Support for Louisiana.

The state we're in is provided by Entergy.

Louisiana is strengthening our power grid throughout the state.

We're reinforcing infrastructure to prepare for stronger storms, reduce outages, and respond quicker when you do need us.

Because together we power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred B and Ruth B Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum, located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is a historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana.

And the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and viewers like you.

Thank you.

Catholics across Louisiana are celebrating Pope Leo the 14th.

Family ties to Louisiana.

And as the air we breathe safe, I'll dig into the highs and lows of Louisiana's air quality and big news in Bienville Parish.

We will check out a major solar energy project in the region.

Plus, American Idol finalist John Foster got a hero's welcome in his hometown.

You ready?

I'm ready.

Let's get started.

Hello, everyone.

I'm Karen Lichtblau, and I'm Dorothea Wilson.

Much more on those top stories in a moment on this week's edition of Louisiana, the state we're In.

But first, Louisiana's Catholic community is celebrating the ascendance of the first American pope and his family ties to New Orleans.

Pope Leo the 14th maternal grandparents lived in the Crescent City, and those ties are bringing renewed pride and hope to the community across Louisiana.

The white smoke billowing from the Sistine Chapel chimney draws cheers and tears from the crowd gathered at the Vatican on May 8th, signifying a new pope was elected.

Following the death of Pope Francis on April 21st.

Pope Leo the 14th is the first American born pope in the history of the Catholic Church, and is making history in Louisiana with his Creole roots.

I was just curious about the name Prevost.

Unlike so many people, I didn't immediately assume that there was a Louisiana connection.

Gerry Honoré is a genealogist at the historic New Orleans Collection, just hours after the papal announcement.

He began researching the family tree of Robert Francis Prevost and posted his findings on Facebook, making national headlines.

This is a name that you'll find throughout, you know, the French speaking world.

And that's what I anticipated was that he might be French-Canadian or Acadian or, maybe from recent French immigrants to this country and on his father's side.

That proved to be true, definitely of Italian and French descent.

But when I shifted just on a whim to his mother's side, I started to see New Orleans reference, and I started to see some very familiar surnames.

And that's when it dawned on me that the Holy Father's maternal side is solidly rooted here in New Orleans.

Gerry's genealogy work revealed the pontiff's maternal grandparents, Joseph and Louise Martinez, were Creoles of color from the seventh Ward, the census, which is still taken every ten years for 1900.

They were at 1933 North Prayer Street, which is in our historic seventh Ward neighborhood here in New Orleans.

And I was hoping that that house would still be standing.

But like so many in that little corridor, it was taken by the I-10 overpass in the 1960s.

But in the 1910 census, which is the last one where they recorded here in New Orleans, and probably just a few a matter of months before they migrated to Chicago, they were actually renting and the Upper Pont Talbot building right on Jackson Square.

All four of his great grandparents were rooted in Louisiana and out of his great great grandparents.

On the maternal side, at least five of them were also born right here in Louisiana.

Joseph Martinez worked as a cigar maker, and his wife, Louise was a homemaker.

They had seven girls.

Six were born in New Orleans before moving to Chicago in 1910 and changing their racial identity from black to white.

The seventh daughter, Mildred Agnes Martinez Prevost, was born in Chicago and is Pope Leo the 14th mother.

They were listed as black or mulatto or colored in censuses and in vital records and other sources, but once they migrated to Chicago, then, almost in fact, universally everything changes to white.

Pope Leo the 14th.

Creole roots are a source of pride among Louisiana Catholics.

Bishop Michael Gerard, Duca of the Diocese of Baton Rouge, says the new pope brings a fresh energy to the faithful.

Well, I think everybody is excited.

I mean, it just it actually a kind of renewal of spirit when you have someone coming in brand new, new hope, new energy, and then of course, they speak your language.

They know your culture, and they're connected to you.

Acadian Louisiana.

Now, you know they're connected here as well.

It just brings the church closer to you and makes us, for a little bit, feel a bit more part of the universal church as well.

