Environmentalism is a hard corner to fight in Louisiana, a state where oil, gas and chemical companies are big in the economy and politics. But it takes a lot to frighten Albertha Hasten, a larger-than-life campaigner for poor citizens, and above all for fellow African-Americans, who in her view suffer disproportionately from contamination of the air, water and soil.

In her small, rickety home town of White Castle, the tap-water often comes out “blacker than me”, she has complained. Mrs Hasten fights the cause of communities affected by oil spills in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and she makes indignant phone calls to the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC, to say federal pollution standards are being violated. And like many people in and around New Orleans, she fears the city could again be threatened if sea levels rise and hurricanes become even more frequent as a result of climate change.

Ask what emboldens her, as a black woman of modest origins, to challenge the sophisticates of Washington, and she answers like a shot: her deep Baptist faith. “When God calls you to do something, you have to work patiently until all is well.”

The revivalist hymns that Mrs Hasten sings with gusto are a long way, culturally, from the grave beauty of Byzantine Greek chants—but she was glad to meet the Patriarch of Constantinople, “first among equals” in the Orthodox Christian hierarchy, when he came to New Orleans to host a symposium, the eighth he has convened, on faith and the environment. “If I weren’t so fat, I’d have made you a good wife,” she teasingly told Patriarch Bartholomew who, as an Orthodox bishop, is celibate.

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