This story was produced in partnership with Prism.

IN 2020, TWO disastrous hurricanes struck southwest Louisiana in the span of just five weeks. Hurricane Laura made landfall first, in late August. Eighteen feet of storm surge hammered coastal communities, as 130 mile-per-hour winds whipped inland Lake Charles, a gulf city of 80,000 near the Texas border. At the time, state officials described Laura — a Category 4 — as the most powerful storm to hit Louisiana’s shoreline since 1856, nearly a century before the US began naming hurricanes. Hurricane Delta arrived in early October. Although Delta’s landfall was recorded as a milder Category 2, already-damaged homes across the region were pelted with more than 12 inches of rainfall.

Thousands of southwest Louisianans were displaced by the storms. Many learned they lacked livable homes to return to. The hurricanes damaged or destroyed about half of Lake Charles’ affordable rental units, eliminating much needed housing in a community where one in five residents lives below the federal poverty line.

Roishetta Sibley Ozane’s home was among the hundreds damaged by the storms. Ozane is a single mother of six who has called Lake Charles home for more than two decades. In August 2020, her local TV meteorologist announced his family planned to leave ahead of Laura’s landfall. He advised viewers to do the same. Ozane packed up her children, and they evacuated to their grandmother’s home in Mississippi, compounding the emotional and economic stress of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Ozanes returned to Lake Charles several days later to check on their house. Upon arrival, they found a tree had fallen through its roof and the backdoor was ripped off its hinges, likely due to Laura’s winds. The house had already begun to mildew, and nearly everything inside it was destroyed. In that moment, Ozane realized their family of seven was homeless, becoming a part of the region’s long history of environmental injustices.

Overwhelmed by the loss, Ozane turned to her faith and prayed for direction. Her family attends a local nondenominational Church of Christ, in a modest, red brick building. On Sunday mornings, white pillars greet worshippers as they walk through a double-door entrance to sit in long wooden pews. It resembles most small churches, including those of Ozane’s Mississippi upbringing. Faith, along with memories of her grandmother marching for public services, such as federal Head Start programs that provide services to children from low-income families, shaped Ozane, now 39, into the activist she has become.

As Ozane navigated her own post-storm fallout, those same convictions led her to post on local social media groups, asking if neighbors required assistance. She understood their grief. “As I entered southwest Louisiana, I immediately saw destruction,” Ozane said in testimony delivered to a congressional committee in Washington, DC, in 2022. “I was in tears, and so were my children.”

“I’m going to keep going until my last breath, until I can’t fight any more on this side of life.”

In 2020, Lake Charles experienced the nation’s largest population exodus, according to US Postal Office end-of-year data. Seven percent of residents were forced, or opted, to permanently uproot before or after the storms. Outward migration was exacerbated that year and into 2021 by three additional natural disasters occurring in the months after Laura and Delta: a tropical storm, a flash flood, and Winter Storm Uri, all between January and May of 2021. It was a devastating blow for a region still recovering from past natural disasters, including 2005’s Hurricane Rita.

Amid this disaster fallout, Ozane helped fill gaps in local recovery and social services. She expanded her work the next year by founding the mutual aid and environmental justice organization Vessel Project of Louisiana, which provides direct community aid, like assisting locals in gaining shelter, clothing, food, and water, and by fundraising. Through online crowdfunding, Ozane placed 300 vulnerable locals in hotels ahead of Uri’s historic freeze. It was crucial work; in neighboring Texas, Uri killed 210 people, the Texas Department of State Health Services later reported. Crowdfunding remains the Vessel Project’s primary funding source.

Alongside national allies, the grassroots group also organizes against local petrochemical projects. It is working to limit local impacts as well as stave off the worst effects of climate change, as petrochemical facilities across the region add annual carbon emissions that gradually warm our atmosphere and fuel increasingly devastating natural disasters. That includes organizing to prevent the company Venture Global from building one of the world’s largest liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals locally: Calcasieu Pass 2, or “CP2.” (Venture Global rarely gives interviews to the media and did not respond to requests for comment.)

Four out of the nation’s eight operating LNG terminals are within a short drive of Ozane’s home, as are Citgo’s local petroleum refinery — one of the US’ largest such facilities — and dozens of other oil and gas operations.

