AFP UK

Thousands of indigenous protesters marched through Brazil’s capital Wednesday, dancing to the beat of pounding drums, as the Supreme Court prepared to take up a case that could eliminate reservations on their ancestral lands.

In what organizers said was the country’s biggest indigenous protest ever, an estimated 6,000 demonstrators marched to the seat of power in Brasilia, filling the ultra-modern square bordered by the Supreme Court, Congress and the presidency with traditional costumes and chants.

The protest aimed to pressure the high court as it began a session where it will consider a case that could remove protected status for some native lands, opening them to agribusiness and mining.

The protesters, who hail from more than 170 ethnic groups, were also fighting what they call systematic persecution under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

“The Supreme Court needs to listen to the concerns of indigenous peoples and protect our constitutional rights,” said Jatota Wajapi, 32, of the Wajapi people in the northern state of Amapa.

“The president wants to do away with our rights,” he told AFP.

The protest was peaceful, with organizers urging demonstrators to avoid confrontations with police.

A similar protest in June erupted into clashes, with three indigenous demonstrators injured and three police wounded by arrows.

The court case revolves around the Brazilian constitution’s protection of indigenous lands.

The agribusiness lobby argues those protections should only apply to lands whose inhabitants were present in 1988, when the constitution was adopted.

Indigenous rights activists argue the constitution mentions no such time limit, and that native inhabitants have often been forced from their ancestral lands.

Indigenous protesters have been camped out near the high court since Sunday, and plan to remain for a week — though it is unclear how long the ruling will take.

The court adjourned Wednesday without getting to the case, the second on its docket.

– ‘Brutally expelled’ –

The case involves a reservation in the southern state of Santa Catarina but will set legal precedent for similar cases across Brazil, experts say.

The plaintiffs are the Xokleng, Guarani and Kaingang peoples of the Ibirama-Laklano indigenous reservation, part of which lost protected status when a lower court ruled the groups were not living on the land in question in 1988.

They say that is because Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) forcibly removed them.

“During the dictatorship, the state sold our land to farmers. The reason we weren’t there (in 1988) is because they expelled us and forced us onto a tiny corner,” Ana Patte, a 29-year-old Xokleng activist, told AFP.

“Everyone knows how brutal the process of colonization was in Brazil… They killed us as if we were insects they had to clean up so they could plant crops.”

– Legal onslaught –

The implications of the case are far-reaching.

Experts say it will set legal precedent for dozens — potentially hundreds — of similar cases, at a time when a powerful, Bolsonaro-backed agribusiness lobby has been aggressively moving to rewrite the rules on protected lands in Brazil.

The case echoes legislation before Congress that would enshrine the 1988 “time-frame argument” in law.

The bill is one of several that indigenous activists and environmentalists say Bolsonaro and his allies are trying to use to further the advance of agriculture and industry into Brazil’s rapidly disappearing forests.

Environmentalists say protecting indigenous reservations is one of the best ways to stop the destruction of the Amazon, a critical resource in the race to curb climate change.

Bolsonaro warned Tuesday that “chaos” would ensue if the court did not rule in favor of the 1988 cutoff.

“There’s land that’s productive today that could stop being productive… It would be chaos for Brazil and a great loss for the world,” he said.

Bolsonaro has vowed in the past that “not one centimeter” of new indigenous reservations will be created in Brazil.

Streetlights — particularly those that use white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) — not only disrupt insect behavior but are also a culprit behind their declining numbers, a new study carried out in southern England showed Wednesday.

Artificial lights at night had been identified as a possible factor behind falling insect populations around the world, but the topic had been under-researched.

To address the question, scientists compared 26 roadside sites consisting of either hedgerows or grass verges that were lit by streetlights, against an equal number of nearly identical sites that were unlit.

They also examined a site with one unlit and two lit sections, all of which were similar in their vegetation.

The team chose moth caterpillars as a proxy for nocturnal insects more broadly, because they remain within a few meters of where they hatched during the larval stage of their lives, before they acquire the ability to fly.

The team either struck the hedges with sticks so that the caterpillars fell out, or swept the grass with nets to pick them up.

The results were eye-opening, with a 47 percent reduction in insect population at the hedgerow sites and 37 percent reduction at the roadside grassy areas.

