Mother Jones Magazine
Below are selected pieces from 2019 when Nicole Javorsky was an editorial fellow at Mother Jones …
“God Told Me to Fight”—Inside the Battle to Stop Another Petrochemical Plant in “Cancer Alley”
Sharon Lavigne has lived all of her 67 years in St. James Parish, Louisiana. She can tell you about a time when the fig and pecan trees in her neighborhood produced plenty to eat and sell, and when her grandfather caught fish and shrimp in the Mississippi River. The land and the water surrounding it wasn’t always poison …
98 Percent of Their Island Is Underwater. Now Tropical Storm Barry Is Headed Their Way.
In the 19th century, when the Indian Removal Act became law, Native Americans were forced off of their land. In Louisiana, some fled to what is now Isle de Jean Charles in Terrebonne Parish, which was then considered to be “uninhabitable swamp land.” For years, the community that mostly consisted of members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, worked as fishermen, oystermen, or trappers. But since 1955, because of a combination of oil extraction, hurricanes, and sea level rise, Isle de Jean Charles has lost 98 percent of its land …
Suburbs Aren’t Only Conformist, White-Bread Clichés. They’ve Also Been Radical, Green, and Visionary.
The typical suburb as it is stereotyped in the popular imagination is white, wealthy, and conformist. The Monkees’ 1967 song “Pleasant Valley Sunday” captured the cliché by describing a place with “rows of houses that are all the same and no one seems to care,” where there’s a TV in every room “here in status-symbol land.”
Amanda Kolson Hurley, an editor at CityLab, author of Radical Suburbs, and resident of Silver Spring, Maryland (a suburb of Washington, DC), knows that real-life suburbia is a “dizzyingly broad category” …