Strangers in their own land

What Hacker News says

1. gammaratorAug 2026
   The book “Strangers in Their Own Land” covers similar ground.
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2. munificentFeb 2026
   I grew up in Cancer Alley. Here's my old neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/3DZbiz8Bgyx5tx7v9

   That wedge surrounded by green is a neighborhood that was created by landfilling a patch of swamp and building a levee around it. The northeast side of the wedge is the "nice" part of the neighborhood. You can see the houses are much bigger and there is a golf course running through it. There's a country club and lot of very nice houses. That's where a lot of upper level oil company employees live. (We lived here, my stepfather was a research chemist at DuPont.)

   The southwest side of the neighborhood (much of it literally on "the other side of the tracks") is the cheaper houses and some apartments where a lot of blue collar employees work.

   Zoom out a bit and you see Shell Norco to the northwest, the very heart of (and cause of) Cancer Alley. Ormond Estates was basically created to be a commuter neighborhood for Shell. Across the river is Dow Chemical. Look east and you see the IMTT St. Rose chemical plant. Keep going upriver and you get to DuPont and the Marathon Refinery.

   Most of the executives responsible for cancer here do live in the area. People of all stripes have an impressive ability to maintain cognitive dissonance and live in denial when they are incentivized to do so.

   Southern Louisiana is an intense microcosm of this. Seafood is one of the biggest industries there and you would think the local culture would be intensely protective of the environment, especially after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But environmentalism is woven into liberal culture that is in opposition to the religious conservative culture of the area, so it often gets actively rejected even though poor people in Louisiana are the ones who suffer for their choice.

   "Strangers in Their Own Land" is an excellent social science book if you want to know more about the area.

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3. chneuJul 2025
   There is an amazing book about this. The author interviewed hundreds of people down in Alabama to get an idea of how they felt about these things.

   Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_in_Their_Own_Land

   The gist of it is that people think short term. They can care about the environment/greater good but if you promise them jobs/prosperity in the short term they'll usually vote for that, despite their livelihood/environment being destroyed by the industry that promised them the jobs. Then when things don't work out they blame minorities, women, etc for "cutting in line" with the help of people like Obama and democrats.

   It's really not that complicated which, imo, is kind of sad.

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4. giraffe_ladyApr 2025
   There's a really interesting book that became about this because of an accident of timing and the author's research it's called Strangers in Their Own Land.

   The author was writing about a specific region of louisiana that is all three of farther right than the norm even for a US rural area, more polluted than almost anywhere, and having a local culture that prizes connection to the land and natural systems present there.

   It's very good! The author approaches these contradictions with more curiosity and care than you're going to find on HN even on its best days. https://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land

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5. ubermanAug 2024
   Not directly about Trump but this will help you understand the foundation.

   Strangers in Their Own Land

   By Hochschild

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6. munificentJul 2024
   I grew up along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas.

   Louisiana is, frankly, a shitshow when it comes to making smart long-term decisions. Corruption is rampant and businesses generally have politicians in their pockets. Those businesses are able to effectively offload their externalities, so they are incentivized to destroy the environment while reaping the short-term profits.

   If you want any prediction as to how things will go in Louisiana, the easy answer is "poorly" and you'll be right most of the time. It's honestly hard to expect better from a place whose largest city's motto is "Let the good times roll". The local culture is just deeply broken.

   At the same time, I'm really disappointed that this article almost completely glossed over one of the major challenges facing Louisiana that has absolutely nothing to do with climate change. The only tangential mention is:

   > Last November, Louisiana broke ground on a $2.3 billion project to shunt some of the muddy flows of Mississippi under and past Ironton into degraded wetlands to the west. The project is being financed largely with settlement money from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, and aims to halt losses of wetlands by mimicking the Mississippi River’s historic path.

   When the article notes:

   > Since 1932, the state has lost more than 1,900 square miles of land, an area equal to the state of Delaware

   It implies that the loss was primarily climate change, but that's not true at all.

   Most of this loss was driven by the way the Army Corps of Engineers has managed the Mississippi River. For millions of years, the Mississippi River went through periodic oscillations. As the river dumped more and more sediment into the delta, the delta would build up until eventually it started blocking the flow. The majority of the flow would then shift to the Atchafalaya river. That river would empty into the Gulf and its delta would build up sediment. Eventually, it would reach a level where the Mississippi was again the easiest route to the Gulf and flow would change again. That periodic meandering route to the Gulf is what created the entire southern half of Louisiana and is why it is such astonishingly fertile land (well, not so much "land" now).

   But for the past hundred years, the Army Corps of Engineers has been instructed to build floodwalls along the Mississippi to avoid floods in the midwest. Those floodwalls increase the overall flow rate so that by the time the river reaches southern Louisiana, it's moving too fast to deposit sediment in the delta like it used to and instead it gets washed farther out into the Gulf.

   At the same time, the Corps has been responsible for keeping most of the water flowing into the Gulf going through the Mississippi side instead of the Atchafalaya so that the Port of New Orleans doesn't get hurt economically. That also means that the river isn't allowed to meander and build up sediment across the southern edge of the state.

   If you think of Louisiana as a boot, this is why the "toe" (where the Mississippi dumps into the Gulf) is getting longer while the instep (the middle of the state where the Atchafalaya) is disappearing.

   All of this was true and has been happening for decades before any significant climate change occurred. It's still 100% human-caused, and known, and preventable. But it's not from carbon in the atmosphere and sea level rise, though those are now exacerbating it.

   If you want to learn more about engineering the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, read John McPhee's Atchfalaya, written almost 40 years ago: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya

   If you want to learn more about Louisiana's paradoxical culture around the environment, read Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land".

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