America is kind of insulated sometimes.

This draws us into the world stage in a very positive way, and that's a good thing.

Pope Leo the 14th was born in Chicago, attended Villanova University, and served as a missionary in Peru for two decades.

The 69 year old pope chose the name Leo, joining a group of 13 other pontiffs who have taken the name.

It was last held by Pope Leo the 13th, a social justice advocate who served during the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s.

I think when he picked Leo, he sees that we're in the same situation now.

Electronic revolution, you might say.

And we can see how social media is helping us, but also pulling families apart, decreasing people's interaction with one another.

Face to face.

How?

There's a great division, more and more between rich and poor.

The same kind of things are happening.

High degrees of traffic.

Human trafficking.

Human dignity is being pushed under the rug for the sake of profit or for sake of of of increasing the tronic, you know, dominance, where we might call it at the expense of human interaction.

Robert Francis previous was initially a long shot for the papacy.

The papal conclave chose the 267th pope on its second day, after four rounds of voting.

The fact that he has Kryo roots tied to Louisiana.

Do you see that in some way?

Perhaps motivating stagnant Catholics to inspire them to come back to the church, or maybe bringing more Catholics into the fold, because now they feel they see themselves in him, or they they feel some sort of kindred spirit.

Is there some positive impact, I guess, among Louisiana Catholics bringing some back to the church?

I think definitely anytime you have someone make a connection, they at least look back.

They give a little bit more respect to the church.

Respect meaning you look again and I think some eyes and ears have been turned toward the church again to listen.

And whenever the church speaks, something that touches the hearts of people, even if they don't agree with it, touches their hearts, it draws them back to the heart of the gospel.

I think this moment has done that.

Everybody fondly remembers the visit of John Paul the Second in 1987, and we eagerly anticipating a visit from Pope Leo.

It highlights our heritage of faith, and I think that faith and heritage are so often linked.

We learn our prayers at our mother's knees.

We follow the example of our parents and grandparents and the practice of our faith.

And so the fact that we have in this story, family and religion is just it's just beautiful.

From hashtags to headlines.

Here's what's trending this week.

Heartbreaking news in Iberville Parish, where the historic not away plantation is virtually gone.

Burned to ashes.

That's right.

The plantation caught fire Thursday afternoon and firefighters thought they had it under control.

But the fire sparked and quickly spread late Thursday night.

So the home's roof and its second floor collapsed, along with several of the walls not away was built in the 1850s and through the years was a symbol of both the darkest parts of Louisiana history, but also served to educate visitors on the progress we've made now, in recent years, it served as an iconic wedding and events venue.

Dan Dyce and his wife Desiree, bought the home and had spent quite a bit of money restoring it, and it was supposed to function as a community events venue.

They were going to open the restaurant, and the community of civil parish really had high hopes that it would work to bring the community together.

Absolutely.

And you know, when I think about most of all is those that were going to have weddings there, and there could be some bride out there that wanted to have a wedding actually this weekend, and she can no longer do so.

We have to acknowledge its past, but, mourn that it is.

It's a loss to our history and definitely an architectural treasure.

Well, moving on to some good news.

A major green energy initiative is underway in Bienville Parish.

Microsoft, in partnership with Clear Loop, hopes to boost energy diversity and reduce carbon emissions in underserved communities.

The project also brings economic and educational opportunities to the region.

Take a look.

What was once pasture land for cows and poultry houses in Arcadia is finding a new purpose harvesting the sun for energy.

It's the site of the first solar farm in Bienville Parish.

And to be able to see now which was want to open passion with cars to now see solar panels fall on it.

That will definitely be a side to seeing that I actually show people that like a market is growing when you travel down that, and a lot of times you have investors that may travel up and down the twin and say, hey, that place is going, I want in on it.

Clear loop and its parent company, Silicone Ranch, a solar and carbon solution company, are developing the $15 million solar farm.