“We were really quite taken aback by just how stark it was,” lead author Douglas Boyes, of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, told AFP, adding the team had expected a more modest decline of around 10 percent.

“We consider it most likely that it’s due to females, mums, not laying eggs in these areas,” he said. 

The lighting also disturbed their feeding behavior: when the team weighed the caterpillars, they found that those in the lighted areas were heavier.

Boyes said the team interpreted that as the caterpillars not knowing how to respond to the unfamiliar situation that runs counter to the conditions they evolved in over millions of years, and feeding more as a result to rush through their development.

The team found that the disruption was most pronounced in areas lit by LED lights as opposed to high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps or older low-pressure sodium (LPS) lamps, both of which produce a yellow-orange glow that is less like sunlight.

LED lamps have grown more popular in recent years because of their superior energy efficiency.

The paper acknowledged the effect of street lighting is localized and a “minor contributor” to declining insect numbers, with other important factors including urbanization and destruction of their habitats, intensive agriculture, pollution and climate change.

But even localized reductions can have cascading consequences for the wider ecosystem, resulting in less food for the birds and bats that prey upon insects.

Moreover, “there are really quite accessible solutions,” said Boyes — like applying filters to change the lamps’ color, or adding shields so that the light shines only on the road, not insect habitats.

Thousands of indigenous protesters marched in the Brazilian capital Wednesday, bearing bows and arrows and traditional headdresses, as the Supreme Court prepared to take up a case that could eliminate reservations on their ancestral lands.

In what organizers say was the biggest indigenous protest ever in Brazil, an estimated 6,000 demonstrators marched to the high court as it began a session where it will consider a case that could remove protected status for some native lands, opening them to agribusiness and mining.

The protesters, who hail from more than 170 ethnic groups, were also fighting what they call systematic persecution under President Jair Bolsonaro since the far-right leader took office in 2019.

“This government is attacking indigenous peoples,” said Syrata Pataxo, a 32-year-old chief of the Pataxo people from the northeastern state of Bahia.

“Today all humanity is calling for the Amazon rainforest to be protected. But the government wants our rainforest, the lungs of the planet, to be replaced by soybeans and gold mining,” he told AFP, wearing elaborate body paint.

The protest started peacefully, with organizers urging demonstrators to avoid confrontations with police.

A similar protest in June erupted into clashes, with three indigenous demonstrators injured and three police wounded by arrows.

The court case revolves around the Brazilian constitution’s protection of indigenous lands.

The agribusiness lobby argues those protections should only apply to lands whose inhabitants were present in 1988, when the constitution was adopted.

Indigenous rights activists argue the constitution mentions no such cutoff date, and that native inhabitants have often been forced from their ancestral lands.

– ‘Brutally expelled’ –

The case involves a reservation in the southern state of Santa Catarina but will set legal precedent for similar cases across Brazil, experts say.

The plaintiffs are the Xokleng, Guarani and Kaingang peoples of the Ibirama-Laklano indigenous reservation, part of which lost its provisional protected status when a lower court ruled the groups were not living on the land in question in 1988.

They say that is because Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) forcibly removed them.

“During the dictatorship, the state sold our land to farmers. The reason we weren’t there (in 1988) is because they expelled us and forced us onto a tiny corner,” Ana Patte, a 29-year-old Xokleng activist, told AFP.

“Everyone knows how brutal the process of colonization was in Brazil…. They killed us as if we were insects they had to clean up so they could plant.”

– Legal onslaught –

The implications of the case are far-reaching.

Experts say it will set legal precedent for dozens — potentially hundreds — of similar cases, at a time when a powerful, Bolsonaro-backed agribusiness lobby has been aggressively moving to rewrite the rules on protected lands in Brazil.

The case echoes legislation before Congress that would enshrine the 1988 “time-frame argument” in law.

The bill is one of several that indigenous activists and environmentalists say Bolsonaro and his allies are trying to use to further the advance of agriculture and industry into Brazil’s rapidly disappearing forests.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has surged under Bolsonaro. In the 12 months through July, a total of 8,712 square kilometers (3,364 square miles) — an area nearly the size of Puerto Rico — of forest cover was destroyed, according to official figures.

Environmentalists say protecting indigenous reservations is one of the best ways to stop the destruction of the Amazon, a critical resource in the race to curb climate change.