Oil and gas industry infrastructure is a defining aspect of southwest Louisiana’s economy and coastal landscape. But their proximity and associated health risks make it personal, local organizers say. They are fighting for improved air and water quality, and the curtailing of petrochemical development in the Gulf, already the world’s largest petrochemical refining corridor. They hope to end the destruction of marshland, the pollution of fisheries, and threats of chemical explosions, and to prevent petrochemical’s industrial sprawl from someday consuming their homes.

“I’m going to keep going until my last breath,” Ozane told me in October, “until I can’t fight any more on this side of life, until I’m an ancestor, and my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren carry the torch for me.”

IN SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA today, most residents see themselves as living in a national sacrifice zone, one that has been polluted and exploited for a greater economic good for generations.

For millennia before the arrival of European colonizers, the Ishak people were stewards of southwest Louisiana’s land. Their territories stretched from Vermillion Bay, in modern Iberia Parish, toward Galveston Bay.

Europeans wouldn’t reach the Gulf’s western portion until the sixteenth century. Spanish conquistador Alonso Álvarez de Pineda’s 1519 expedition witnessed pre-colonial Louisiana first, landing nearly 200 miles away, at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Next, in 1528, arrived Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who historians believe was rescued by Ishaks when he and his crew were shipwrecked that year. Before they walked back to Mexico City, Cabeza de Vaca made field notes on American Indigenous groups’ distinct cultures, including their tolerance of transgender people and non-heterosexual unions. Later, in the ensuing centuries, southwest Louisiana’s remaining Ishak integrated with local formerly enslaved communities; their children became Louisiana’s Creole ethnicity. These “Creole Indians,” as they’re widely known, developed their own traditions, including the distinct zydeco style of country and western folkways music.

Europeans began colonizing Ishak land in 1682. In 1762, France’s King Louis XV ceded Louisiana west of the Mississippi River to Spain. But in other parts of the territory, France and Spain disputed each other’s claims. For the next 60 years, southwest Louisiana became a “no man’s land,” as historians have described it, known as the Louisiana Neutral Strip. More European colonizers wouldn’t arrive here until 1781, when Martin LeBleu and wife Dela Marion left their home in Bordeaux, France, and became the first recorded arrivals to the LeBleu Settlement. Their daughter, Catherine, later married fellow colonizer Charles Sallier, and the couple built a home on the shores of what was “Charlie’s Lake,” or Lake Charles.

Lake Charles’ website claims early settlers in the area lived in “peaceful coexistence with several tribes of Indians,” but historians contest that claim. Instead, the region’s surviving Ishaks were described as taking shelter in southwest Louisiana’s pine forests and swamps or migrating to Texas. They welcomed the protection of black bears, snakes, and alligators as layers of defense against the European settlers.

With neither French nor Spanish government representation, the Louisiana Neutral Strip became a refuge for the socially persecuted. First came Baptists and Pentecostals hoping to escape France’s Code Noir laws, which banned any religious practice other than Catholicism. They were followed by formerly enslaved people who were freed or had escaped, and who hoped to disappear into the landscape, as the Ishaks had.

“There was a brief moment where the real value of the place was to be isolated or alone,” Keagan LeJeune, interim dean at McNeese State University, told me last year. In 2016, he published Legendary Louisiana Outlaws, which chronicles Louisiana history. While the Louisiana Neutral Strip’s historical records are lacking, LeJeune described the free state as a series of small-pocket communities, much as the largely rural area remains today.

Ozane and her fellow anti-LNG organizers are fighting to keep region’s little-known history alive as they build a path to record its history going forward. As Ozane told me, there’s a “whole history of injustice we’re facing in our community.”

IN LESS THAN a century, roughly 2,000 square miles of Louisiana shoreline — nearly twice the size of Rhode Island — has eroded away into rising seas. The state loses roughly the equivalent of a football field in wetlands square mileage every two hours; in fact, Louisiana’s “boot” has disintegrated so much that, in 2013, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration removed the names of 31 formerly recognized bodies of water, like Yellow Cotton Bay and Dry Cypress Bayou. Rural coastal communities, like those within Lake Charles’ Calcasieu Parish and neighboring Cameron Parish, are at risk of disappearing with the rising tides.