What we do, a clear loop, is we focus on getting companies that want to do something good for the environment, and we are using their dollars to go deploy new solar projects in parts of the country where those projects are not happening.

And so we, essentially are carbon solutions platforms.

The 60 acre track of land will produce solar energy that connects to the local power grid.

The aim is to accelerate decarbonization and drive economic investment in underinvested communities.

The tax dollars that will get off of it, that will be one thing.

But the other thing is having that foundation and having that infrastructure, in case you have, another major business that want to come in and want to go win green energy, our clean virgin up energy.

The Bienville Parish Solar farm is the first of several that Clare Loop and Silicon Ranch planned to launch in Louisiana.

The solar energy produced will enhance the power grid and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It's about a, a little less than five megawatts.

It powers about, a little less than 2000 homes in the area.

So this will be a solar project in that community that will be generating electricity from the sun there locally, and then also interconnected to the distribution grid in Entergy, which then distributes to, to the parish, in the town of Arcadia.

The solar farm is part of Microsoft's commitment to deploy up to 100MW of renewable energy projects over the next three years.

So Microsoft essentially provides the funds and in turn gets the carbon offset.

Is that how this works?

Yeah.

So they get the environmental attributes from this project.

And so what they're trying to do is use their capital basically as a way to reduce, you know, sort of pollution and the adverse effects on the environment.

And then they're taking that and matching it against their own carbon footprint.

And so for them, it's a way to reduce their burden on the environment, while at the same time helping to deploy new infrastructure.

And so we identified Danville Parish as a place where there's lots of really great factors, sort of this opportunity to get more carbon out of the grid.

So it's a good thing for the environment, but also a good thing for that community, because we are actually becoming big taxpayers.

The solar project also brings community investment in Bienville Parish through a nonprofit funded by Microsoft to support education and economic development.

They're going to provide trainings for our science teachers and provide a curriculum free, where we can teach Stem to our students, and that will provide our students access to the solar farm as well.

I think with the Stem program and the curriculum, that clear loop and Microsoft is providing those that will give our students the knowledge base to become engineers and anything else they would like to become.

They will learn about renewable energy and the benefits of renewable energy for our community and as a state and as a whole for the entire world.

Bienville Parish leaders say solar power production brings energy resilience to the area, with the ability to generate power locally as a safety net in times of natural disaster, power outages or grid failures.

In the state of Louisiana, less than 1% of the electricity that you're consuming today comes from solar.

And as there's more and more demands and kind of growth of the electricity sector, there's an opportunity for us to actually build more and kind of take advantage of the resources we have from the sun.

In a rural parish where jobs in manufacturing, oil and gas and farming dominate the economy, renewable energy offers Bienville Parish an opportunity to diversify, grow its tax base, attract more businesses and repurpose large tracts of land.

A new report shows both progress and ongoing challenges for Louisiana's air quality.

The American Lung Association State of the Air Report is a mixed bag for us here in Louisiana.

Here's a look at their findings.

Well, I am here with Eric Windsor, all the advocacy director with the American Lung Association.

Eric, thank you so much for being with me today.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, yeah.

Now we have this report about our air quality.

Talk to us about that.

Yeah.

So we have published our 26, edition of our state of the air.

It is, one of our three signature reports that the American Lung Association puts out every year.

And what it does is it analyzes air quality across the nation and grades it off of three levels, which are our ozone levels, our, daily particulate levels and then our yearlong, exposure to particulate levels.

We have one for each state.

And so of course, we're here talking about Louisiana.

Yes, please.

And unfortunately, we are seeing a downwards trend here in Louisiana across the state.

We're kind of seeing a lowering of numbers.

We give grades, on those three, metrics that we were talking about.

And we've, we've seen, lower in, in all three, unfortunately.

Yeah.

So let's talk about Louisiana and our numbers.

Now, you said the numbers are lower.

What impacts does that have on our health here?

A huge amount.

When we're talking about, ozone levels, we're seeing that could have a serious health effects, serious, health effects for people who are susceptible to these kind of things.

