Louisiana Wants to Censor Citizen Science, but Residents Are Fighting Back

Very few places exemplify our country’s shameful health disparities as much as Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.”

Notorious for its toxic air and alarmingly high cancer rates, this petrochemical hub between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is where oil, gas and chemical corporations make their profitable products at the expense of the local population.

It’s a moral disgrace that neither Louisiana’s government nor the federal government has acted with urgency to end this well known injustice. Even United Nations human rights experts have condemned the environmental racism driving the poisoning of Cancer Alley, whose residents are disproportionately poor, Black or both.

Local communities have done their best to fill these gaps. People living near polluting facilities like those in Cancer Alley have started using pollution measuring equipment to monitor air quality in their communities for themselves. This is an example of “citizen science,” where the collection of scientific data is crowdsourced.

But lawmakers in Louisiana and beyond are trying to quash this work.

A law enacted in Louisiana last year requires that all air monitoring data that is shared publicly be collected using EPA-approved equipment. But EPA-approved air monitoring equipment has a price tag of $791,000 apiece — and needs more than $200,000 a year for operation and maintenance. It’s simply out of reach for the impoverished communities suffering the worst pollution.

Even worse, the law says that sharing data collected using any other equipment can be punished by fines of $32,500 a day — escalating to $1 million if the violation is done “intentionally, willfully or knowingly.”

The law is specifically targeted toward community air monitoring “for the purpose of alleging violations or noncompliance with the federal Clean Air Act, Louisiana Environmental Quality Act, or any other applicable law, rule, or regulation for which the state has primary enforcement authority.”

But now, residents of the most polluted communities in Louisiana are fighting back in federal court. Community groups — including groups based in Cancer Alley, such as Rise St. James, the Descendants Project, and the Concerned Citizens of St. John — are suing the state, alleging a violation of their First Amendment rights.

The law is clearly an assault on the ability of communities to advocate for themselves. It’s not an isolated example either, but part of a longstanding pattern of government serving wealthy interests by restricting the ability of marginalized communities to protect their air, water, land, and livelihoods.

In a 2020 report, my colleague Gabrielle Colchete and I documented a similar pattern with laws to stifle dissent, which are now on the books in 22 states, including Louisiana. At the time, we looked at states that were pushing increasingly harsh laws against people who protest fossil fuel infrastructure. We did detailed case studies (including one on Louisiana) of the political interests pushing for these laws and the environmental justice campaigners the laws were targeting.

Laws attacking citizen science should be viewed similarly. And in fact these laws work together.

When powerful corporations use their allies in government to block communities from being able to advocate for themselves, they have no other avenue for change except protest — which is then restricted by anti-protest bills.

While these are alarming trends in general, they are particularly alarming today with an increasingly authoritarian White House that’s waging an ideological attack against the very idea of environmental justice. The Trump administration has censored environmental justice data on government websites and eliminated environmental justice programs at both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Justice.

Given this political environment, there’s a real danger of laws attacking community air monitoring spreading to other states — a similar bill passed the West Virginia assembly last year before failing in the state Senate — and eventually being taken up by Congress.

Bad ideas, especially ones that benefit the wealthy and powerful, often spread far and wide. If we value clean air, clean water, and democracy, we need to be vigilant, and to fight back.