Climate change is driving coastal Louisiana’s ongoing erosion crisis. And the oil and gas industry is driving the climate crisis.

Torbjörn Törnqvist, a geology professor at Tulane University, describes coastal southwest Louisiana as an area he and other scientists expect to be among the hardest hit as the Earth warms. “If you have to pick one county in the US that’s more vulnerable to climate change, or that’s most vulnerable to sea level rise, it would be Cameron Parish,” he told me last year.

Louisiana has played a pivotal role in the oil and gas industry’s global growth.

Louisiana has played a pivotal role in the oil and gas industry’s global growth. Oil in Louisiana was first struck in a rice patch in the southwestern region’s Mamou Prairie, in 1901. The discovery came only months after a gusher’s unleashing in neighboring Spindletop, Texas, near modern-day Beaumont. These discoveries helped lay the foundations for the Gulf’s modern — and massive — petrochemical corridor.

Today, fossil fuels command Louisiana’s economy, and the petroleum industry employs an estimated 13 percent of the state’s workforce. It also plays an outsized role in polluting the state. Louisiana is the only US state that claims refining as its top source of CO₂ emissions, not transportation and energy. Refining produces about two-thirds of Louisiana’s annual emissions. Its southwestern region is its second-largest emitter, according to Louisiana State University’s 2021 greenhouse gas inventory, which was developed by former Governor John Bel Edwards’s Climate Task Force, whose aim is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

To do so, the state will need to reduce refinery emissions and take a new approach to natural gas, which is comprised mainly of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Natural gas is frequently converted to a liquified state for transportation: Liquified natural gas (LNG) takes up 1/600 the volume of natural gas and can be converted back to gas and used to produce electricity. But its use comes at a cost. UN scientists estimate methane released by humans is responsible for 25 percent of climate change’s effects felt today.

The US, meanwhile, is the global leader in LNG production. Much of the gas is refined along a strip of Gulf coastal land between Texas and Louisiana, where four out of the nation’s eight operating LNG facilities are based, according to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). At least seven additional LNG facilities have been proposed or are in planning phases there.

Since 2022, the US has also led the globe in LNG exports, and last year, roughly two-thirds of the nation’s LNG exports were shipped out of Louisiana, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Meanwhile, the state contributed about 11 percent of total US natural gas production, behind only Texas (25 percent) and Pennsylvania (20 percent.)

President-elect Donald Trump is likely to boost fossil fuel development and has promised to greenlight even more LNG terminals in Louisiana. But some experts argue that the state’s economy cannot be tethered to LNG for prosperity, especially amid falling global demand for oil and gas as the world confronts the climate crisis.

Louisiana’s unprecedented rise as the world’s LNG refinery hasn’t gone unnoticed. In part a result of local activism, President Joe Biden’s administration issued a temporary pause on LNG development in January. Then in June, the Biden-appointed FERC approved Venture Global’s CP2 project, as well as construction of an 85-mile natural gas pipeline to transport highly flammable LNG through east Texas’s neighboring pinewoods, to one of Texas or Louisiana’s Gulf LNG facilities, and then, finally, overseas, with most of the US’ LNG destined for Europe or Asia. FERC’s 2-1 decision came despite research by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an industry watchdog group, which found that the company’s Calcasieu Pass LNG export terminal violated the federal Clean Air Act 286 times in its first 343 days in operation.

CP2 would produce as much greenhouse gas emissions as roughly 42 million cars each year.

“We were shocked, but not very surprised, to see the number of permit deviations they’d listed,” Shreyas Vasudevan, a researcher who contributed to the Louisiana Bucket Brigade’s findings, told me shortly after the release of their report on the Calcasieu Pass facility in 2023.

Additional research by the Sierra Club estimated that CP2 would produce as much greenhouse gas emissions as roughly 42 million cars each year, while environmentalists also warn that construction of Venture Global’s facility will kill coastal marshland that protects against storms, as well as aids in bonding together the same land that’s disappearing from Louisiana’s shores.

