What residents and advocates have known for a long time is now EPA-official: People who live in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” suffer increased cancer risks because of exposure to pollution from nearby chemical plants. “They see what we are going through and they see that this is environmental racism,” Sharon Lavigne, founder of Rise St. James, which has successfully fought multi-billion dollar plants in the region, told the AP. In a 56-page letter to state officials, the first of its kind, EPA outlined findings of racist discrimination by at least two Louisiana regulatory departments in their failure to regulate pollution in the industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The EPA has “significant evidence suggesting that the Departments’ actions or inactions” in Cancer Alley have harmed and are harming Black residents of St. John the Baptist Parish, St. James Parish. (AP, E&E $)