Bolsonaro warned Tuesday that “chaos” would ensue if the court did not rule in favor of the 1988 cutoff.

“There’s land that’s productive today that could stop being productive…. It would be chaos for Brazil and a great loss for the world.”

But the 1988 cutoff is “unconstitutional,” said lawyer Samara Pataxo, legal adviser for the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB).

“There’s nothing in the constitution that says indigenous peoples’ rights are limited to that date,” she told AFP.

A team of archeologists examining the remains of victims from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD have discovered coastal people of the time ate far more fish than modern Italians, with men getting more of the high-status food than women.

The researchers, led by a team at the University of York, analyzed amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — in 17 adult skeletons excavated from the city of Herculaneum, a popular seaside resort that remained buried under volcanic ash until the 18th century.

By studying the ratio of carbon and nitrogen isotopes of the amino acids and applying a statistical model, they were able to differentiate between food groups with a new level of precision, the team wrote in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.

Lead author and PhD student Silvia Soncin told AFP that Herculaneum provided an “extraordinary population” to study historic diets because the natural disaster gives archeologists a snapshot in time.

“Cemeteries are usually used over a certain period, we’re talking about hundreds of years, and the food sources may have changed because of changing climate or different trade routes,” she said.

Though Herculaneum and nearby Pompeii were destroyed by the volcano, most inhabitants managed to escape in time, senior author Oliver Craig, a professor of bioarcheology told AFP.

The 11 men and six women studied by the team were picked at random from 340 people who died on the beach and from nine adjacent fornici — stone chambers for boats — where they had sought shelter from the pyroclastic flow.

“We found a surprisingly high amount of marine contribution to the diet of these people, particularly compared to the modern Mediterranean population,” said Soncin, with the ancient dwellers eating about three times the amount of seafood compared to their counterparts today.

Herculaneum’s sewers were filled with fish bones, prior research has shown. Typical species would have included porgies, tuna and shellfish.

– Gender gap –

They also discovered a significant sex gap within the group, with males on average getting 50 percent more of their protein from seafood compared to females.

Men also got slightly more protein from cereals compared with their female contemporaries, while women obtained more of their proteins from animal products and locally grown fruits and vegetables.

The team put forward several possible reasons: men may have been more involved in fishing than women, but the historical record also shows that certain fish such as tuna were considered high-status food in Roman society, with men having more access.

Another aspect is that, although Herculaneum was known as a resort for the elite, it was also home to many slaves and freedmen, said Craig. 

Male slaves had a higher chance of emancipation than women and were generally freed at an earlier age, giving them more access to coveted foods.

“Now we’ve got a way and approach for actually quantifying diet in the past, so what we want to do is apply this more widely through time and space,” said Craig.

He hopes to next examine how quickly diets shifted when prehistoric humans moved from hunter-gathering activities to agricultural societies.

Thousands of indigenous protesters gathered in the Brazilian capital, bearing bows and arrows and traditional headdresses, as the Supreme Court prepared to take up a case Wednesday that could eliminate reservations on their ancestral lands.

In what organizers say is the biggest indigenous protest ever in Brazil, an estimated 6,000 demonstrators prepared to march to the high court when it opens its session to consider a case that could remove protected status for some native lands, opening them to agribusiness and mining.

The protesters, who hail from more than 170 ethnic groups, are also fighting what they call systematic persecution under President Jair Bolsonaro since the far-right leader took office in 2019.

They held a candlelight vigil Tuesday night in the square bordered by the presidential palace, the Supreme Court and Congress in Brasilia, dancing and singing to the beat of drums.

“This government is attacking indigenous peoples,” said Syrata Pataxo, a 32-year-old chief of the Pataxo people from the northeastern state of Bahia.

“Today all humanity is calling for the Amazon rainforest to be protected. But the government wants our rainforest, the lungs of the planet, to be replaced by soybeans and gold mining,” he told AFP, decked out in elaborate body paint.

The case revolves around the Brazilian constitution’s protection of indigenous lands.

The agribusiness lobby argues those protections should only apply to lands whose inhabitants were present in 1988, when the constitution was adopted.

Indigenous rights activists argue the constitution mentions no such cutoff date, and that native inhabitants have often been forced from their ancestral lands.