People with, asthma, lung disease, older population or the very young particulate matter.

Specifically short term spikes and particulate matter.

We can see, acute effects, such as coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath.

And that is actually what can lead, to lung cancer.

Now, I know earlier we were just chatting and you talked about the relationship you have with Cancer Society and American Heart Association.

Why those in particular?

Does the air quality affects those organs as well?

Absolutely.

Air quality affects all parts of the body now.

Of course.

The air can becomes filtered through the lungs.

But what affects the lungs will affect the rest of the body, will enter into our bloodstream and will have that negative effects across the whole body, not just in our lungs.

So I see why there's a correlation there.

So I wanted to talk about the burden of air pollution on communities of color.

Talk to me about that.

Unfortunately, what we see across the United States, and especially here in Louisiana, is communities of color are disproportionately affected by these burdens of, air quality, these, larger days with worse outcomes, where you see more of these f, ratings that we're seeing.

Probably the most infamous example is Cancer Alley.

You know, it is, majority black populations, and they are exposed to some of the worst, exposures that we've seen in the entire country.

Well, that's interesting there.

So what can we do, Eric?

How can we fight this?

What can we do as a community, as a state to combat this air pollution problem?

The first thing I would say is to be informed.

A lot of us don't know.

And perhaps we were, exposed to it a couple of years ago when Louisiana had those kind of unprecedented wildfires.

Right?

We realized across we were learning about what, bad days meant, what purple Days meant.

Like, what do all of these air quality things mean for me?

And so the first thing you can do is check the air quality before you go out, especially if you are one of those populations who are more susceptible to bad air quality.

Go to air now.gov to check what kind of air quality you have, and if you have the ability to shape your schedule around it.

If you are someone who exercises outside and you see that it's a bad air quality day shift to indoor exercise or stay indoors more if you can.

Other ways we can do it, aside from just being informed, is to advocate.

Advocate?

We can go to lung morgues to we have a bevy of resources for you to not only educate yourself, but to get involved.

What we're really looking at right now is at the federal level, is that we really want to protect the Environmental Protection Agency.

EPA they are under threat of losing a lot of funding and reverting a lot of the great work we've done and setting up the metrics that we have to protect people.

So calling on your senators and your congresspeople to support the EPA, to increase that funding and then at the local level, get involved, see what's happening.

Work with your your council members, anything we can to to promote healthy air at the local level as well.

Thank you, I love that.

Any final thoughts, Erin?

I think one of the one of the most impactful things we say at the Lung Association that really resonates with me is that when you can't breathe, nothing else matters.

It is.

And it should let everybody know that the air we breathe, this is not a Partizan issue.

This is something that matters to everybody at all ages, of all demographics.

We all rely on healthy air to live good life.

And so I would say, make your support loud and proud.

Keep yourself informed.

And, you know, do what you can.

Awesome, I love that.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

Such a great cost.

So important.

The air we breathe.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Louisiana's own John Foster is headed to the finale of American Idol.

Foster was welcomed home to West Baton Rouge Parish with a parade and concert earlier this week.

I got to talk to foster and his family ahead of the idol finale.

Don't all the dreams we see come true?

Come.

Name and fame.

All right.

You know what, Carrie?

You say it's different now.

Louisiana native John Foster will soon find out if he is the next American Idol.

We chatted with him at his family's meat market to catch up, meet his family, and hear about his amazing journey so far.

John, how excited are you?

Not exciting just to get the golden ticket.

Way back at the moment.

You know, when I first film, that audition was just a surreal moment for me and every single step has been more and more exciting.

Born and raised in Addis, this American Idol hopeful immersed himself in music from a young age.

Listening to traditional country music artists like George Strait, Keith Whitley and Merle Haggard before reaching the top three on the popular TV show, the 18 year old country singer formed a band with his uncle, Galen Martin, who could tell by the spark in his eye that John was committed for the long haul.

Well, you know what?

He came to me.

