Anatomy of Struggle

Steve Lerner. Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. xiv + 344 pp. $27.95.

Reviewed By Gwen Ottinger

Stories of local opposition to chemical manufacturing plants are becoming quite common, but Steve Lerner’s account of Diamond, an African American neighborhood in Norco, Louisiana, distinguishes itself. In addition to presenting a richly textured account of the lives of Diamond residents as they struggled against the nearby Shell Chemical plant, Lerner’s book considers the implications their protracted campaign has for environmentalists, governments, and chemical companies.

Diamond is at its core a triumphal story. In 2002, after decades of opposition to Shell, Diamond residents won their demand that the company buy their properties. But Lerner does more than trumpet the residents’ victory; he shows how the small minority community succeeded in their bid against a multinational chemical company. He describes the industrial accidents suffered by Diamond residents, their initial organizing efforts and attempts to gather evidence about the plant’s effects, the involvement of environmentalists from all over the United States, the growing international attention on Diamond, and the negotiations with Shell that ultimately ended the campaign. While the book’s thematic organization sometimes obscures the campaign’s chronology, it successfully shows how the campaign was won because of a convergence of forces that included attention from the environmental community and the concern of high-ranking Shell officials.

The scope of Diamond, originally conceived as an oral history project, extends beyond the environmental campaign and into the lives of the individuals involved. Lerner traces the history of the community back to the plantations on which residents’ ancestors were slaves and recounts how Shell evicted African American residents from their homes in the 1950s. He also weaves together residents’ recollections to portray convincingly their experiences of racism in the segregated town. Combined with the stories of several white Shell supporters, the stories of Diamond residents leave readers with a vivid picture of the racial polarization in Norco that formed the backdrop for the struggle.

Lerner is similarly attentive to Diamond’s environmentalist supporters. He describes how the professional activists who contributed to the residents’ victory came to be involved in the struggle, painting a nuanced picture of the environmental support enjoyed by the community.

Unfortunately, Lerner’s portrayal of Shell’s interactions with residents lacks the same texture. Nonetheless, he refuses to vilify the company, presenting the perspectives of Shell officials throughout the text and giving them considerable credit for their role in resolving the conflict in Diamond. Lerner is attentive to Diamond’s status as a particular type of community: a community of color, close to a hazardous facility, whose members were worried about the effects of the facility on their health and well-being. While their plight was typical, their campaign’s success was remarkable, so Lerner concludes by asking what can be learned from the struggle in Diamond. Using the remarks of environmentalists, he discusses the precedent that Diamond sets and suggests remedies to the problems faced by similar communities. As in other places in the book, it is difficult to tell where the voices of Lerner’s interviewees end and where his own voice begins, but the final sections are satisfying because in them Lerner, having stimulated the reader’s concern for the community of Diamond for its own sake, demonstrates its importance on a much larger scale.