By Ashley Kiser, age 14
Roishetta Ozane and her children reside in Sulphur, La., also known as “Cancer Alley.” In Sulphur, there are numerous petrochemical, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and oil and gas polluting facilities. In simple terms, LNG is a type of gas mostly made of methane, which is very bad for the environment, according to the Environmental Health Project. So Roishetta and her 12-year-old daughter, Kamea, decided to bring attention to this issue in their communities.
Roishetta is the founder of the environmental justice program, the Vessel Project. Roishetta and her daughter Kamea appeared on Democracy Now! in August to discuss their national tour to confront the business leaders who are implementing natural gas projects that are harming their community. They’re calling it the “Toxic Billionaires Tour.” Their objective is to bring attention to major banks and executives who “sit here in New York and in offices in D.C. [and] make decisions for our community, decisions that are killing our children, decisions that are harming our air, our water and our life,” said Roishetta to Democracy Now!
Roishetta’s kids, especially her 7-year-old, have a hard time playing outside because, as she puts it, they say, “Mom, it stinks out here. It smells like rotten eggs. I don’t want to be outside.” And her daughter Kamea has developed eczema and asthma from the harmful chemicals in her community.
“The Citibanks keep funding these fossil fuel industries in our communities. They put them in the small Black and Indigenous communities on purpose, because they know that we can’t do anything about that. They put them in poor communities and low-income communities on purpose. This is not OK. This is racist,” said Kamea at a protest outside Citibank.
Roishetta and her family have been fighting to create cleaner, healthier communities, but nothing seems to be working. In the fall, they took a big step by going to New York to get the attention of Citibank and executives to make them understand that having fossil fuel industries near communities does more harm than good.
