Anne Rolfes: Bringing buckets of help to fenceline communities
by Vicki Wolf, March 2009
Anne Rolfes, founder and program director of Louisiana Bucket Brigade (LABB), is known as a leading pioneer of low-cost air sampling, soil testing and health surveys. With these tools, she helps citizens show the link between their health problems and what they see and smell coming from the smoke stacks of oil refineries next door to their fenceline communities.
She started LABB in 2000. The very effective low-tech buckets, made for low-cost citizen air sampling, were first sponsored by California-based Communities for a Better Environment. Using the buckets, LABB has developed the largest collection of community-gathered air samples in the United States. They have documented hundreds of violations of state and federal air quality standards.
In 2007, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation honored Rolfes for her leadership and advocacy in environmental health with the “Community Health Leaders Award” and $125,000.
LABB has taken on the big oil companies, including Shell and Exxon Mobil, and won important battles for fenceline communities. The website offers a long list of accomplishments these major victories:
- Pressured the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality to install air pollution monitors across the street from the Exxon Mobil refinery in Chalmette
- Enforced environmental laws by filing two citizen Clean Air Act law suits against polluting refineries, resulting in over 2,500 violations of the law
- Pressured Shell Oil Company to buy polluted properties in Norco, Louisiana so that residents could move to a safer and cleaner place
“Anne has succeeded where others have failed to bring these companies to justice,” says Jane Dale Owen, president of Citizens League for Environmental Action Now (CLEAN).
Rolfes grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, among many people who made their fortunes in the oil industry. But she didn’t understand the devastating effects of pollution from the industry until she worked as an organizer in Africa.
Right out of college, Rolfes joined the Peace Corp and went to Togo, West Africa. She lived in a village north of Togo with villagers in mud huts. The people there lived by farming. “I loved the family I lived with,” Rolfes recalls. “When I came back to the states, I knew I wanted to work for a non-profit.”
Rolfes read about oil production pollution in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. “They leave oil all over the land, and the people can’t grow their crops,” Rolfes says.“This destroys farm land, a way of life and a way of staying alive,” They also dumped salt water into fresh water, which ruined fishing as a source of food for the Nigerian families, according to Rolfes.
“I got very upset because of my relationship with my village in Togo,” Rolfes says. Her distress over what was happening in Nigeria moved her to join Project Underground, a non-profit organization based in Berkeley, California that worked with communities affected by oil and mining. Rolfes went back to Africa and did research with a group of refugees in Benin, east of Nigeria, who had stood up to Shell Oil Company to protest the oil production pollution. “Their protests resulted in their village being set on fire and the women gang raped by the military sent there to protect Shell,” says Rolfes. “It continues to be a terrible thing.”
Rolfes eventually wanted to come back home to Louisiana and continue environmental justice work there. Ironically, the first community she met with was dealing with Shell. This was all it took to ignite Rolfes passion. “I was extremely upset about what was happening in Nigeria,” she says. “To come home and see people dealing with the same thing was a call to action.”
The experiences in Africa were instrumental in leading Rolfes into the work she is doing today with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. “I Really would never have figured it out if I hadn’t gone to Africa,” Rolfes says. “I learned to understand my world when I went half way around the world.”
Rolfes was unable to find a job working with communities neighboring polluting facilities to help them get justice from the big oil companies so she started Louisiana Bucket Brigade.
LABB’s work has evolved over time. The group has worked to have an intense campaign in one area. Over the past few years, the group is working to link people together who have similar issues and deal with the refining industry as a whole. “We can do a lot more by coming together to plan and advocate for collectively,” Rolfes says.
Rolfes and LABB work to ensure that the neighbors who are affected by the pollution from nearby refineries are partners rather than subjects, or guinea pigs. “We aren’t going in like antrhopologists,” Rolfes says. “It is their work. When the media come, we make sure they are featured.”
People need to go very public with information about pollution in their area, according to Rolfes. “As long as it is just a secret between the polluters and the complaining community, nothing will every change.”
Rolfes says it is the people in the neighborhoods and her basic sense of justice that keeps her doing this work.
When she is not advocating for environmental justice, Rolfes like to play the piano. She just finished re-reading “Jane Erye.” “When it is football season, I really like the Saints, and I watch football.”
One of the new developments in Rolfes’ life is that she will soon be a new parent. She and her partner, Cindy Brown, who works for the Nature Conservancy, are in the process of adopting a child.
