ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how the capitalist-driven political-economic structure manufactures the vulnerability of coastal Louisiana's communities, transforming the region-once a place of refuge for displaced native peoples and ethnic minorities-into energy sacrifice zone that risks setting the stage for future disasters. Based on ethnographic research conducted primarily between October 2011 and September 2012 with tribes in coastal Louisiana, it highlights the 2010 British petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster — the most recent infamous event in a century-long story of smaller-scale environmental and social disruptions. The chapter examines the use of corexit dispersants in an attempt to ameliorate contamination that further contaminated the environment and affected local residents' health and livelihoods. The analysis shows that government actions reflect a privatization paradigm that inevitably leads to energy sacrifice zones. This process indicates that by destroying the environment — and the possibility of physical and cultural reproduction within that environment — also destroying select populations to make way for profit.
