Lavigne’s family has lived in St. James Parish for generations. She was born here, baptized in St. James Catholic Church, and grew up on her parents’ sugar cane farm. But St. James was different then.

She remembers helping her father dig potatoes from their garden and pick figs and pecans from their trees. Her grandfather caught fish and shrimp in the Mississippi River, while she and her siblings played along the levee or splashed in the water. Above all, she remembers fresh air. Clean water. Productive soil.

“Oh, when I was a little girl, we had everything that a person would want, and everything a person would need to survive,” she said. “Now, the grass is not as green as it used to be. And I’ve seen our pecan trees die. And our persimmon trees, and my orange trees, my fig trees, my elderberry trees — all of those trees are dead. … And we can’t do a garden like we used to do when I was little. Now the land and everything that grows on it is poison.”

The remnants of that life are still here in St. James. Lavigne still lives on the land her grandfather purchased. She drives by the schools she attended and then dedicated her career to. She visits friends and neighbors she’s known since she was small. Some local farmers continue to grow sugar cane.

But everywhere, the shadow of the industry looms over them.

The high school where she worked is now owned by a chemical company that produces methanol. One local sugar cane farm sits adjacent to a massive 140-acre artificial lake that stores hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive wastewater, too toxic to be released into the river.

And many of her neighbors have either moved away or fallen ill.

“My sister-in-law died with breast cancer. She worked in the industry. My neighbor on my right side, she died with cancer. And my neighbor on the left side died with cancer. And a whole lot of other people. A whole lot. You can’t sit down and just write a list — it’s that many. Because if you start to write the list, you’re going to leave out some.”

Lavigne was in high school when the first plant came into St. James in the late 1960s. At that point, the community celebrated the jobs and economic growth it would bring to the area.

“Everybody welcomed that plant. Everybody thought it was something nice coming to our little town. Then more and more started to come,” she recalls. “But we didn’t know that plant was going to poison us.

“Cancer Alley” is an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that is home to more than 150 petrochemical factories and refineries. According to one analysis, the cancer risk in this region can be as high as 1 in 210, or 47 times the EPA’s acceptable risk limit.

The region was once known as “Plantation Country” for its high concentration of sprawling fields and farms where enslaved people were forced into labor to provide the backbone of the booming sugar industry in the 1800s.

In a 2021 statement, the United Nations issued a statement noting the connection between past and present, calling for an end to the “environmental racism” that plagues the largely African-American inhabitants of the corridor today. Also in 2021, President Joe Biden cited Cancer Alley specifically in signing an executive order on tackling the climate crisis.

Thirty-two factories and refineries are in St. James Parish alone, and a dozen are in its 5th district — within a few miles of Sharon Lavigne’s home.

In 2017, the plants released more than 1.6 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air of St. James Parish, including sulfuric acid, n-Hexane, ammonia, methanol, styrene, and benzene, to name a few.

There’s a clear correlation between race and household income in the area and the number of chemical plants sited nearby. The 4th and 5th districts, which contain more plants than any other districts in St. James, are home to populations that are 64 percent and 90 percent Black, respectively, with nearly a third of residents living below the poverty line.

A 2014 land use plan adopted by the St. James Parish Council exacerbated that disparity when it rezoned residential areas in the 4th and 5th districts as “residential/future industrial” to allow for further development.

“The Civil Rights Act and the Louisiana Constitution are supposed to protect Black communities from this type of environmental racism. They have not in Cancer Alley,” Lavigne said. “Our agencies are rubber stamping every permit that comes across their desks.”

Less than two years after the land use plan was adopted, the local government sold St. James High School, where Lavigne taught for 38 years, to a chemical corporation. Teachers and students — who learned of the sale only after it was complete — were forced to relocate to other districts.

It was then that Lavigne, who decided to retire, found herself reflecting on the changes she’d seen in the area — from an increase in the number of children with asthma and developmental disabilities in her classroom to the growing number of friends and family with cancers, respiratory issues, and other illnesses.

“We saw a lot of people getting sick and a lot of people dying. But we didn’t know where it was coming from at that time,” she said. “We didn’t have a clue that it was coming from industry. And I thought the world was about to come to an end because we had so many people getting sick. I thought that the sun might be wiped out after a while. That’s the way I felt. But I was wrong. It was not the end of the world — it was the plants.”

Lavigne herself was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis in 2016 and has since learned that she has elevated levels of aluminum and lead in her bloodstream. The turning point came for her when she researched the disease and discovered that it can be triggered by environmental toxins. As she continued to look into the environmental and health impacts of the industries that surrounded her, she began attending meetings of a local nonprofit organization focused on curbing pollution.

But two years later, another corporation received the green light to build a multibillion-dollar chemical plant in St. James Parish, two miles from Lavigne’s home. While many in the community believed that fighting the proposed facility was a lost cause, Lavigne felt called by God to take action.

Lavigne launched Rise St. James with an informal gathering of 10 people in her living room. She now manages a small staff and more than 20 regular volunteers.