Yale Environment 360: How did you come to found the Vessel Project?

Roishetta Ozane: In 2020, I was left homeless with my six children after losing everything to hurricanes Laura and Delta. I realized that I was living in a community that was surrounded by billion-dollar industries that had very little resources for people who looked like me. I went on Facebook and said, “Who needs help?” So many people needed food. They needed water. People had recently become homeless.

I looked at the connections between industrial pollution, the storms that were happening in Louisiana and Texas, and the proposed industry along the Gulf Coast. I started to realize how it was all connected when I heard about these 20 proposed LNG terminals. My first question was, “Where are they going to go?” I had this overwhelming feeling that they were going to displace more black communities. I didn’t want that to happen, so I wanted to educate people.

e360: What does it mean to say that the Vessel Project is a “mutual aid” organization?

Ozaan: I don’t have any federal funding. I get a few small grants from organizations, but a lot of the funding comes from crowdsourcing from all over the US. I help people with food, shelter, water, clothing, paying their utility bills, paying their rent. But then they come to our community outreach meetings and protest. [In late June] I was able to organize over 200 people from Texas and Louisiana to march with over 1,000 people on Wall Street to tell banks to stop funding environmental racism in our communities. I can’t talk to someone in my community about CP2 if they can’t feed their family, if they can’t pay their rent. We’re building community from the ground up and making sure that our community is strong enough to withstand whatever comes our way.

e360: Have you noticed the effects of the petrochemical industry in the air and water?

Ozaan: I’m originally from Mississippi. When we first came to Louisiana in 2003, I knew right away that those industries were bad because we could see the fires and the smoke. One day it smelled like rotten eggs and the next day it smelled like Clorox. It made me sick. One of my sisters who worked in a petrochemical plant was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 30. Her job was to watch the flame to see how big or small it was going to be, but she didn’t know what was coming out of that thing.

Three of my children have eczema and two have asthma. My son was recently diagnosed with epilepsy. He started having seizures last year when he was 17. He had his first seizure when he was driving between two buildings that had flaming flames. Flaming flames are loud, they are bright and those are the things that trigger seizures. It was also a few days after the explosion at [a local refinery]I tried to get answers, but everyone I spoke to said that the chemicals released from these facilities quickly clear your blood.

e360: Does anyone keep track of the incidence of cancer, asthma and epilepsy in the region?

Ozaan: There have been studies done by Tulane and LSU, but the studies I have seen have been paid for by the industry and are biased. The state of Louisiana has said that although cancer rates are going up, there is no way to say that they are going up because the industry has grown. Louisiana is third in the nation for cancer rates. People hear about Cancer Alley and they don’t understand that the entire state of Louisiana is a cancer state. I live about three and a half hours from Cancer Alley and my community is surrounded by over a dozen petrochemical and gas facilities and three LNG facilities.

e360: How does liquefied natural gas harm the environment, even before it is burned?

Ozaan: LNG is produced by supercooling the gas into a liquid. The liquefaction process releases methane into the atmosphere. And shipping it across the ocean means more tanker traffic and dredging, more pollution, more contamination of our seafood. It’s all for export, while our energy costs here are going up. Natural gas prices in southwest Louisiana are among the highest in the state.

e360: But doesn’t it also bring jobs and infrastructure?

Ozaan: They are not delivering the number of jobs that they promise, and the people who work at these facilities are retiring with cancer. If they are delivering so many good paying jobs, why are these communities still in the state that they are in? Why are people still coming to my organization for help paying their rent and their utility bills?

e360: What role does racism play in this?

Ozaan: Racism plays a huge role because when white and wealthier people said, “We don’t want these facilities in our neighborhoods,” they were built in low-income communities and people of color. The Vessel Project fought coal in Westlake, Louisiana, and right after coal came LNG. And right after LNG you now have [new] petrochemical plants. And right behind that comes CCS [carbon capture and sequestration]It comes back again and again in the same communities.

e360: To what extent do you make climate change an explicit part of the conversation at Vessel Project?

Ozaan: I’ve learned in this work that if you want to get people to the table, you have to be careful when you talk about issues that are politicized. So we may not necessarily use the words “climate change,” but people understand that something is wrong when two historic hurricanes come back-to-back in one area. And that’s followed by flooding, and that’s followed by freezing weather, and they get pushed away.

You’re talking about a red state in the South, so we try to keep that kind of language out of the conversation and instead teach people that your environment starts with your body. If you’re not breathing clean air and clean water, you’re not going to be healthy. You’re not going to feel good, which contributes to you not wanting to go to work and not being the best version of yourself. We’re talking about industrial pollution, methane emissions. We can have a crawfish boil and we’re talking about how we had less crawfish this year than last year. And someone in the audience is going to say, “That’s because of climate change.” We don’t have to put on the flyer that we’re talking about climate change, but because we’re connecting the dots, people get it.

e360: It appears that the Department of Energy will make a decision on the permit for CP2 in January 2025.

Ozaan: We’re pushing them to speed things up. Because we don’t know how this election is going to go. We’re hoping that people will vote on the issues that are going to save their communities. We need the Biden administration back to make sure that the policies that he’s putting in place are enacted into law. The state of Louisiana just had a judge try to overturn the LNG pause. The FERC approved this permit for CP2 knowing that it can’t go anywhere without the DOE permit. [With the Sierra Club and the NRDC] We are taking all necessary steps to take this to court and have the permit declared invalid.

e360: To what extent are your activities now focused on the national level?

Ozaan: In the short term, I’m focused on elections back home in Louisiana. I’m trying to make sure that people in communities that look like mine are registered to vote and are informed about the issues. Nationally, I’m trying to go to states that have communities that look like mine and connect these issues together so that people know that these are not one-time issues. Cancer Alley in Louisiana is not the only Cancer Alley in the United States. Other communities that look like mine are being overwhelmed by polluted air and polluted water. The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, is also happening in Sulphur, Louisiana. There’s a water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. We need to start talking about how these issues are connected, how the people in these communities are all the same, and why they’ve been sacrificed for so long.

e360: How do you remain optimistic given the latest developments surrounding CP2?

Ozaan: Every morning I wake up and see my children, and they have this happiness, these smiles. And let me tell you, my children are not hidden from this. If you look back at our Climate Week post, you see my children on the front lines with banners. But the fact that they still wake up every day smiling, knowing that the fight is before us, gives me hope. Because I know that if I am not alive to see what I am fighting for come to fruition, I am raising the next generation of environmental activists, climate activists, and the fight will continue until we win.

This interview has been shortened and clarified.