I'm driving from New Orleans, heading in the direction of Baton Rouge.

We're getting out into open space, crossing the bridge over Lake Pontchartrain,

and the landscape is becoming a lot more rural.

But the trees look sick. Their tops have no leaves, and the branches look withered. There's vegetation, there are even some cows,

but things don't exactly look right, as if something happened here. The first sign were headed

in the right direction, but also the first

decidedly troubling sign, is an air quality alert that pops up on the navigation screen in our

rental car. It comes up the moment we enter Reserve, Louisiana, a small town of just under

10,000 people. The reason for this alert is not exactly a mystery.

Reserve is one of several towns on an 85-mile stretch of land,

shared by roughly 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations.

According to a major study from Human Rights Watch,

this is the largest concentration of plants of that nature in the Western Hemisphere.

The locals have a nickname for this area.

The area we're in now, Cancer Alley?

Cancer Alley.

Robert Taylor is an 84-year-old, lifelong resident of this area.

He's who I'm meeting today.

The rate of cancer, the rate of illnesses, my mother, my sisters, my next-door neighbors,

my friends from around, they are dying.

Taylor's wife died a few months ago.

She was a cancer survivor.

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