The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans was ground zero for Hurricane Katrina. In the prolonged aftermath, residents were forced to deal with social abandonment, discriminatory rebuilding policies, the BP disaster, redistricting, and the everyday toxic assault that comes from living in Cancer Alley. A 14‐month ethnography of the neighborhood revealed residents’ understanding of Katrina was grounded in a larger pattern of discourse surrounding extreme environmental threats. While not everyone in the community talked about suffering in the same way, there was a common discourse stemming from a cultural coherence based on shared perceptions and understandings of social disruption from the environment. This coherence reveals a discourse of environmental suffering. I refer to residents who employed this discourse as the ecological precariat. In this article, I focus on the discursive responses to suffering that constitute this particular way of making sense of suffering. In doing so, I denote three dominant discourses, including distrust, uncertainty, and confusion.