It is only February and already Robert Taylor is facing his second seismic life event of the year.
Both are wrapped in grief and angst, tied indelibly to the land that surrounds his home in the community of Reserve, Louisiana.
It was on 11 January when Taylor’s wife of 61 years, Zenobia, was laid to rest at a cemetery a few miles away. In 2003, she was diagnosed with breast cancer – an illness Taylor has long linked to the emissions from a chemical plant a few thousand feet away. Although she went into remission, the cancer set off a chain of severe health issues from which she never fully recovered, he said.
And now, consumed with heartache, he is braced for the second of this year’s momentous events: the new era of Donald Trump, which is already on the brink of undoing the fragile environmental reform here that Taylor has pushed for so vigorously.
“It is going to be terrible for us,” Taylor said, almost in disbelief. “His assault is outright and he is upfront. He just started right out the gate.”
We are speaking at Taylor’s home, which is still being rebuilt after its destruction by Hurricane Ida in 2021. It is just a few hours after reporting indicates that the second Trump administration has moved to gut or shutter key offices tasked with environmental issues and civil rights at both the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Both are branches of the federal government which, under the Biden administration, had eventually intervened to curb excessive pollution here after years of grinding advocacy led by Taylor and other locals.
The measures are part of an onslaught of early executive actions announced by the new administration reversing established environmental justice and climate policy. “Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened business with regulation,” the White House claimed, without evidence, as it unleashed its first flurry of orders.
Taylor, 84, became a stalwart environmentalist in the region known as “Cancer Alley” in his late 70s. It was shortly after the EPA estimated that census tracts in his community held the highest cancer risks due to air pollution in the US, due partly to a single pollutant found nowhere else in the country: a likely human carcinogen called chloroprene.
Since 1968, the chemical plant near Taylor’s home has discharged the compound – a key constituent of a synthetic rubber called neoprene – at dangerous levels, threatening the health of the mostly Black, low-income communities that surround it, according to EPA filings. The facility, built by the chemical giant DuPont, has been operated by the Japanese firm Denka since 2015.
Denka has said a voluntary agreement with the state of Louisiana, costing the company $35m, has reduced the plant’s emissions by over 85%. A spokesperson said the emissions now “remain at historic lows”.
Thrust into advocacy later in life, Taylor, a retired contractor, has spent much of the past eight years split between tending to Zenobia in California and fighting for regulation. She had lived for the last decade out of state – and never returned – moving to Anaheim in an attempt to preserve her health. He spent a week of every month with his wife.
Zenobia had hoped that if chloroprene emissions could be reduced to what the EPA deemed a safe lifetime exposure limit, of 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter, then she could return to Reserve.
“She wanted to come home,” Taylor said. “She suffered so much.”
The campaign for cleaner air here began in earnest around the time of Trump’s first victory. It was met with indifference from the federal government and, initially, from Democrats representing the region in Congress. But the change in government in 2020 brought with it new promises as well.
Then President Joe Biden mentioned the region just days into office as he signed a series of executive orders on the climate crisis. In November 2021, the then EPA administrato,r Michael Regan, met with Taylor and others during a “Journey to Justice” environmental tour of the deep south.
“I’m hoping this is the beginning of a change,” Taylor told me at the time as we waited for Regan in the shade near his home. “A change in the relationship with the agencies that are supposedly there to protect us.”
Five months later, the EPA announced its first major intervention in the region, commencing a rare and sweeping civil rights investigation focused on the Louisiana agencies responsible for permitting oil and chemical plants in the Black-majority communities that line the banks of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
Within a year, the justice department announced a separate lawsuit specifically targeting the Denka plant in a bid to force compliance with the Clean Air Act. And in April of 2024, Biden’s EPA unveiled a sweeping set of new rules targeting cancer-causing chemical emissions, setting an expedited timeline of 90 days for a significant reduction of chloroprene in Reserve.
Taylor sat in the front row at the EPA’s Washington headquarters during the signing ceremony of the new rule. He felt a sense that the mission he had devoted his later life to could be on the verge of fulfilment.
“It was finally clear they understood the seriousness of the situation here,” he recalled.
