I spent last week in southern Louisiana, in a region I had never visited before.  My first impression was one of sadness; a long profound melancholy that seemed to reside in the landscape: the spires of drilling rigs, the rising murky water, the stagnant sinking marshes, the faint mix of saltwater and burning oil from the Gulf, the rusting pipelines and dead wetland trees. Taken together, there was a sense that something terrible had been occurring there for many years.  Something fundamental, something which preceded the current oil disaster, something irreversible and wrong.

“Fish and oil, fish and oil.”  I heard this strange and perverse couplet many times during the week – over fried shrimp dinners, on boat tours, in community forums, and walking along the desolate beach on Grand Isle and the flooded Isle de Jean Charles.  The utterance had the bizarre ring of prophecy, of brute reality, of what shouldn’t have been the case, but is, nonetheless.  Ironically, the coastland of Louisiana is the most productive seafood estuary in the country, while the coast and adjacent Gulf waters contain the most productive offshore oil patch.  Now, the seafood is contaminated, the oil is spreading in the marshlands, and despite the ongoing calamity, the oil industry is fighting tooth and nail to reserve the right to keep drilling off the coast. 

I was with a delegation of indigenous and campesino leaders from the Ecuadorian Amazon, who know all too well about fish and oil.  They have been suffering for the last forty years as a result of Texaco’s (now Chevron’s) oil contamination in their rainforest homeland.  They had come to meet with the Houma and Atakapa tribes, Native Americans who have been living off the water and land of southern Louisiana for hundreds of years.  They had come to learn firsthand about the oil disaster plaguing the Gulf Coast, and to share their own stories and lessons from the Amazon on how to cope with the lasting, pernicious impacts of severe oil pollution. 

It was a kind of redemption of industrialized globalization.  Communities devastated by the impacts of a bloated global industrial growth model coming together to share in pain and hope.  I feel honored to have been a part of the encounter, and outraged to have seen how much has been destroyed.  And I feel compelled now to share what I witnessed.

Impressions from the Bayou

Mud-stained and rain-soaked American flags droop over rickety abandoned houses.  Telephone poles rise out of marshlands near underwater graveyards.  Oil clean up crews and bird rehabilitation units work on converted seafood loading docks.  Government officials speak of “an invasion of oil.” Native American women speak of the next great storm.  The paperwork and bureaucracy of the British Petroleum claims process punishes locals.  Miles of snaking orange boom lies abandoned on desolate beaches.  The heavy weight of industrial language is spoken over gumbo dinners:  boom, sand berm, skimmer, rock levy, relief well, spill zone, oil sheen, treatment plan, containment dome, top kill, controlled burn, chemical dispersants. 

The Houma and the Atakapa people told us of their dreams, of their fears, and of what is at stake in the bayou: Great Egrets, Laughing Gulls, Blue Heron, Muskrats, Alligators, Blue Crabs, Speckled Trout, Black Drum, Garfish, Tilapia, Amberjack, Sheepshead, Shark, Red Snapper, Grouper, Pompano, the spring breeding grounds of fish, crab, shrimp, whales, crawfish boils, fishing rodeos, memories, the sweetness of the early morning sun before a day of fishing- an entire way of life.