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James Hiatt used to work for a refinery on the Louisiana coast. Now he’s galvanizing his community to create a healthier bayou.
For James Hiatt, the 43 year old founder and director of For a Better Bayou, a nonprofit seeking to foster alternatives to the fossil fuel economy in Southwestern Louisiana, the oil and gas industry isn’t just in his blood; it’s in his nostrils.
“My dad worked at Conoco, now Phillips 66. He’d come home in his Nomex [fire retardant garments] smelling like the refinery after 12-hour shifts,” Hiatt said. “He missed a lot of family stuff. I told myself I was never going to work in the refinery.”
Instead, he got married at 19 and moved in 2002 with his wife to New York City, a young couple with a plan: she’d teach school while earning a master’s degree, and he’d pursue rock star dreams and get a day job to help pay the bills.
His first such job was in a Times Square hotel with Jewish owners, a Pakistani manager, and a Nigerian bellman. His previous worldview — conservative, Christian, conformist — was exploded by the diversity. The owner, a Holocaust survivor, had a number tattooed on his arm by the Nazis; the bellman fasted for the entire month of Ramadan while hauling luggage up three or four flights without a sip of water. Against the intense glow of neon lights, Hiatt found himself considering morality, sacrifice, and his own values and their impacts.
“I started recycling. I stopped buying things made by exploited foreign labor just because they were cheaper. The belief structure I’d been given told me that everybody’s burning in hell unless you save them, unless you convince them to believe the way you believe. And that didn’t work for me anymore,” he said.
In 2007, the couple’s big city adventure ended for the best possible reason: the arrival of their baby boy. Returning home to raise him (and later two daughters) among family (who were mostly working in refineries), Hiatt soon got a job at Citgo, a Venezuelan oil company in Lake Charles. He started as a contract operator on the docks and in the finished tank farm where the jet fuel, gas and diesel were stored. When a better paying opportunity came his way in the refinery’s lab, he went for it.
I tell folks, pick whatever lights you up, whatever pisses you off. Is it the LNG buildouts, the data centers, carbon capture? Pick one, and let’s work on that.
– James Hiatt
His wallet fattened, but it came at a price. “Like my dad, I was really grouchy working those 12-hour shifts. My poor wife and kids. You know, you only sleep a couple hours, and you’re up to try to do something, and then you’re in a bad mood,” he said.
Those “bad moods” eventually led Hiatt to a 12-step program. Now ten years sober, his personal transformation feeds his professional commitments: if individuals can be released from the grip of self-obliterating addictions, societies can, too. And he set to work to help make it so, first as a campaigner in a nonprofit focused on halting the liquid natural gas (LNG) expansion in the area, and since 2023, at the helm of For A Better Bayou, which more broadly seeks to protect the health, livelihoods, and cultural heritage of Southwest Louisiana amid expanding industrial pollution and accelerating climate impacts. Funding comes from individual donations and through foundation support.
The focus is on opposing harmful fossil fuel infrastructure, while supporting fisherfolk and frontline communities, nurturing community empowerment, advancing coastal restoration and climate resilience efforts, and building pathways toward a just economic transition rooted in local knowledge and stewardship. Hiatt shoulders that work with one paid staff member.
When not meeting with local residents and workers, their days, and not uncommonly evenings and weekends, are spent documenting environmental harms, reviewing permits and regulatory filings, engaging with local, state, and federal agencies, and building coalitions with partner organizations to advance community-led solutions.
“I tell folks, pick whatever lights you up, whatever pisses you off. Is it the LNG buildouts, the data centers, carbon capture? Pick one, and let’s work on that,” he explained.
Hiatt’s ties with big oil weren’t severed in a golden moment of epiphany and grace. He was pushed out — fired in the midst of workplace drama that his union successfully resolved on his behalf, resulting in a payout he used for tuition to retool. He earned a psychology degree while hustling in the gig economy for Grub Hub and Door Dash.
“I was aiming to be a social worker because I love the ability to help people (myself included) stretch beyond the patterns and behaviors we can’t always see that cause the issues — like the externalized costs that are never, ever attributed to these refineries.”
But in the aftermath of back-to-back hurricanes in 2020, it became apparent to him that emergencies were being normalized, and help was not on the way. His community’s existence was, in phases, being doomed to the ultimate sacrifice — displacement, dispersal, dissolution.
“My son’s 18 and absolutely loves it here. My 16 year old — all her friends are here,” he said. The thought of his children’s birthrights being stolen out from under them keeps him standing up. “I’d been thinking there’s no way to fight big money; they always win. But then I had a better thought. What if we get serious about building our power to stop them?”