In late November, in a win for the Sierra Club and other environmental groups, FERC temporarily withdrew approval of the project, pending further study of the cumulative impacts of its emissions. As Floodlight reports, Venture Global has already filed a schedule for the study, and still expects the Commission to approve the project. Venture Global also still awaits the US Department of Energy’s response to its license application for CP2.

In his latest book Finding Myself Lost in Louisiana, LeJeune explores the consequences of such dramatic changes to Louisiana’s landscape, from both a physical and cultural point of view. He walked away from the project better understanding ways in which local culture can be changed, or even erased entirely, as a result of similar, and dramatic, outside interventions. Oil and gas construction, he says, is a modern example of such outside intervention.

“When people see the chenier plain of Cameron Parish — when they see that world — they see it as this place that’s wasted, like you can’t do much here,” LeJeune told me of how many outsiders tend to view his home region. He’s referring to how the metal of petrochemical facilities has a way of shimmering across the region’s industrial surroundings, and how refineries’ flaring of excess gases ignites the sky with ominous colors on some evenings.

“The Neutral Strip was a place that was intentionally used as a buffer, where the history there was supposed to be kind of off the record,” LeJeune told me, referring to how the region’s colonial inhabitants sought it out as a place of religious refuge. Despite industry’s exorbitant growth locally, LeJeune said, “I still think there’s a desire to decide one’s own fate here.”

Today, it falls on organizers to take care of southwest Louisiana’s natural features. In subscription to her faith, Ozane describes organizing as, in part, God’s work. “God, as men and women, gave us dominion over animals, and over the land, and over the sea,” Ozane told me recently. “But that doesn’t mean we mistreat it. We have to take care of it, and make sure it’s replenished, and that it can give us what we need to survive and thrive.”

OZANE AND HER organizer peers’ main goal is to ensure families and communities can stay together after future natural disasters. But they are also committed to ensuring their health and the region’s environmental health is no longer impacted by petrochemical refining, and that she and her neighbors are better equipped through local government the next time powerful storms inevitably hit.

Louisiana has the third-highest cancer rate among all US states. Recent data from US Cancer Statistics states that the state’s cancer rates are nearly 41 percent higher than the national average. A 2021 study by Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic also found correlations between cancer rates and areas in the state that have high rates of industrial pollution, like Lake Charles.

Locals mention health concerns regularly. Ozane’s sister worked at a local petrochemical plant and was diagnosed with cancer at age 30. Among Ozane’s six children, three have eczema, and two have asthma. One of her sons was recently diagnosed with epilepsy. People who live near such plants regularly report headaches, nosebleeds, itchy and watery eyes, and burning or itching sensations inside their throat.

Ozane has built a life here, even if she often thinks about her early life in Ruleville, Mississippi. There, her surroundings consisted of fields of cotton, greens, beans, and rice, as well as catfish farms. In Lake Charles, dozens of petrochemical facilities surround her instead, a thicket built of steel.

Ozane has also built a reputation here. She’s organized marches locally, and on New York’s Wall Street, to protest the role of major banks in funding environmental injustice. She’s testified before Congress, bending the ear of the nation’s powerful officials. In 2022, she became a member of Earth Island Institute’s Women’s Earth Alliance and its US Grassroots Accelerator for Women Environmental Leaders, which advocates for environmental activism across the globe.

It’s now been some four years since southwest Louisiana experienced five natural disasters in a 10-month period. Some of the region’s displaced residents have returned. Even so, recovery drags on, as is evident by an increase in the number of locally abandoned, dilapidated properties. And even as working-class municipalities, like Lake Charles, work to bounce back after recent natural disasters, the prospect of future storms looms large: A 2021 study by the nonprofit First Street Foundation focused on climate risk data estimated that roughly 40 percent of Lake Charles’ residential properties, as well as some half of the city’s infrastructure, are at risk of future flooding.

Since 2020, Ozane and her organizing peers have developed a message to continue fighting, and in recent years, it’s begun traveling farther and farther across the globe. Ozane has become one of the local faces of the movement. “I know I was given this task for a reason,” she said, “and I’m still here — still fighting.”