He said, hey, I want to start a band, you know, and it's like, okay, let's let me see if I can get some guys together.

You know, and it it was a little bit of a process.

It took us, you know, roughly a year to really kind of get the right guys lined up and once we did, we started, you know, playing some honky tonk, little bars around town.

After playing with the band and mastering his guitar skills.

John felt ready to take his career to the next level and pursue a opportunities in the big leagues with his faith, guitar and flavor of Louisiana to meet the judges.

And John, what am I carrying or carrying some Cajun Cajun Louisiana boudin in here?

I'm not sure.

Do.

And it goes without saying it was a hit.

Louisiana food is good for the soul.

Hey, you going to Hollywood?

Any of them?

And the rest is history.

John took to the American Idol stage following his audition and has sung his way through multiple rounds of eliminations, passing through each round with Grace.

I've gotten more and more comfortable with this idol stage and the production.

So friendly.

I've gotten to meet so many amazing contestants from around the world, literally become lifelong friends with some of them, and just, you know, the support that I've gotten from my family, from my hometown, everything is just coming at me at once, and I'm just embracing it full force.

And, you know, keeping centered on my faith in myself and, you know, just ride along on the run.

While John's family celebrates his success on the show, his Aunt Samantha, who has seen John develop into the young man he is today, add Mitt that she isn't particularly surprised.

She feels that a star was meant to shine the day John was born.

One thing I can tell you about John Foster that like watching him grow up, whatever he's done, he has succeeded.

He you know, school, whatever he's tried to do, he's, you know, always gone to the top.

And John is indeed shining as he has reached the final round.

And this Sunday he could be crowned the next American Idol.

He returns to his hometown of Addis just before the season finale, and received a hero's welcome.

A parade was held in his honor, attracting numerous fans from across the state to celebrate his return and show their support.

It's such a full circle moment to see him finally being successful, because everybody kind of knew that he was going to end up famous one day.

And it just makes it so much like, so, so proud of him because he's such a good person.

We are so excited.

We're all so proud.

This community is just really behind him.

Yeah, I love that.

So tell me your affiliation with John.

So I'm a teacher at the Burley schools, and he's come through all of our schools.

He has left a lasting impact on all of his former teachers, and we are all just so proud of him.

He makes us so proud.

He concluded his hometown visit with a concert, performing six songs for his supporters while honoring his home state, Louisiana.

Good luck to you, John Foster.

Your Louisiana family is rooting for you.

This year, the sun will come up, but it won't shine on her skin.

And I give anything.

I have to talk to her again.

Now, if you want to show your support to John, visit American idol.com/vote.

He is contestant number 13.

That's important.

Oh my goodness.

So you visited with the family?

Yes I did with the star himself.

Did he indicate what song he was going to sing for the finale?

No, Karen, he actually did not.

But I will say that he is a standout.

A great young man comes from a really strong you know faith you know.

And so that's really good to see at someone his age it was just great.

Well and as we were chatting off camera he definitely has star power.

So.

All right.

We're waiting for you.

We are.

Well, before we leave you, we want to wish a happy birthday to our former executive director, Beth Courtney.

From everyone at LPB.

Beth, we hope you have a great day.

Well, that that's our show for this week.

Remember, you can watch anything LPB any time, wherever you are with our LPB app.

That's right.

And you can catch LPB news and public affairs shows as well as other Louisiana programs you've come to enjoy over the years.

And please like us on Facebook and Instagram for everyone at Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

I'm Karen Lichtblau.

And I'm Dorothea Wilson.

Until next time.

That's the state we're in.

Support for Louisiana.

The state we're in is provided by Entergy.

Louisiana is strengthening our power grid throughout the state.

We're reinforcing infrastructure to prepare for stronger storms, reduce outages, and respond quicker when you do need us.

Because together, we power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred B and Ruth B Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum.

Located in Jennings City Hall, the museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is a historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and by Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center.

Visit Baton Rouge and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and viewers like you.

Thank you.