Filings in the justice department’s case against Denka and DuPont noted that chloroprene readings at a company air monitor near Reserve showed an average concentration 14 times higher than the EPA’s 0.2 lifetime exposure threshold between April 2018 and January 2023. It acknowledged a particular risk to children at an elementary school, which sits next to the plant’s fence line, noting that average readings at certain sites could mean those under 16 might surpass the EPA’s excess cancer risk rate within two years of their life.
At the end of last year, the parish school board voted to close the school down at the end of 2025.
Denka has described both the lawsuit and the rapid implementation of the chloroprene rule as “politically motivated”. A spokesperson for the company said the litigation posed a “significant threat to the community” and “jeopardises the livelihoods of our dedicated employees”.
“Denka is fully prepared to present scientific evidence in court to counter the EPA’s fabricated ‘emergency’ claims,” the spokesperson added, suggesting the agency used “overly conservative risk assessments that misrepresent scientific facts”.
As the federal government fought to reduce the release of cancer-causing chemicals in the area, state officials sided with the chemical industry. And this pushback had already started blocking reform.
The EPA had dropped its civil rights investigations in June 2023 under pressure from Louisiana’s hard-right attorney general, Jeff Landry, who would later be elected as governor. Landry is a staunch ally of the oil and gas industry and, as the Guardian revealed, had hired lawyers already working for another petrochemical giant implicated in the investigation to negotiate with the EPA on the state’s behalf.
As well as dropping its own investigation, the agency was successfully countersued by Landry after a district court judge, appointed during Trump’s first term, ruled to permanently block the use of certain sections of the Civil Rights Act to regulate the state’s polluting facilities. Judge James Cain’s opinion brushed aside the extensive body of evidence that Black Louisianans are disproportionately harmed by the toxic discharges that abound in the state’s Cancer Alley. “Pollution does not discriminate,” he wrote.
Taylor viewed the initial pushback as an insult and a blatant rejection of recent history. Born in 1940, he remembers the racial segregation laws that shaped his youth in Reserve, and the fears that those forces – of “separate but equal” – have never fully dissipated.
“We live in a sacrifice zone here,” he said. “And this all just gave me more evidence of my original fear.”
But the new chloroprene rule and the justice department lawsuit against Denka would also be actively fought in court as well. Both now face a deeply uncertain future in the new Trump era, according to observers.
Denka initially fought the rapid implementation of the EPA’s chloroprene rule in the DC appeals circuit unsuccessfully. But then a similar appeal in the conservative fifth circuit was upheld in July last year. The appeal relied partly on intervention from Louisiana’s state environment department, which under the guidance of new Republican leadership had determined it would extend the company’s period to comply with the EPA’s standards into 2026. The EPA had argued that the state had no authority to do so as the federal agency had not delegated its responsibility.
The justice department’s separate lawsuit against the plant had also been stalled, partly by Biden’s justice department itself, following the announcement of the EPA’s new rule. It was quietly reinvigorated in October last year, and is set for trial this April – more than two years after it was first filed. But, according to Deena Tumeh, an attorney with Earthjustice who represents Taylor and other community members, the suit could be voluntarily dismissed before then, amid a freeze on all pending environmental litigation ordered by the Trump administration last month.
Such an outcome would be devastating for those who have long advocated reform, said Tumeh.
“Dismissing enforcement cases is part of Trump’s plan to gut efforts addressing environmental injustices, abandon the communities hit hardest by toxic air pollution, and promote unbridled industrial expansion,” she said.
A spokesman for Denka indicated the company had not yet received any formal notification of such a dismissal.
“The incoming Trump administration has stated that it intends to curb politically driven and misguided enforcement actions that weaponize environmental statutes far beyond their legislative intent. This lawsuit exemplifies such regulatory overreach,” the spokesman said, adding it was still prepared to litigate in court.
A spokesperson for the EPA declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
Taylor last heard from the EPA in the dying weeks of the Biden administration. He received an email with a link to a short, slickly produced documentary made to commemorate the “Journey to Justice” tour. His face was emblazoned on the promotional poster.
Despite the years of advocacy, the countless media interviews and travel between California, Washington DC and Reserve, Taylor has never waned in his ability to speak with force and clarity about his community’s demands.
He acknowledges that this is now a major juncture in that movement.
“I’m trying to see what I can be fighting for now. Where can I go?” He said. “I never could go to the state [government]. The federal [government] was my only option. And now it’s not.”
