Putting Cancer Alley on the Map

Report #1, June 22, 2002

As a demonstration of how SVG can be used for citizen mapmaking, we invite you to join us midstream in a project -- putting Cancer Alley on the map of Louisiana. If you have an appropriately configured system (see the sidebar to the right), you can check the map out here.

"Cancer Alley" is a term coined in the 1980s by Louisiana activists Darryl Malek-Wiley and Richard Miller to describe a pollution-ridden industrial corridor that is home, by some counts, to over 300 major industries. Louisiana development officials and industry supporters dispute the cancer association, claiming the area's cancer rates are typical of the rest of the country. The Cato Institute, for example, has called Cancer Alley an "environmental myth". For residents of the area, however, physical ailments are anything but mythical. As Barbara Koeppel noted in her piece in The Nation, "People living nearest the factories and waste dumps are sick and dying. Clusters of asthma, stillbirths, miscarriages, neurological diseases and cancers have mushroomed". Undoubtedly, scientifically reliable health analyses confirming the existence of "Cancer Alley" would help residents to advance their claims. According to Koeppel, such studies have been hampered, in part, by deficient data classication and sloppy record keeping at the state's Tumor Registry ( "Cancer Alley, Louisiana", The Nation, November 8, 1999).

We clearly sympathize with the residents and advocates for whom the term "Cancer Alley" has acquired popular legitimacy. This project -- putting Cancer Alley on the map -- aims to give voice to local complaints, visually associating health experiences with specific geographic locations.

If you have downloaded and installed your SVG viewer from Adobe's SVG download site (see right sidebar), you can see that we have already built a map of the year 2000 Toxics Release Inventory reporters in Louisiana. Included are layers for Congressional districts and State Senate districts along with contact information. (We have produced a State House districts layer but wish to reduce the large file size before including it). In the southeastern portion of the state, the shape of Cancer Alley stands out conspicuously, starting in the area south of New Orleans along Lake Pontchartrain, running along or parallel to the Mississippi in a northwesterly direction toward Baton Rouge.

The next steps required in order to put Cancer Alley on the map include: