Marking the third anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and celebrating the 43rd anniversary of Earth Day, Loyola University New Orleans’ Environment Program and the Loyola Film Buffs Institute will screen the film, “Dirty Energy.” It highlights the personal stories of Louisiana fishermen and locals impacted by the oil spill. The screening is set for Monday, April 22 at 7 p.m. in Miller Hall on Loyola’s main campus.

The director Bryan Hopkins, as well as film participants Aaron Viles, deputy director of the Gulf Restoration Network, and George Barisich of the St. Bernard Fisherman’s Association, will be on hand for a Q-and-A session with the audience following the film. Loyola sociology professor Anthony E. Ladd, Ph.D., will moderate the session. The Center for the Study of New Orleans is also co-sponsoring the event.

“This is an excellent and hard-hitting film that reviews the history of the events leading up to the BP disaster and the continuing ecological and health impacts of both the blowout and the dispersant used to ‘clean up’ the oil,” Ladd said.

Sevick collaborated on the project with biology professor Frank Jordan, Ph.D., chair of Loyola’s Department of Biological Sciences. The two are comparing data on the number and variety of fishes, shrimp, crabs and other creatures in the Mississippi River Delta before and after Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill.

Given the extent and severity of the BP oil spill, they predicted that the abundance and diversity of aquatic organisms would be reduced. What they uncovered astonished them both. Preliminary findings show that the number and variety of shrimp, crabs and fishes actually increased following major environmental disturbances.

“It’s surprising,” Sevick said. “And we’re definitely not saying that the oil spill was a good thing, but our research tells us that the Mississippi River Delta is really resilient.” Sevick believes this resiliency is a great sign for coastal wetlands, which are important nursery grounds for commercially and recreationally important species.

Sevick will highlight those findings at the Biology Undergraduate Research Symposium scheduled from 12:30 to 5 p.m. in Nunemaker Auditorium located on the third floor of Monroe Hall on Loyola’s main campus. His presentation on “Post-Disturbance Abundance and Diversity of Marsh Nekton in the Mississippi River Delta” is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. The symposium is followed by a crawfish social from 5 to 7:30 p.m. in Dixon Court at the St. Charles Ave. entrance of the Communications/Music Complex.

The researchers used large, square traps to catch all types of live aquatic life, including the kinds of shrimp, crab and fishes important to the state’s seafood industry. While Jordan and Sevick were picking lots of creatures out of the traps last summer, local fishermen were also doing well.

“This kind of resilience could just be the nature of the Mississippi River Delta,” Sevick said. “It’s important that we find out why this ecosystem is so resilient.”

It’s gratifying for Sevick to participate in such ground-breaking research as an undergraduate student. “It reassures you that you can go headfirst into grad school,” Sevick said. His research was funded in part by Louisiana Sea Grant’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, and this was Sevick’s first-ever research grant.

The research isn’t just great for Sevick’s resume, it’s also connects his passion for the state’s fishing industry.

“I grew up here in New Orleans, so I’m really passionate about the fisheries here,” Sevick said. “That was a big deal to work on something that I cared about.”

Sevick is currently considering graduate school options and is also interested in pursuing a career with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

Sevick will be one of the very first Environmental Science majors to graduate from Loyola and the first to complete departmental honors research in the Environment Program. Jordan has recruited two additional Environmental Science majors—Jenny Simon and Samantha Stieffel—to continue research on fishes and other aquatic organisms that depend on Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.

For media interviews or high-resolution images, please contact Mikel Pak, Loyola’s associate director of public affairs, at 504-861-5448.

A hearing was held in July 2010 in Boise, Idaho, by a seven-judge panel, known as the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, to decide how to tie together hundreds of spill-related lawsuits.

Thomas Sims of the law firm Baron & Budd, P.C., which argued for Barbier to oversee the consolidated cases, said, “Barbier will be a great judge. He knows how to work with plaintiffs and defendants to get the case moving forward with minimal court involvement.”

In addition, Barbier has also handled many cases related to Hurricane Katrina, including the first federal trial in Louisiana in 2007 brought by policyholders against State Farm Insurance over damage from the devastating 2005 hurricane.

