Portside

Cedric Richmond is a rising Democratic Party star and co-chair of Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign. The African American congressman is also one of the highest Democratic Party recipients of donations from the oil, gas and chemicals industries.

Louisiana is one of the states, mostly Southern, where energy companies use eminent domain to take property for oil and gas infrastructure. Typically the seizures are in rural and poor areas where political support for the oil industry is strong.

The Green New Deal is not perfect but it’s all we’ve got to credibly address the existential climate change crisis at a national level. And despite its imperfections it does include a powerful provision to protect the indigenous people of the U.S.

The uranium tailings spill at Church Rock, NM was the largest single release of radioactive contamination in US history. But the radioactive spill in this small Native American farming community is the nuclear accident that almost no one knows about.

Many poor rural Southern communities lack a decent water and sewage infrastructure; consequently, poverty-related infections, or “neglected tropical diseases,” have been discovered in southeastern Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Saving the land cannot be separated from saving the people, their livelihood, health and the best of their way of life, from the reach of profiteers. The first peoples, the new pioneers of mountain farms, veterans of mining, labor in unions and not, coal-resistance activists have tales that can teach their more modernized would-be helpers. Learn to listen. It will take patience and perseverance to renew coal country, and the rest of the Earth too.

When a stockpile of aging explosives blew up at a former Army ammunition plant in Minden, Louisiana, the U.S. military had a public relations disaster on their hands. What were they going to do with the remaining 18 million pounds of old explosives? They shipped it to a plant in Colfax, a tiny, African-American corner of Louisiana, the only commercial facility in the nation allowed to burn explosives and munitions waste with no environmental emissions controls.

A federal judge rules that the Dakota Access pipeline did not receive an adequate environmental vetting. The rulling in favor of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on Wednesday, handing the tribe its first legal victory in its year-long battle against the Dakota Access pipeline.

Mustafa Ali is stepping down from his position as head of the environmental justice program at the EPA after a 24-year career at the agency. There appear to be no plans to replace him amid reports that the Trump administration is targeting deep cuts in EPA's environmental justice and other efforts.