article in the Villanova Environmental Law Journal, Ida Catellon notes, “Most of Cancer Alley’s residents are impoverished African Americans who live near, or next to, petrochemical plants. This is no coincidence…There is little evidence that communities of color move to sites where toxic waste facilities and landfills are located. Rather, toxic waste sites are often sited in primarily poor and African American neighborhoods…”
Recognizing this threat, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new rules in April 2024 to protect people living near industrial plants from the emission of toxic chemicals. Officials estimated that these new regulations would reduce cancer risks in communities like Cancer Alley by as much as 96%. But the new regulations are now on the Trump chopping block. Following his swearing in, Trump and his appointee to head the EPA, Lee Zeldin, moved to cut the EPA’s funding by 31% and the Agency’s workforce by 20%—roughly 3,200 employees.
How far will Trump go in his war on environmental protections? How great will be the harm caused by his cruel policies?
Looking at just one of the primary threats to environmental health—air pollution—stringent EPA regulation and enforcement are clearly needed, not weakened regulation and lax enforcement. The health and social benefits of effective regulation far outweigh the economic costs of sustaining a healthy environment. Air pollution causes one of every six deaths worldwide, making it one of the world’s gravest environmental threats. Evidence that breathing air pollutants increases vulnerability to infection dates back to at least the killer 1952 London smog, which caused the premature death of an estimated 12,000 people.
History of the EPA
In the U.S., the modern conversation about protecting the environment began in the 1960s. The publication in 1962 of the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, a clarion call about the dangers of the indiscriminate use of pesticides, hastened concern. Two disasters shortly after the book’s publication corroborated Carson’s complaints. An offshore oil rig in California spilled millions of gallons of crude oil, fouling beaches. And the Cuyahoga River running through Cleveland, Ohio, contaminated for decades with chemicals dumped by the industries lining its banks, burst into flames.
Public pressure sparked federal action and in early 1970 President Richard Nixon presented the House and Senate with a 37-point message on the environment. Nixon focused on water and air pollution control, solid waste management, and parklands and public recreation. Subsequently, he sent Congress a plan to consolidate the responsibilities for the environment that were spread across the federal government into a single agency, the EPA.
With bipartisan Congressional support over the years, the EPA racked up a number of major accomplishments, including banning the use of DDT; banning lead in gasoline, paint, and new water pipes; regulating auto emissions; cleaning up toxic waste; protecting Earth’s ozone layer; increasing recycling; improving drinking water; lowering emissions from highway diesel engines; and revitalizing inner-city brownfields (urban areas that have been polluted with hazardous substances).
The cozy relationship that some polluters had with the EPA was a concern, however. In 2005, nine states sued the EPA arguing that the agency’s regulation of mercury emissions did not follow the Clean Air Act, and that political appointees ignored the lax enforcement. The suit also claimed that the EPA exempted coal-fired power plants from using the most effective emission control technologies. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled for the states, agreeing that the EPA had violated the Clean Air Act.
After the ruling, the EPA delayed issuing a report showing that auto companies were using loopholes to produce less fuel-efficient cars. In 2008, the Union of Concerned Scientists charged that more than half of the nearly 1,600 EPA scientists who responded online to a detailed questionnaire reported they had personally experienced political interference with their work.
An even more serious problem for the EPA was the fracturing of bipartisan support for the agency. While on the public level environmental protection remained a popular issue, environmentalism became a target for some politicians and that encouraged financially invested interest groups to claim that environmental concerns were overblown and regulation was stifling production and profits. By the mid-1980s, strident anti-government sentiment had gained hold in the Republican Party and found sympathy as well among some Democrats from districts housing companies that complained about the burdens of environmental regulations. Ever since, the EPA has been chronically underfunded and subjected to litigation by conservative attorneys general and corporations. As presidential administrations changed, the EPA’s priorities have seen sudden shifts. The return of Donald Trump to the White House may constitute the most consequential reorientation of the EPA to date.
Zelden’s EPA
Despite the EPA’s inconsistent enforcement history, water and air in the United States are considerably cleaner than they were before the EPA’s creation. But the need for implementing and enforcing strong controls on anthropogenic disruptions of natural systems and processes is greater now than at any point in history.
This year, scientists moved the Doomsday Clock—a symbolic monitor developed by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that represents the perceived proximity of humanity to a global catastrophe—to 89 seconds before midnight. The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board explained, “Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.” The Board added, “The impacts of climate change increased in the last year as myriad indicators, including sea-level rise and global surface temperature, surpassed previous records. The global greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change continued to rise. Extreme weather and other climate change-influenced events—floods, tropical cyclones, heat waves, drought, and wildfires—affected every continent. The long-term prognosis for the world’s attempts to deal with climate change remains poor, as most governments fail to enact the financing and policy initiatives necessary to halt global warming.”
Oblivious to this warning, Lee Zelden, Trump’s selection to head the EPA, is plotting a very different course for the organization he now leads. As Abigail Dillen, the president of the environmental group Earthjustice, explained, Zelden plans to “take a sledgehammer to EPA’s most recent lifesaving regulations, putting politics over science and endangering our communities.” Zelden, a former Congressman, has close ties to the oil and gas industries that have provided hundreds of thousands of dollars over many years to his political campaigns.
Zelden is aligned with Project 2025, the far right plan spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. As noted by Creation Covenant Alliance, a religious environmental group, “Project 2025 is essentially a death sentence for federal climate and environmental protections. Everything from rules to curb hazardous air pollutants, to programs that help make cleaner and more energy-efficient purchases affordable [will] be on the chopping block.” Even listing PFAS, “forever chemicals,” as hazardous will now be revisited. Under Zelden, the economic interests of polluters will be prioritized in all EPA and governmental decision-making, including the elimination of programs supporting renewables like wind and solar energy production.
Today, in the face of the MAGA onslaught, we face the distinct possibility of the creation of Cancer Alleys across the U.S. But as the full Trump playbook comes into view, with sweeping cuts across multiple federal and state programs concerned with the environment and the climate, we are beginning to see a rising backlash. Saving the environment was a prominent theme of the 1200 marches and demonstrations that took place across the U.S. on April 5th. Meanwhile, the Doomsday clock is still ticking.
Merrill Singer, who specializes in the critical anthropology of health, is an emeritus professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author or editor of over 35 books and 225 peer reviewed articles.
Sources
Alley, William and Alley, Rosemary. 2020. The War on the EPA: America’s Endangered Environmental Protection. Roman & Littlefield Publishers.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 2025. It’s now 89 seconds to midnight. https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/
Nixon, Richard 1970. Special Message to the Congress on Environmental Quality. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/240088
Singer, Merrill. 2011 Down Cancer Alley: The Lived Experience of Health and Environmental Suffering in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25(2): 141-163.
Wizech, Eli 2024. How an Extreme Combination of Fog and Air Pollution Brought London to a Standstill and Resulted in Thousands of Fatalities. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-an-extreme-combination-of-fog-and-air-pollution-brought-london-to-a-standstill-and-resulted-in-thousands-of-fatalities-180985515/