Plantationocene Geographies: Petro-Multinationals, Agribusiness, and the Racial Ecology of the Cold War Mississippi Delta

The Cold War Mississippi Delta figured prominently as a hotbed of massive resistance against racial integration and as a civil rights battleground, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s. It was also home to an agrochemical regime of plantation production that heavily impacted regional ecosystems. This article addresses the interplay between white supremacist politics and environmentally destructive forms of large-scale farming, especially the connections between petrochemical manufacturing in Louisiana and plantation agriculture in Mississippi’s Delta region. I discuss how a Jim Crow mindset manifested itself in these industries, with toxic repercussions for both society and nature. The petro-multinationals that settled along the Mississippi River were active in various parts of the planet, and the crops grown on Delta neoplantations were sold on world markets, making the activities of these companies distinctly global in character. This essay considers the factories in Louisiana and the large-scale farms in the Mississippi Delta as part of a unified agrochemical entity that can be considered a Plantationocene geography: a globalized business conglomerate based on a racialized labor system and an extractive, for-profit logic that was detrimental to local communities and the environment. With the arrival of oil and gas plants in Louisiana and the rise of the neoplantation during the New Deal years, an industrialized and poisonous racial ecology began to develop in the southern Mississippi River Valley wherein water, land, and minerals served as resources for the enrichment of a select few.