Barbier has strong ties to the Gulf Coast region. A native of New Orleans, he attended Southeastern Louisiana University and Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. He was in private practice for several years in New Orleans before former President Bill Clinton called him for the federal bench in 1998. Barbier is a 14-year veteran of the federal bench.

For more information, please contact James Shields in the Office of Public Affairs at 504-861-5888 or jshields@loyno.edu.

Nor is it limited to that event. Earlier this month 12 people were killed and 200 injured when an explosion ripped through a metro station in Belarus during rush hour. A week before, Southwest Airlines passengers watched in horror as a chunk of their plane’s roofing tore away from the fuselage, forcing an emergency (and, thankfully, safe) landing.

Did I mention that Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, crippled by last month’s tsunami, is still streaming radioactive iodide into the air?

The truth is that even with the events of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina in our recent past, we are still not paying enough attention to catastrophic threats. And when we do, we go about it the wrong way. Low-probability, high-impact events — sometimes called “black swans” — are notoriously hard to plan for.

Policy makers are used to managing threats to safety or the environment according to a loose formula in which risk is the product of an event’s probability multiplied by its potential harm. This equation helps government set priorities. The probability-impact relationship informs a wide array of government standards, from the quality of your drinking water to the wattage in your car’s headlights.

But what if you don’t know the probability of an event or the full dimensions of its impact? If that formula is your only decision-making tool, a black swan will eat you for lunch.

Estimating the probability of a worst case is often impossible because they occur so rarely. Our measurements of hurricanes in the Gulf go back only a few decades; and climate change will likely alter those trends. Before last year, a catastrophic blowout in the Gulf had never occurred.

Even when you can ballpark a low probability, psychologists note that people underestimate the significance. We’re pretty good at comparing, say, a 50 percent risk to a 25 percent risk. But when risks fall below 1 percent, we stare at our shoes and reduce all likelihood to zero. That’s why you probably don’t think much about a major earthquake striking Manhattan or a tsunami battering the Oregon coast, even though each has happened and will probably happen again.

Experts fall prey to this bias, as well. While assessing flood-control measures before Katrina, scientists used storm models that intentionally left out data from two previous hurricanes on the theory that their force was atypical. When officials at BP performed analyses before beginning operations in the Gulf, they similarly down played the threat of undersea blowouts on the grounds that they were unlikely.

In addition, because black swans come in so many shapes and sizes, it is hard to imagine their full impact beforehand or to predict how the next one will be triggered. Too often we look only behind us, preparing ourselves for the last disaster. We imagine we can avoid our problems with narrow fixes. Worried about leaking tankers off the Alaska coast? Require double-hulled vessels. Terrorists with shoe bombs? Slide your heels and loafers through a scanner. Sonar shut-off valves for blowout preventers sound like a good idea and will probably come next. But we need more.

The way out of this quandary is to supplement standard risk management strategies with a robust array of planning and economic initiatives designed to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience on a broad scale, doing as much as is reasonably affordable and preferring options that provide multiple benefits. Such a strategy would present risk categories from a holistic perspective. It would educate policy makers and the public about a range of plausible worse cases and work toward acceptable resolutions. In addition to asking, “What would make this oil rig safer?” we would ask, “What would make us less vulnerable to the risk of blowouts and more resilient afterwards?”

In addition to oil rig safety, the answer might include a host of other concerns like strengthening deep-sea fisheries and shoreline ecosystems, developing contingency plans for native tribes that rely on fish, diversifying coastal economies and diversifying our sources of energy production.

Planning for resilience is like eating a healthy diet. You don’t eat right only to avoid colon cancer; you eat right because it makes your body stronger, more vital and less vulnerable to risks of all kinds. No one can say what the next black swan will look like. All we know is that it’s coming.

The forum will provide first-hand accounts and analysis from experts who witnessed the environmental disaster up close. It will also explore the issue of climate change, what it means to our coast, the continued damage caused by the BP oil spill, and the lingering health and economic concerns of Gulf Coast citizens.

The event will feature a distinguished and diverse panel of experts in their fields.

