Though I taught for 40 years, I never taught American history. As a child of the Vietnam War era, I had seen too much to be able to deliver convincingly the exaggerations of most high-school textbooks.
Today, Louisiana is a subject in another chapter. This is the latest section of a long chapter that has been a century in the writing. Its title is simple: “Corporate Annihilation of the Cultures and Landscapes of Louisiana.”
In the past century, French was beaten out of the population, underground pipelines tore up sugar fields, above-ground pipelines scarred the marsh landscape, cancer and asthma became endemic upriver from New Orleans and around Lake Charles and the state Legislature refused to levy property taxes on offending companies…