Sharon Lavigne has lived all of her sixty-seven years in St. James Parish, Louisiana. She can tell you about a time when the fig and pecan trees in her neighborhood produced plenty to eat and to sell, and when her grandfather caught fish and shrimp in the Mississippi River. The land and the water surrounding it wasn’t always poison. Today, her community is part of the 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where more than 100 petrochemical plants and refineries dot the shore.