Virginia Burkett, Ph.D., executive director of the U.S. Geological Survey, is a nationally and internationally recognized leader in research on the impacts of climate change on our natural ecosystems. Dr. Burkett was an early leader in the advocacy movement for addressing climate change when she began to focus on the issue in the 1990s. She is renowned as one of the most knowledgeable scientists in her field and was a lead author of sections of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third and Fourth Assessment Reports, for which Vice President Al Gore received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Amy Harmon recently provided extensive coverage on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill for the New York Times. Harmon spent months examining nearly every aspect of the oil spill, from its damaging effects on the environment to the plight of the fishermen nearly driven into bankruptcy as the seafood industry struggles to recover. She has written more than a half-dozen articles on the far reaching consequences of the oil spill, as well as contributing to the ongoing discussion on The Times’ environment and energy blog.

Gulf Restoration Network Executive Director Cynthia Sarthou has taken an active role in repairing the Gulf’s damaged ecosystem in the wake of the oil spill. In October 2010, she and other concerned parties joined forces in filing a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency in response to the use of possibly toxic dispersants used by companies charged in cleaning up the oil slick. She is also fighting Congress’ attempts to slash the budget that would drastically cut funding for clean water and clean air programs, national parks and clean energy programs.

Robert A. Thomas, Ph.D., director of Loyola’s Center for Environmental Communication, will serve as moderator. In addition to being an expert on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its disastrous effects on the Gulf Coast’s fragile ecosystem, Thomas was the founding director of the Louisiana Nature Center and is past president of the Association of Nature Center Administrators. He was named Conservation Educator of the Year in 1986 and since the 2010 BP oil spill, Thomas joined the Louisiana Office of Tourism’s Expert Bureau to help improve Louisiana’s image nationally and has appeared in hundreds of news stories dedicated to the spill. He also has led more than 200 post-Katrina recovery tours of the New Orleans area.

Loyola University’s President’s Forum on Current Issues and Controversies seeks to explore and discuss some of the most compelling contemporary issues facing us today. Featuring internationally recognized scholars, the forum’s goal is to develop a dialogue with the larger community that helps us deepen our understanding and challenges us to move toward a more just and enlightened society.

For more information on the President’s Forum or to schedule an interview, contact Matt Lambert at 504-861-5448 or by e-mail at mlambert@loyno.edu.

As scientists continue to debate the severity of the Deepwater Horizon spill and the likelihood of lasting damage to ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico, questions are being asked about how politicians have responded. Some have accused Barack Obama of wild over-reaction to the spill, and of using it as a vehicle for anti-corporate propaganda. They argue that he was playing to the gallery in order to win back some popularity ahead of the mid-term elections. The finger has also been pointed at green groups who, some say, are deliberately playing up the scale of the spill in order to discourage us from using oil at all. Others argue that it was a huge catastrophe, and that the Gulf of Mexico and the Louisiana coastline have been devastated by the spill, and will continue to be so for years to come.

Jim Gabour

There has certainly been a sensational atmosphere to all of this. At the same time as people are screaming for help, they are doing ad campaigns saying that the beaches are here and ready for visitors.

The magnification by the media doesn’t actually help. The tourism and seafood seasons have effectively been killed by the media. As far away as New York, people are ordering sea food and refusing it if it comes from the Gulf.

For those who have lost their livelihoods, it cannot be hyped enough. The world will collectively forget soon, that’s how it goes. But oyster beds have been ruined for the next five to ten years. As one fisherman said; “you can fool the people, but you can’t fool the fish.”

Americans will keep guzzling oil, prospecting will remain in the Gulf of Mexico. Of course, not everything that’s wrong here is down to BP, (the area was used as a dumping ground for bombs after World War Two), but the habitat’s fragility has meant that the effects of the accident have been far greater than if it had happened elsewhere.

The earthquake in Haiti, 2010.

The oil spill in the Gulf, 2010.

How is your cell phone part of the solution?

If you thought “texting donations,” you’re on the right track. But there’s another valuable resource besides monetary donations: Information.

That’s why the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has partnered with Ushahidi to develop the Oil Spill Crisis Map.

