Tourists continue to visit Louisiana’s River Parishes, drawn by the canopy of oaks and the image of the Old South. At places like Oak Alley and Laura Plantation, they stroll through gardens, take photos on columned porches, and hear stories about elegance and tradition. What they rarely hear is how the legacy of these estates continues to shape the lives of nearby communities, many of whom are still living with the consequences of what those plantations once stood for.
Just beyond the fences and Spanish moss, communities like St. James, Reserve, and Convent live under constant chemical threat in what environmental justice advocates call Cancer Alley—an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, home to over 200 petrochemical plants and refineries.
On one side of the River Road, visitors toast champagne under chandeliers in plantation ballrooms. Just a few miles away, longtime residents are filing complaints about toxic air, unexplained illnesses, and chemical flares that light up the night sky. The stories told to tourists rarely acknowledge what’s still happening in the communities that built—and were exploited by—those estates.
The Business of Erasure
Louisiana’s plantation tourism industry has grown into a multi-million-dollar business, promoted by state travel agencies and featured on everything from wedding blogs to travel influencers’ Instagram feeds. In 2018, Oak Alley Plantation welcomed more than 250,000 visitors. Less than five miles away sits a major Shell chemical facility.
Though some plantations like Whitney Plantation have made national headlines for centering the experience of enslaved people, most still focus on architecture, landscaping, and wealthy white families. Many offer costumed reenactments and dining packages while nearby communities remain under environmental assault.
This romantic version of the Old South generates revenue for the state and local parishes. But it also sustains a long tradition of selective memory, ignoring both the brutal foundations of these sites and the people living beside them today—many of whom are direct descendants of those once enslaved there.
Cancer Alley by the Numbers
The people living in the shadow of these plantations are overwhelmingly Black and working-class. In St. John the Baptist Parish, where several popular plantations are located, over 57% of residents are Black. The poverty rate sits at nearly 20%.
It’s also home to the Denka Performance Elastomer neoprene plant, which emits chloroprene—a likely human carcinogen—at levels up to 700 times the EPA’s recommended limit. Residents here have some of the highest cancer risks from air pollution in the country.
The community of Reserve, just a few miles from the Laura Plantation, is in a census tract the EPA once identified as having a cancer risk of 1,500 in 1 million. In 2019, Big Easy Magazine published “They Don’t Call It Cancer Alley for Nothing”, exposing the deeply unequal health outcomes in the region.
How Louisiana Helped Fund the Crisis
Much of this industry buildup was fueled by the Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP), one of the most generous corporate subsidy programs in the country. ITEP allows petrochemical companies to avoid paying local property taxes—often for decades. Between 2000 and 2016, the state granted over $13.7 billion in tax exemptions, gutting the budgets of public schools and local infrastructure in the very communities forced to bear the industry’s health burden. As Big Easy Magazine reported, the program has failed to deliver job or income growth in return, despite over $20 billion in local tax breaks since 1998.
Formosa Plastics, for example, which proposed a $9.4 billion complex in St. James Parish, stood to receive more than $1.5 billion in exemptions under ITEP. The plant would have doubled toxic emissions in the parish. Local organizer Sharon Lavigne and her group RISE St. James led a successful legal and grassroots campaign to block the project’s permits.
Tourism and Silence
While local residents battle cancer, asthma, and displacement, plantation tours remain silent. Some do not mention slavery at all. Few, if any, mention the petrochemical giants operating just down the road.
Visitors travel the River Road to experience “Southern charm,” unaware that they are also passing through one of the most toxic regions in the United States. Tour buses do not stop in Reserve. Tour guides do not talk about chloroprene. Brochures do not mention the vast volumes of toxic chemicals released into the air and water by nearby plants each year—pollution that continues to threaten the health of surrounding communities.
As we reported in “Environmental Justice in Louisiana: Communities Push Back as Industry Expands”, these are not isolated incidents. They are the result of decades of policy decisions that treat Black communities as sacrifice zones while whitewashed tourism keeps the money flowing.
What Needs to Change
The plantation tourism industry cannot continue to operate in a bubble. Tours should include the full context of where these sites are located and how their history connects to present-day environmental injustice. State tourism boards must stop marketing sites of enslavement as neutral or romantic destinations.
Tourists, too, must ask what their dollars support. If we can remember grand ballrooms, we can remember Black cemeteries bulldozed for parking lots. If we can fund house restorations, we can fund clean air monitors. And if we can promote these places as history, we can finally tell the whole truth.
Because there’s nothing nostalgic about poisoning the descendants of the enslaved so others can take wedding photos on blood-soaked land.
