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Plantations to Pollution: Black Communities, Legacy Pollution and the Path Forward
By Jordy Yager and Tasha Durret; photos by Cornell Watson
The South’s history is built into the land. It’s in the rice fields and cotton rows that once fed the nation’s wealth. It’s baked into the multigenerational neighborhoods born from freedom’s fragile promise. It’s also in the flood zones, the smokestacks, and the highways that now carve through the same places.
From plantations to pollution, the South’s story is one of unbroken extraction — first of labor, now of land, health, and, if left unchecked, our future. Many Black communities in the South were founded in the shadow of plantation economies. After the Civil War, they built neighborhoods, schools, and churches under restrictive laws, racist zoning, and discriminatory social codes. These injustices made it easier for those with power, money, and influence to exploit these communities — through the siting of highways, landfills, and other polluting industries.
The result is a long throughline of environmental harm stretching back as far as the 1600s. According to a 2017 study by the NAACP and the Clean-Air Task Force, Black Americans are exposed to 38 percent more polluted air than white Americans, and they are 75 percent more likely to live immediately adjacent to an industrial facility, hazardous site, or other source of environmental risk.
These are not accidents of geography — they are the direct consequence of land-use decisions rooted in race, place, and economic exploitation.
SELC’s new storytelling project, Plantations to Pollution: Black Communities, Legacy Pollution, and the Path Forward, explores these injustices and looks closely at communities deeply committed and determined to protect their culture, the land, and their future. SELC is working to realize that vision by taking on the largest polluters and fighting for a South where everyone has the right to clean air, safe water, and a livable environment.
SEEING THE SOUTH
Underground marvels: Caves of the Cumberland Plateau
Photos by Stephen Alvarez
Caves have always called to the curious, offering mysteries down their damp dark passages and sights found nowhere else. Their cool recesses provide refuge from the heat, a covered dry space to escape the rain, and a chance to see creatures built for survival in a land without light.
Often unseen, caves still reflect all that’s happening above ground. While the Cumberland Plateau’s unique geography is home to beloved national forests and precious habitat for endangered species, it’s also a place where renowned rivers can become dumping grounds for industrial pollution. And eventually some of that water flows underground, carving these extraordinary underground natural wonders out of ancient limestone. Protecting our waterways and the lands around them from forever chemicals like PFAS or coal ash isn’t just good for us on the surface, it’s vital for life underground as well.
These photos by Stephen Alvarez, taken where Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia meet, invite us to explore the unparalleled beauty and magic of all that lies beneath one of the world’s most cave-rich regions.
Why we can’t afford to lose our public lands protections
By B. Sunni Hickman
When you step into a roadless area of a national forest, the difference is immediate. The air is cooler, the woods quieter, the water clearer. You hear the splash of a mountain stream or the rustle of leaves in the breeze. These are some of the most intact places in our national forests—rare sanctuaries where roads have not carved up landscapes, where adventure and clean water still thrive.
Roadless areas are rare, especially in the eastern U.S., and they are now under threat. The Trump administration has proposed dismantling the Roadless Area Conservation Rule—better known as the Roadless Rule—one of America’s most important bipartisan conservation achievements. It safeguards 45 million acres of national forests. For the South, the loss would be devastating.
Data centers descend on the South
By SELC staff
Imagine being so happy it almost hurts.
That’s how Amanda Wydner describes the moment she learned months of sustained organizing efforts were finally paying off. After an April vote by the local board of supervisors, following an outpouring from concerned residents, the homes she and her neighbors owned near Virginia’s southern border were no longer under threat from a gigantic complex of data centers and its harmful gas power plant.
The United States is home to the most data centers in the world. Thousands of facilities across the country currently power online activities that vary from file storage and money transfers to generating artificial intelligence, or AI. The largest concentration of these facilities is in the South, and Virginia holds the title of “data center capital of the world” thanks to the hundreds of facilities located across D.C. suburbs like Ashburn, Sterling, and Manassas.
In addition to the numerous data centers already running, at least 200 new ones are in some stage of development, from proposal to construction, around the South. These centers are often paired with new fossil fuel projects to power them, dragging us backward on climate progress.
The run on data centers has happened so fast it has allowed for unchecked growth without much transparency or public input.