Volunteer groups, residents of the Gulf states, or anyone with a cell phone or internet connection can upload reports by

• texting (504) 27 27 OIL, that’s (504) 272-7645,
• emailing bpoilspill@gmail.com,
• tweeting #BPspillmap,
• or filling out this form

And you can get involved volunteering here.

The Ushahidi Platform, developed in Kenya, uses an approach called crowdsourcing (think outsourcing work to a crowd), allowing many individuals to do what no one could do alone: create a map, a dense web of information. This has become an invaluable resource in crisis response work. Ushahidi has been used in each of the crises mentioned above.

For the Gulf, so much work done immediately and in the long-term here will be predicated on reliable information. The leak may have been stopped, but the long road to ecological and economic recovery has just begun, and an accurate picture of the damage to the Gulf will be vital in that recovery.

Whichever it is, we are in that situation yet again.

This weekend there are 15,000 people professionally partying in New Orleans as part of the five-day summer “Tales of the Cocktail” festival.  Which continues, even as a tropical storm approaches.

Most are visitors from all over the country in town for the lectures and demonstrations on everything remotely dealing with barrooms, thriving on the myriad tastings and food parings.  And of course, there is the Serious Drinking.

Much entertainment is also being executed, including a famous stripper, sponsored by Cointreau liqueur:  Dita Von Teese.   Ms Von Teese is scheduled to artistically remove her clothing in a special two-of-a-kind performance entitled “Be Cointreauversial”, disassembling her couture piece by piece until finally spinning nude in a seven-foot-tall martini glass filled with her beverage of choice.  Cointreau, of course.  Neat.  No olive.  This is undoubtedly for the public good.

Though her appearance in New Orleans is being underwritten, Ms Von Teese has shown that she can be something of a philanthropist, having once performed at benefit for the New York Academy of Art wearing nothing but $5,000,000 worth of diamonds.  Plus, the fact that she was married to Marilyn Manson for three years is bound to count as penance for any worldly wrongdoing.  New Orleans was happy to welcome her as a distraction, especially in the face of the oncoming storm.

She has, in fact, completed her admirably attended  bookings and is at this moment high-tailing it for higher ground.

I, however, must remain in place.  And deal with the ground-level effects of a combination of man-made and meteorological disasters.

Basically, I get to test my century-old house’s brand new louvered shutters this weekend.  I had them made over the past month from scratch in durable red cedar, fabricated by an incredibly talented crew of young millworkers who live just one block away.  I will probably start battening down the hatches later today, as the front of Tropical Storm Bonnie is due in tomorrow morn.  With all the increased BP scare, I imagine I should have a flat shovel ready, in case tar balls are rolled with the wind into my own Marigny street via Lake Ponchartrain.

The morning news reports that local government officials on the east end of the lake have positioned large barges across the deepest of the passes, to try and keep the oil out.  They have not been hugely successful at doing so these past weeks, but at least the structures look formidable.  And the well is temporarily capped, so at least it is not new bad news, just a doubled recurrence of the old.

Appearance is once again much more important than substance in the face of a fear nurtured by media and government alike.  Putting sand berms down offshore to keep the oil out of the wetlands was completely disowned by every scientist in the state as not only a non-solution, but also as more harmful to the environment than the initial oil threat.  The scientists repeated this in every media outlet  possible, even as the Louisiana Governor forced the Corps of Engineers to begin putting them in place.

His action should prove moot this weekend, as the shallow foreplay of the storm is already eroding the artificial islands into non-existence.  They should be gone by Monday.  But the oil?  The oil is on its way.  If Tropical Storm Bonnie hits just to the west of us as predicted, the wind and wave flow, the storm surge, will come from the southeast, bring the millions of gallons of petroleum right into our coast.  Deeper than can be imagined.

This combination of menaces has all the politicians again fighting for network soundbites, standing in front of shallow shiny surf and proclaiming this their own private disaster du jour – a “must-watch” national news event, with them as the stars.