“All Brazil is indigenous land. We’ve always lived here,” said Tai Kariri, 28, a leader of the Kariri people from the northeastern state of Paraiba.

The case involves a reservation in the southern state of Santa Catarina but will set legal precedent for dozens of similar cases.

Bolsonaro warned Tuesday that “chaos” would ensue if the court did not rule in favor of the 1988 cutoff.

The case echoes legislation before Congress that would enshrine that “time-frame argument” in law.

The bill is one of several that indigenous activists and environmentalists say Bolsonaro and his allies are trying to use to further the advance of agriculture and industry into Brazil’s rapidly disappearing forests.

Operators of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear plant unveiled plans Wednesday to construct an undersea tunnel to release more than a million tonnes of treated water from the site into the ocean.

Plans for the one-kilometre (0.6-mile) tunnel were announced after the Japanese government decided in April to release the accumulated water in two years’ time.

Ministers say the release is safe because the water will have been processed to remove almost all radioactive elements, and will be diluted.

But the April decision triggered a furious reaction from neighbouring countries, and fierce opposition from local fishing communities.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said it will start building the tunnel by March 2022 after carrying out feasibility studies and obtaining approval from authorities.

It will have a diameter of about 2.5 metres (eight feet) and will stretch east into the Pacific from tanks at the plant containing around 1.27 million tonnes of treated water.

That includes water used to cool the plant, which was crippled after going into meltdown following a huge 2011 tsunami, as well as rain and groundwater that seeps in daily.

An extensive pumping and filtration system extracts tonnes of newly contaminated water each day and filters out most radioactive elements.

But fishing communities fear releasing the water will undermine years of work to restore confidence in their seafood.

The plant’s chief decommissioning officer Akira Ono said Wednesday that releasing the water through a tunnel would help prevent it flowing back to the shore.

“We will thoroughly explain our safety policies and the measures we are taking against reputation damage, so that we can dispel concerns held by people involved in fisheries” and other industries, Ono told reporters.

In a statement, TEPCO said it was ready to pay compensation for reputation damage related to the release.

TEPCO also said it would accept inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency on the safety of the release. The IAEA has already endorsed Japan’s decision.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has called disposing of the water an “inevitable task” in the decades-long process of decommissioning the nuclear plant.

Debate over how to handle the water has dragged on for years, as space to store it at the site runs out.

The filtration process removes most radioactive elements from the water, but some remain, including tritium.

Experts say the element is only harmful to humans in large doses and with dilution the treated water poses no scientifically detectable risk.

Russia’s central regions on Wednesday battled “extreme” wildfires fuelled by an unusual heatwave that comes after forest fires linked to climate change ravaged Siberia for most of the summer. 

Authorities were fighting 15 wildfires in the Urals region of Sverdlovsk, the emergencies ministry said. 

The region — which lies on the border of Europe and Asia — faced “extreme fire hazard” due to a heatwave, it added. 

Images on social media Tuesday showed flames on either side of a federal highway between regional capital Yekaterinburg and the Urals city of Perm, forcing the road shut for most of the day, according to reports.

Fires had meanwhile grown so intense in Mordovia, a region southeast of Moscow, that firefighters were forced to escape from a “ring of fire”, the ministry said Wednesday. 

And in the Nizhny Novgorod region east of Moscow, nine planes provided by the emergencies ministry, the defence ministry and the Russian National Guard had dropped 129 tonnes of water onto a large wildfire spreading to neighbouring Mordovia. 

Authorities had deployed 1,200 firefighters to put out the blaze, the emergencies ministry said. 

President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to protect the country’s forests, saying the nation must learn from the “unprecedented” wildfires that engulfed swathes of Siberia.

In the country’s largest and coldest region of Yakutia, fires have burned through an area larger than Portugal.

The emergencies ministry said Wednesday that there were 50 forest fires now buring in the region. 

Officials in hard-hit regions have called for resources and economic support from Moscow to deal with the damage.

Experts blame the huge fires that have ripped across Russia’s vast territory in recent years on climate change, negligence and underfunded forestry management services.

Russia’s forestry agency says fires this year have torn through more than 173,000 square kilometres (67,000 square miles), making it the second-worst season since the turn of the century.

A former sceptic of man-made climate change, Putin has called on authorities to do everything possible to help Russians affected by the gigantic fires. 

