Journally Speaking: Hallowed ground

There’s a lot of talk nowadays about brand awareness, with operators and service companies alike scrambling to ensure corporate actions align with identities and reputations they’d like to uphold to the world at large.

Environmentally friendly. Community centered. Socially conscious. Ethically minded. Fully transparent. The list goes on and on, and while companies spend millions on branding, sometimes common sense, or lack thereof, is all it takes to make or break a public image.

It’s no question the industry has made great strides in walking the walk it talks. But there are still outliers, and for better or worse, they reinforce increasingly negative sentiments the global population holds when it comes to oil, gas, and petrochemicals development.

Roots that clutch

Just ahead of the New Year, Louisiana-based community group RISE St. James revealed that Formosa Petrochemical Corp. (FPC), during the process of seeking a land use permit from state regulators, didn’t alert local community to the confirmed presence of graves of enslaved people on the site of subsidiary FG LA LLC’s proposed $9.4-billion ethane cracking and petrochemical complex along the west bank of the Mississippi River in St. James Parish, La. (OGJ Online, Apr. 24, 2018).

RISE St. James alleges that, despite the group’s consistent public engagement on the issue, neither FPC nor state authorities disclosed to locally impacted communities that FPC’s plant would be built on one or more plantation burial grounds for former slaves. This information would have been highly relevant to land use debates about the project, RISE St. James said in a filing to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ).

Recent documents obtained by RISE St. James as part of a records request show that FPC and the state held detailed discussions about these cemeteries starting as early as July 2018. RISE St. James told the LDEQ that the lack of candor and transparency surrounding the process signals a disregard for the human dignity of historically enslaved people as well as their surviving descendants in the region.

Accordingly, RISE St. James petitioned LDEQ to deny FPC’s air permit applications and to ensure any future permit applications for these or any other project sites be subjected to the latest rigorous, scientific, and archaeological methods for determining existence of unmarked burial grounds in consultation with representatives of affected local communities.

Fear in a handful of dust

Just to be clear, this editor isn’t so naïve as not to understand that the world as we know it today is built upon civilizations that came before us. Modern cities, states, and countries across the globe likely sit atop ruins of still-unnamed nations, peoples, and cultures that are—and probably forever will stay—lost to us. While we can’t undo whatever injustices were done by our predecessors as they tried to impose order on a world they perceived as savage or primitive, surely we’ve come so far as to exercise sound judgement and practicality—as any self-proclaimed enlightened, just, and humane society would—to do the right thing when confronted with irrefutable facts that a course of action might cause irreparable harm.

If reputation truly is the ultimate sum of what something is, it’s time industry and its partners—both suppliers and government agencies—figure out it’s possible to preserve and extend inherent principles of human decency and dignity to all parties involved in a project.

This editor isn’t sure of much these days, save for one basic truth: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Despite whatever false sense of security leads us into believing that we’ve somehow dodged a consequence, like it or not, everyone’s bill comes due one day.