I have personal concerns closer to home.  Actually at home.  Of bigger import to me is this huge hackberry tree in my patio, which has been leaning more and more as it gets older and the roots rot.  Hackberries are short-lived though tall swamp vegetation, and are generally considered trash trees that drop something in every season, leaves, berries, pollen.  There were fifteen of them here when I bought the house, so I had no real choice about their presence, until thirteen were uprooted in Katrina and another fell over in Gustav.  I have, however, been thinking about removing this final tree for the last five years.  I didn’t want to lose the yard’s last real shade tree, but it is getting increasingly dangerous.

In any case I have finally been getting bids from arborists this last week to cut it down.   It is a very expensive and dangerous process, and I wanted someone insured, bonded, and licensed.  I had also promised to award the job by noon today, Friday.  In retrospect, the timing seems all too coincidentally late, as the tree may come down of its own accord with Bonnie’s high winds.  Hopefully not crushing the backyard cottage, and my studio, in the process.

So the official storm season rears its ugly head and I must prepare, first getting into the garden shed to drag out the generator for its annual crank-over and tune-up.  I need to see how much gas I have left, check the oil, remove dirt and dust.  Then I need to check the kerosene hurricane lamps and their reserves.  Maybe I will go buy a couple of gallons of back-up water, even though post-K I installed a built-in water filtration system in the kitchen for just such an occasion.  The guarantee says it takes out 99.5% of all the bad stuff.  It has made N.O. water palatable for these last five years, so I am depending on it.  I just changed the filters a month ago, so it should be ready to deal with higher levels of pollutants, just in case.  Though I doubt this storm is strong enough to cause worry about water supply.

Then I’ll go get some flashlight batteries.  And maybe a small supply of bourbon, in case of minor injuries to body or soul.  And a bag of crisps.

Never can tell.  Hate taking any storm too lightly.

I say that as I watch CNN:  our brave Republican Governor “Bobby” Jindal is out there again today, milking any fear he can find for his personal PR scrapbook, talking the good fight and then moving on.  He is running for national office at the expense of his more local constituents.  A man I once believed had at least the possibility of a modicum of integrity has proven himself as concerned about real people as was W, flying over Katrina in Air Force One.  Only this politician does it on the ground, via limo, with his shirt sleeves rolled up.

I would have felt safer, and vastly more content, if Miz Von Teese had remained in town, her sleeves undoubtedly much more artfully rolled up.  And her significance on the site much more impressive.

The last tree-cutter just came by, and ended up offering the best bid and earliest start-date.  He will bring a crew over this coming Monday.  But that will be after Bonnie passes through town.  I must call him back to negotiate a cheaper price in the eventuality the tree is already horizontal when he comes to remove it.

So, after the generator testing, and the supply shopping, and the shutter closing, I intend to clean up and attend a Tales of the Cocktail sampling of twenty-five year-old bourbons this evening.  After all, the weekend’s unwanted windy guest will probably demand much more serious attention through the next two days, and one must keep disaster in perspective.

You may consider this my soundbite.

*  *  *

Epilogue:

Like so many first-time visitors to Miami, Bonnie was mostly dissipated by the time she left and headed to New Orleans.  She arrived here in South Louisiana between midnight and 1am Sunday, with much flashing light and explosive noise.  Then she turned off our lights for a few hours, lost interest as we lost energy, and went away.  All very much the modus operandi of our current governmental leaders.

The man does get his share of media attention, especially with CNN, but he seems to be using the public eye to gather popular momentum and raise money to alleviate the parish’s deterioration under the petroleum onslaught.  In spite of being a Republican, Nungesser has been documented actually performing positive constructive acts himself, getting his hands dirty literally and metaphorically, rather than watching from Washington and critiquing others’ efforts, as has seemed indicative of others of his political affiliation.

He has already gathered enough funding to start building small new protected islands for nesting pelicans in the Barataria pass.  At Vaughan’s he told of touring the existing islands a week earlier to see the pelicans abandoning ground nests, because oil had already washed totally over the shallow sand bars, coating the surface and any living vegetation.  To keep out of the muck, the large birds had adapted, and actually built makeshift nests in the few scraggly trees that stick up from the reeds and bushes along the shore.  The problem, he said, is that if a chick falls from a nest to the ground, which happens all too frequently, they are instantly coated in oil and suffocate.