Protection  from two doses of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines wanes within less than six months, according to a study of phone app data Wednesday, suggesting that booster shots may be needed to ensure prolonged coverage.

The latest finding comes as several countries are rolling out additional jabs for the fully vaccinated, a move slammed by the World Health Organization as millions in the world have yet to receive a single dose.

The Pfizer jab was 88 percent effective a month after the second dose, but protection fell to 74 percent after five to six months, according to the latest analysis of data from the Zoe Covid Study.

The study uses real-world data gathered via a mobile phone app with over a million active users, who log details on their vaccinations and test results, which is then analysed by researchers including scientists at King’s College London.

The study drew on more than 1.2 million test results and participants.

Protection from the AstraZeneca vaccine fell from 77 percent one month after a second dose to 67 percent after four to five months.

The lead scientist on the Zoe app, Professor Tim Spector, said that more data was needed on how vaccine effectiveness changes in different age groups. 

UK cases grew sharply after social restrictions lifted in July but hospitalisations have been stable for the last month.

But Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, warned that waning vaccine effectiveness among the most vulnerable could lead to more hospitalisations and deaths by winter.

“In my opinion, a reasonable worst-case scenario could see protection below 50 percent for the elderly and healthcare workers by winter,” he said.

If high levels of infection remain, fuelled by the more transmissible Delta variant and easing of restrictions, “this scenario could mean increased hospitalisations and deaths”, the scientist said.

“We urgently need to make plans for vaccine boosters,” Spector added.

He also said the UK needed to decide whether its current focus on vaccinating children was “sensible if our aim is to reduce deaths and hospital admissions”.

The latest findings come after another study by University of Oxford scientists published last week found that the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine declines faster than that of AstraZeneca.

The UK began vaccinating older or clinically vulnerable people in December last year, so these make up most of the people who have been fully vaccinated for half a year and are now likely to be at increased risk of infection.

A village in the Austrian Alps known for its family-friendly ski resort has been forced to adapt to waning snow due to climate change, turning to a new downhill sport — mountain biking.

Bikers as young as three ride over landscaped jumps and curved forest trails, breathing new life into Sankt Corona am Wechsel, around an hour’s drive from Vienna, and offering a model for other struggling resorts.

“We used to be a 100 percent winter destination. Now, we have to think about climate change, and summers are booming,” said Karl Morgenbesser, who runs the adventure park in Sankt Corona.

As the coronavirus pandemic increases enthusiasm for outdoor activities, many Austrians hope mountain biking and other summer sports can make up for winter losses in the Alpine nation, where skiing accounts for around three percent of the GDP. 

Nearly a month of snow cover has been lost in the Alps at low and medium altitude in half a century, according to a March study published in The Cryosphere scientific journal.

And a recent report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that in the Alps the snow cover will decrease in areas below 1,500 metres (5,000 feet) throughout the 21st century.

– Lift pulls bikers up –

Situated at an altitude of nearly 900 metres, Sankt Corona dismantled its winter infrastructure in 2014 after years of losses as annual visitor numbers fell to 25,000 from 70,000 some 20 years earlier.

A rollercoaster-like summer toboggan and climbing space soon opened, but the 400-resident village’s fortunes truly turned when it devised a network of mountain-biking trails.

While most mountain biking destinations boast steep slopes, Sankt Corona’s undulating trails suit professionals as well as children relying on training wheels, and now draw about 130,000 visitors per season.

“We really like to come here as a family,” said 33-year-old Lisa Goeschl, who used to ski in Sankt Corona as a child and whose husband is an avid mountain biker.

“I think summer is a bigger hit with people (than winter) because there are so many activities on offer.”

This June, a new T-bar lift — which pulls bikers up the slope — opened, as a shuttle bus service taking riders to the top could no longer keep up with demand.

“I wanted the T-bar lift to be as simple as possible,” Simon Hanl, a local mountain biker who conceived the system to pull up the bikers, told AFP.

– ‘Inspirational’ –

Former snowboard instructor Morgenbesser hosts delegations from some of the world’s biggest ski resorts, curious to see how the tiny, low-lying village has adapted so well to a possibly snowless future. 

