Sharon Lavigne, St. James Parish and the Fight Against a Plastics Complex

In the spring of 2021, the Goldman Environmental Prize, an award that each year honours grassroots environmental leaders from six regions of the world, named its winner for North America. It was not a scientist, a senator or the head of a national advocacy group. It was Sharon Lavigne, a retired special-education teacher from St. James Parish, Louisiana, who had spent most of her life within sight of the Mississippi River and had never thought of herself as an activist until she was in her sixties. The prize recognized one thing above all: a small, church-rooted group she founded had stood in the way of a petrochemical company's plan to build an enormous plastics complex on land a few miles from her home. That plan had arrived with the backing of the governor, the parish council and the promise of thousands of jobs. Lavigne arrived with prayer meetings, public comments and a stubborn refusal to accept that her community had to be the place where it went.

In short: Sharon Lavigne founded RISE St. James in 2018 to oppose new petrochemical plants in her majority-Black district on the Mississippi, and the group became the centre of a years-long fight over a proposed Formosa Plastics complex. Her story shows how ordinary residents can use permits, public hearings, history and the courts to change what seemed inevitable.

A parish already crowded with industry

St. James Parish sits in the middle of the river corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that residents call Cancer Alley. It is a rural place of sugarcane fields and small towns, and it had already absorbed a long list of plants, tank farms and terminals by the time Lavigne began paying close attention. The parish's land-use plan, adopted in 2014, designated large areas near the river in its predominantly Black districts as suitable for industry. Lavigne's own district, the fifth, was one of them.

Lavigne grew up in the parish, raised her children there and taught in its schools. Like many of her neighbours, she had noticed illness around her for years: friends with cancer, relatives with breathing problems, a sense that the air smelled wrong on certain days. What turned the noticing into organizing was a series of announcements, starting around 2018, that more plants were coming. One of them dwarfed the rest.

The project called the Sunshine Project

Formosa Plastics, a Taiwanese conglomerate, proposed a complex in St. James that it called the Sunshine Project, a set of more than a dozen plants that would make the raw ingredients for plastics on a site of more than two thousand acres. The estimated cost was in the billions of dollars, and state officials welcomed it as one of the largest industrial investments Louisiana had seen. The parish council approved the land use in 2019. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality issued the facility's air permits in January 2020.

To understand why residents objected so strongly, you need to see the project the way they saw it. Petrochemical plants of this kind emit compounds including ethylene oxide and benzene, both classified as carcinogens. The complex would add to the emissions of the plants already operating nearby, and the people closest to the site lived in a district that was overwhelmingly Black and already carried more than its share of pollution.

Formosa's case, put fairly, was that it would bring jobs and tax revenue to a parish that needed both, that it would meet every standard its permits required, and that the state's regulators had reviewed and approved its plans. Supporters in the parish pointed to wages that are hard to find in rural Louisiana. That case is real, and some residents believed it. The question RISE kept asking was a different one: approved by whom, measured against what, and who decided that this district should carry the next load?

Founding RISE St. James

In 2018 Lavigne founded RISE St. James. The name carries the spirit of the thing: it was built out of churches and living rooms, and its meetings often opened with prayer. Lavigne has described her decision to fight as a matter of faith, and she brought that tone into public hearings where corporate lawyers and state officials were used to speaking in permits and parts per billion.

The group's methods were not exotic. They were the tools available to anyone, used persistently.

They showed up. RISE members attended parish council meetings and state permit hearings, again and again, and put their objections on the record. Public comment periods exist so that agencies have to read and respond to what residents say, and a written record of objections becomes evidence later, in court.

They found allies. National environmental law groups, including Earthjustice and the Center for Biological Diversity, joined lawsuits on the group's behalf. Researchers at universities helped analyze the air data. Journalists, eventually from all over the world, came to see the parish for themselves.

They told the story in human terms. Lavigne talked about her neighbours, her students, her church and her family's history on the land. That made the fight legible to people who would never read an air permit.

The graves under the site

The most remarkable turn in the fight came from history, not chemistry. Researchers working on the case found that the land where Formosa planned to build had once been part of sugar plantations, and that it contained burial grounds that very likely held the remains of enslaved people. Formosa's own consultants had identified cemetery sites on the property.

For Lavigne and her neighbours, many of them descendants of people enslaved on plantations along this river, the discovery changed the meaning of the fight. It was no longer only about what would come out of smokestacks in the future. It was also about whether the dead who had worked that ground without pay or freedom would be paved over. RISE pressed for access to the graves to honour them, including on Juneteenth, and pressed the company and the regulators to account for what was under the soil.

Here is a small detail worth carrying forward: the cemeteries did not stop the project by law. What they did was change who was paying attention, and that shift in attention mattered when the case reached the people with the power to pause it.

Permits, pauses and the courts

In November 2020 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which had issued a federal permit for the project's impact on wetlands, announced that it would re-evaluate that permit after the legal challenge brought by RISE and its partners, effectively suspending it. The Corps later said it would require a full environmental impact statement, the most thorough form of review under federal law.