Animal distress stories are all too prevalent in the current situation.

On a personal note, myself being an urban dweller, seemingly impotent in the face of the magnitude and remote location of this disaster, I bought a “Defend Our Coast” hat and shirt (proceeds to save the parish’s wildlife) and joined others giving crowd reinforcement to still photos and TV soundbites for the attendant media sorts.  We all figured that anything that will demonstrate the widespread support to spur Gulf politicians forward more aggressively, to make them act decisively and immediately to keep the coastal communities alive, is worth the trouble.

The block party also gathered donations for food to be shipped to the coast, to those whose livelihoods have been threatened.  Feeding families through larger organized efforts is one of the few things locals can actively do at the moment, as people uninvolved with cleanup are, as a rule, not being allowed anywhere near the spill residue.  Up until the time of the party, to see the tar balls and oil mats and shiny water, one needed to book a tourist hotel room or condominium in Biloxi, or Gulf Shores, or Pensacola, or Panama City Beach.  Ever eastwards.  The ruined Louisiana marshes remained, for the most part, off limits.

Unfortunately, as of 5 July the easterly/southeasterly wind shift brought about by the tail of Hurricane Alex changed the game.  The unthinkable happened.  In spite of all the booms and dozens of aligned barges in the passes, tar balls have made their way through Lake Borgne and the Rigolets passes, and into the first reaches of Lake Ponchartrain at the city of Slidell.

By way of geography, the lake is New Orleans’ northern border.  The city has spent the last twenty-five years successfully working to clean up city drainage runoff, and has re-made Ponchartrain into the productive fishing and recreational grounds it once was.   Yes, New Orleanians had been decrying the coastal pollution, but no one ever dreamed the oil could actually infringe the city limits.  And yet it is here.

One private group down in the parish took matters into its own hands, eventually with the local government’s blessing and support:  the Plaquemines Parish Inland Waterways Strike Force.  They invented themselves, and demanded credible license to act.  Nungesser gave it to them, as he has part interest in a Marina that has access to the spill zone, and announced last week that:  “For more than a month, the Plaquemines Parish Inland Waterways Strike Force has been using Myrtle Grove as a launching point, due to its proximity to the oil, at no charge.”

The Strike Force was the group responsible for monitoring initial BP clean-up forces and forcing them to begin taking care as they trod nesting grounds, rather than to continue crushing nestlings and eggs under foot and wheel as they had been doing in the early stages of the action.

BP itself is now renting slips and use of the boat launch at Myrtle Grove, side-by-side with the Force.

But back in the tenuous pre-oil reality of the 4^th, things at the Vaughan’s “Save the Wildlife” rally began to live up to its name around 4pm as the Prince Albert “The Dog Man” & His Royal Knights came to the tiny stage, and chef Big Chris and owner Cindy Wood began ladling out the food, proving once again that even among native New Orleanians, it is very difficult to find someone who can commiserate a disaster, dance a two-step, and eat a bowl of gumbo, all at the same time.  This is, after all, New Orleans, and hurricane parties have been de rigueur for centuries.

Native-American/Cajun traiteur/singer/songwriter/mojo-man Coco Robicheaux arrived late in the afternoon from the Yellow Moon Café, just one block away, with the lyrics to a new song in hand, his offering to augment the occasion.  He’d written the words sitting at the Moon’s bar and watching spill news reports.  Billy Nungesser accepted a copy and swore he’d help get it recorded.

People were singing the song from the moment lyric sheets appeared – everybody in this town knows the tune:

“The New Battle of New Orleans”

Music from a traditional fiddle tune called “8th  of January”

Lyrics Copyright ©2010 Coco Robicheaux

Used by permission

1st VERSE
In 20 and 10 well, we took a little trip:
From jolly old England to the mighty Mississip’.
We brought a lotta drills — we brought a lotta green:
We bought us up an oilfield just south of New Orleans.
Old Halliburton said we could take ‘em by surprise
If we blew us up an oil well and spit it in their eyes.
We held our fire till we clogged that well
But when we blew it up, well, they really gave us hell.

