Yazoo Pumps Project threatens Black residents in Mississippi Delta

The Biden administration, which touted its commitment to environmental justice through the creation of the Office of Environmental Justice and the disadvantaged communities funding initiative Justice40, plans to evict Black residents in the Mississippi Delta to make way for a monumentally costly project that would be a windfall for agricultural and construction industries. 

The proposal for the Yazoo Pumps project is to build the world’s largest hydraulic pumping plant in the Yazoo Backwater Area, a 1 million square-foot patch of alluvial floodplain 10 miles north of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

The public has until December 30 to weigh in on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’  final Environmental Impact Statement that supports the construction of the Yazoo Pumps. The proposal has the backing of the White House, Mississippi’s senior senator, and the commissioner for the Department of Agriculture and Commerce, making the project’s approval likely. According to the advocacy group American Rivers, the project’s estimated cost is around $1.4 billion. 

In the balance hangs the fate of nearly 97,000 acres of “hemispherically vital” wetlands, according to a letter signed by 139 conservation, faith, social justice, and governmental organizations. Those acres include the Delta National Forest, home to pristine bottomland hardwood forest that provides habitat for deer, bears, birds, and other animals. Put another way, this is a swamp forest that needs periodic influxes of water; the Yazoo Backwater Area evolved along with the Mississippi River and its tributaries, both of which flood as natural parts of their ecology. 

These cycles have posed a problem for the industrial agriculture owners in the region, whose crops are inundated when the rain comes. Louie Miller, the director of Sierra Club Mississippi, told Prism that the pumps would activate at 90- or 93-foot elevation depending on the time of year and would be managed based on planting season. He said the pumps aren’t a flood management tool; rather, they’re an agriculture subsidy. Commodity crops like corn, soybeans, and cotton are insured through federal programs run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, so if farm operators can plant before the flooding starts, they can reap an insurance payout when their commodities go underwater. 

The Yazoo Pumps have been called a “zombie project.” Initially proposed in 1941, the project languished in Congress for decades before being vetoed by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008. The Trump administration’s revival has brought the proposal back from the dead. Now, the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency in charge of executing federal construction projects, has reached the end of its formal planning process before a Record of Decision is released and construction gets underway.

With the release of the final environmental impact report, residents who live in the Yazoo Backwater Area are especially concerned about an element of the proposal outlining voluntary “buyout scenarios” of residential and commercial properties in the affected area. The combined actions of “relocating” at least 100 homes—and building the pumps—would ultimately lower the flood risk for the majority Black, low-income community in the Backwater, the Corps argues. The agency posits that this action constitutes “environmental justice.” 

The final report is a marked difference from the draft version, which called for “mandatory” buyouts of potentially affected homes. After community members organized and petitioned the Corps, it appears that the proposal’s call for eminent domain has been dropped. The proposal states that houses would be purchased for their current market value and that additional relocation funds would not be provided. 

Encouraging Black residents of the Delta to relocate isn’t environmental justice, community members argue; it’s environmental injustice. 

“This is not flood relief, this is a violation of the generational struggles our Black communities have endured in rising up against abuse, poverty, and injustice,” reads a letter signed by 56 community members, landowners, and homeowners before the final report was published.

Eminent domain, the legal process whereby the government can take private property for the development of roads, highways, shopping centers, and other uses, has historically and disproportionately targeted Black communities. From 1949 to 1973, during a period called “urban renewal,” the Federal Housing Act allowed governments to displace 1 million people, two-thirds of whom were Black. 

“Politicians and developers found that they could repackage eminent domain and government subsidies in many new ways, facilitating the taking of land for ‘higher uses,’” writes scholar and social psychiatrist Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove in “Eminent Domain and African Americans.” In her research, Thompson Fullilove explores the ways that Black people have been seen as oppositional to the public land use, creating the groundwork for the dispossession of their hard-won private property. Private property ownership, the foundation of familial wealth-building, was once out of reach for African Americans who were considered property when chattel slavery was legal. 

There’s also a lot of speculation from advocacy groups about just how effective the pumps might be. The plan is for the pumps to take water upstream and distribute it downstream, increasing the flow for those living south of the Backwater area, communities which are also majority low-income and Black. The pumps may only clear water from 17% of the area, said Jill Mastrototaro, the policy director of Audubon Delta in Mississippi. 

One of the biggest sticking points is that a number of lower-cost, potentially more effective tools have been laid out for the Corps by advocates like Miller and Mastrototaro. This includes raising roads, utilizing federal programs to pay farmers to turn farmland back into wetlands, and putting houses on stilts. Perhaps the most glaring irony is that the wetlands the pumps would destroy are nature’s “sponge,” a vast and complex ecosystem that absorbs water, weakens storms, and bolsters biodiversity. In other words, wetlands are natural defenses against climate crisis and the increasing intensity of weather events. And in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that undercut federal protections for wetlands, they need all the support they can get.

“Time after time, we have urged you to abandon any version of the Yazoo Pumps because we know the real truth—the Pumps will not keep our communities from flooding,” says the letter written by community members who will likely be affected by the voluntary buyout. “It is an affront to the legitimate health, safety, and recovery needs of our communities that your plan to operate the Pumps is entirely driven to benefit wealthy agricultural interests.”

But Miller of the Sierra Club Mississippi said that he and other advocates have heard no indication that the administration or the Corps is going to substantively consider proven flood control methods that don’t destroy the environment or undermine community needs. 

“It’s so ironic that the Biden administration has touted [and] continues to tout their environmental justice creds—this knocks the feet out from under that narrative,” Miller said. 

The proposed voluntary buyouts destroy the “heritage of people who received this land and passed it down from generation to generation, going back to emancipation,” he said. “It’s obscene what they’re proposing here.”

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