In September 2022 a Louisiana state judge, ruling in the case brought by RISE and other groups, threw out the air permits the state had issued for the complex. The judge found that the state's environmental agency had not properly weighed the project's effects on the community's health. It was the kind of ruling residents of the river parishes had rarely seen.

That was not the end of it. The ruling was appealed, the legal fight continued in the years that followed, and the outcome has turned on courts and agencies as much as on organizing. Readers who want the current state of the permits should follow the environmental justice reporting rather than any single snapshot, because the case has moved more than once.

What can be said with confidence is this: years after the parish council's approval and the state's permits, the people who were told the complex was a done deal had forced a federal agency to take a much harder look, won a state-court ruling against the permits, and made the name of their small parish known far beyond Louisiana.

Why a comment letter can outlive a press conference

It helps to understand the machinery that made those victories possible, because it is the same machinery available in most states.

When a state agency issues an air permit, it does not simply stamp a form. It is supposed to build a record: the company's application, the agency's analysis, the public's comments and the agency's written responses to them. If someone later challenges the permit in court, the judge mostly looks at that record. The question is not whether the judge personally likes the project. It is whether the agency did the work the law requires and explained its reasoning based on the evidence in front of it.

That is why the dull work of showing up at hearings matters so much. An objection raised during the comment period becomes part of the record. An objection raised for the first time in court often does not count. RISE and its lawyers made sure that concerns about cumulative pollution, about the health of nearby residents, and about the burial grounds were on paper before the permits were issued.

Louisiana adds a twist that most residents never hear about. The state constitution makes protecting the environment a public trust, and in a 1984 decision known as Save Ourselves, the Louisiana Supreme Court held that the state's environmental regulators act as trustees. Under that ruling, the agency cannot simply check whether a project meets numerical limits. It has to weigh the environmental costs against the benefits and consider whether alternative sites or designs would cause less harm. Challengers to the Formosa permits leaned on that duty. Strong environmental provisions appear in a handful of other state constitutions, including Pennsylvania's and Montana's, and organizers elsewhere can look for it in their own.

Federal law adds its own layer. When a project needs a federal permit, as Formosa's did for filling wetlands, the National Environmental Policy Act requires the agency to study its environmental effects. A full environmental impact statement is a long document, with its own public comment periods, and it often brings out facts the company would rather not discuss.

Where progressives should be careful

This story is easy to tell as pure good versus pure evil, and that version is not quite honest. Louisiana needs jobs, and many of the people who supported the project were working families making a rational choice. Progressives who oppose a plant in St. James also need to have something to say about what comes instead. Clean energy manufacturing, for instance, needs factories too, and some of them will need permits, river water and land near working communities.

There is also a lesson about process. The legal tools RISE used, from environmental impact statements to lengthy permit challenges, are the same tools that opponents of wind farms, transmission lines and apartment buildings use elsewhere. Defending them in St. James while complaining about them in a suburb is a position that will eventually catch up with us. The better principle, I would argue, is not more delay everywhere but more power for the people with the most at stake: real community consent, cumulative pollution counted honestly, and decisions that come faster in both directions.

The project's backers deserve one more acknowledgement. Some of the project's local supporters were themselves Black residents of the parish who believed industrial jobs offered their neighbours a path to the middle class. Disagreement inside a community is not betrayal, and treating it that way would be a mistake.

A teacher's patience

What stands out about Lavigne is how ordinary her tools were and how long she kept using them. She did not have a law degree or a national platform when she started. She had a church, a phone, neighbours who trusted her and the habit of a teacher who explains the same thing as many times as it takes. The Goldman Prize brought international attention, but the work that earned it was years of meetings in a parish that most Americans could not have found on a map.

That pattern repeats across the history of environmental justice. The movement's founding stories often involve someone who started without any title at all and became an expert by refusing to stop asking questions.

What you can do

If St. James feels far away, start by finding the St. James closest to you.

1. See what is permitted near your home. The facility search lists EPA-regulated sites in a ZIP code with their violations and penalties. It is a fast way to learn which plants and terminals your community already hosts, and whether any have a record.
2. Learn when the next decision is open to the public. Federal agencies post rules for comment on a deadline. The comment page lists open federal rules by issue, soonest-closing first, and explains how to write a comment that becomes part of the official record, the same record RISE relied on.
3. Find the local groups doing this work. The state-by-state nonprofit directory includes environmental and civil rights organizations; many of them need volunteers more than donations, especially people willing to attend hearings.
4. Ask your members of Congress where they stand. Funding for the Corps' reviews and for EPA enforcement is set in Washington. Type your address into the lookup for your lawmakers and you get their phone numbers and contact forms, plus how they voted most recently; a call from a constituent who mentions St. James by name is harder to forget.

Lavigne's lesson is simple enough to fit on an index card: show up, write it down, bring your neighbours, and do not accept that a decision is final just because powerful people say so.