“It’s extremely inspirational,” said Marlene Krug, in charge of bike development in Saalbach, Austria, which frequently hosts mountain biking world cup races, and has now modelled part of its kids’ area after Sankt Corona’s.

Ski resorts first reacted to the lack of snow by investing to make it artificially. 

But temperatures have become so warm that resorts across the Alps will have to look into other options, says Robert Steiger, a University of Innsbruck expert on the impacts of climate change on tourism.  

“Diversifying into summer is necessary for all of them, and mountain biking is definitely something everyone’s interested in,” Steiger says.

Silos, smokestacks and brown pools of water line the banks of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, where scores of refineries and petrochemical plants have metastasized over a few decades. Welcome to “Cancer Alley.”

Industrial pollution on this ribbon of land between New Orleans and Baton Rouge puts the mostly African-American residents at nearly 50 times the risk of developing cancer than the national average, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

For years activists, who gave the 87-mile (140-kilometer) stretch its sinister nickname, have been fighting to clean up the area. 

Then, last spring, it began making headlines for a different reason: one of its parishes — Louisiana’s equivalent of US counties — was hit with the highest rate of Covid-19 related deaths in the country. 

“It ran through this community. People were terrified here,” says Robert Taylor, 79, a resident of the parish of St John’s the Baptist. 

In April 2020, at the height of the first wave, three residents were dying every day in the community of 43,000. 

“It changed our way of life,” says Angelo Bernard, 64, who works for the Marathon refinery. 

“In Reserve, we all used to get together all the time,” he remembers. “We don’t anymore. I go out as little as possible.” 

Since then nearly one in eight parishioners has been infected.

The Delta variant has made the situation even worse: infections have exploded in the last three weeks.

– ‘We jumped on it’ –

Deaths, however, have slowed in recent months — eight this summer, perhaps thanks to a vaccination rate that is among the highest in Louisiana.

After the trauma of 2020 parishioners rushed to get their shots, and St John’s the Baptist now has 44.3 percent of its residents fully vaccinated, compared to 39.4 percent in the rest of the state.  

“When it first came up that vaccination, you know, would help people, well we jumped on it,” smiles another resident, Robert Moore.

That reaction is perhaps not surprising in a community that has already dealt with so much tragedy. 

Like many of the residents of his neighborhood in the small town of Reserve, Moore devoted his life to the nearby plant formerly owned by US chemical company DuPont.

Set up in 1968 on a former plantation, the plant — some of whose pipes reach into the opaque waters of the Mississippi — was purchased in 2015 by the Japanese company Denka.

It is the only site in the United States that produces neoprene, a material used to make wetsuits, gloves or electrical insulators. 

To produce neoprene the plant emits chloroprene, a chemical classified as a probable carcinogen by the EPA in 2010.

Astronomical amounts of the chemical were detected in Reserve’s air in the early 2010s, prompting the environmental agency to set a recommended limit of 0.2 micrograms of chloroprene per cubic meter.

Across the road from the plant, an air quality monitoring station serves as a grim reminder.

– ‘Vulnerable’ –

When Taylor got wind of the scandal, he was only half-surprised: the former construction worker had long wondered why cancer — which struck his mother, and his sister, and his wife, and his nephews — was so prevalent in his town.

Chloroprene is not the only factor affecting the health of Cancer Alley residents.

In Reserve, where more than 60 percent of the 9,000 residents are Black, the poverty rate is two and a half times the national average.  

It is a population with “lots of comorbidities, lots of social challenges, socio-economic factors that contribute to poor health outcomes,” notes Julio Figueroa, an infectious disease specialist at Louisiana State University. 

“They are going to be a vulnerable population,” he said. 

President Joe Biden acknowledged the challenges facing “Cancer Alley” shortly after his arrival in the White House.

He said he aimed to address “the disproportionate health and environmental and economic impacts on communities of color… especially… the hard-hit areas like Cancer Alley in Louisiana.”

The United Nations has also drawn attention to the area’s plight, releasing a report earlier this year denouncing “environmental racism” in the area.

For resident Angelo Bernard, the spotlight placed on his community in recent months is an opportunity for the country to overcome some of its divisions — whether they be race, or the intensely partisan divide over vaccinations and other Covid measures.

“God is allowing all this to happen for a reason, you know,” he told AFP. 

“We got to find the right way to come together and get people vaccinated.”