Louisiana is unraveling.
Unraveling Industry is an interactive platform that maps oil and gas infrastructure in Louisiana by company and reveals the continuum of Extractivism from colonialism to climate change, making a case for corporate accountability and reparations.
Learn how Louisiana wetlands bear the impacts of petrochemical production through the story of a single pipeline
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Use the interactive map to identify oil and gas infrastructure
About
Over the past 100 years, nearly 2,000 square miles of wetlands have eroded at one of the fastest rates in the world. An additional 2,250 square miles are expected to be lost by 2050. Much has been written about this devastating "land loss" — but who lost it?
Louisiana's unraveling is the result of a chaotic network of oil and gas infrastructure dredged, drilled, and installed by over one hundred corporations throughout the fragile wetlands of the state's coastal zone. 10,000 miles of access canals pave the way for the drilling of 75,000 wells, which connect via 50,000 miles of pipeline to the Petrochemical Corridor, also known as Cancer Alley, formerly known as Plantation Country. Here, 200 (and counting) tank farms, refineries, and petrochemical plants occupy the footprints of fallow sugarcane plantations straddling the Mississippi River.
By making this infrastructure visible, we can follow the flow of oil along the full fossil fuel production cycle, from point of extraction to point of emission. By making it legible, we can disentangle chains of liability and chart a course to corporate accountability and ecological reparations that will unravel the industry's web.