CHORUS
We blew that rig and the oil kept a comin’,
Twice as many barrels as there was a while ago.
We let it blow till the oil was a’runnin’,
Up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico.

2nd VERSE:
We fired that rig till the valves melted down,
Then Boudreau grabbed an alligator
And we sent him underground.
We filled him up with pampers and we stuffed him in the line,
And when he shut the leak down that gator lost his mind.

2nd CHORUS
We fired that rig and the oil kept a comin’
Twice as many barrels as there was a while ago.
Oil washed up and now the seafood’s a comin’,
All the way from China to the Gulf of Mexico.

3rd VERSE
Oil ran thru the marshes and it ran thru the bayous,
It ran through the lakes where a rabbit wouldn’t go.
BP ran so fast that the feds couldn’t catch ‘em,
Up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico.

CHORUS

2nd CHORUS

In the end it was a good party.  Folks in the neighborhood ate and drank and danced and sang, a nice chunk of money went into Plaquemines Parish’s Wildlife Fund, and more was dedicated to furnishing food for hungry families down the bayou.   This deep generosity welled up from a section of New Orleans that had itself suffered greatly, just five years ago.

And now we find the oil at our own doorstep.

We all do what we can, hoping to save the wild life.

Robert A Thomas, PhD, chair of environmental communication at Loyola University New Orleans, recently cited evidence that the Gulf oil-spill is having an effect on the nation’s ability to readily obtain a quality chicken-dinner.

The ongoing environmental destruction in the Gulf means that the number of invitations Thomas already receives to speak has grown exponentially in the last two months. This is possibly because his expertise and insights into BP’s effect on the American food-chain go well beyond the water. Even though this area of the Gulf of Mexico furnished some 30% of the country’s seafood before the spill, Thomas details the further impact of the destruction of coastal marshes.

At a luncheon for New Orleans businessmen, he pointed at the plates of food, a baked chicken dish, being consumed. ”Why are we supposed to save the wetlands?” he asked.  “If you lose the wetlands, you lose the commercial fishing industry. No questions about it.” But, further, he added: ”You remove the marsh, you remove the plankton, which removes the menhaden (a Gulf fish used extensively for fishmeal, the principal high-protein feed for poultry) which removes the chickens.”

The menhaden are already washing up dead on oil-slicked south Louisiana beaches by the thousands.  Their plankton food-source is diminishing, their swimming and breeding area clouded by giant swathes of oil.

Bob and I have offices in the same building on the Loyola campus, and are, much to my delight, friends. Easily enough, as he is an aggressively congenial force, always positive and quick with a smile.  Coincidentally, we were both raised in central Louisiana, in an area bounded by Bayou Boeuf and the Red River, the Red emptying into the Mississippi, and thus flowing downstream through New Orleans and directly out into the ever-widening petroleum spew.

That connection made me once again realise that the culture of Louisiana continually filters through the south, too.

Land rites

In my own childhood, back near Bayou Boeuf, there were only three houses on the mile-and-a-half of ditch-lined dirt named Boeuf Trace, “cattle trail”.  There was, and still is, a “Duck Crossing” sign at the head of the Trace where it crosses Bayou Robert, to protect the flocks of wild geese and ducks who nest year-round on the bayou, and occasionally cross the road to feed their young.  Feeling part of nature was not an option growing up there. You were immersed in it on a daily basis.

I have never known kids like those I met as a child. Both of my best friends spoke Cajun French as their primary language. Their secondary mode of communication was in the swamps, hunting and fishing.  As a concession to civilisation, one of my buddies took accordion lessons – learning the squeezebox was the Cajun equivalent to studying concert piano.  My other friend slept in a used Greyhound shell that his father, a bus mechanic, had purchased to relieve the overcrowding in their tiny brick house, and parked permanently in their back yard.  The old bus’s slide-back windows overlooked Bayou Boeuf swamp, which teemed with life.

Out there we caught catfish, fresh-water eels and crawfish when the water came up, and hunted rabbit and squirrel and occasionally wild boar when it was down. From the time I was 8 years old until I was 18 and went away to university, a substantial percentage of what we ate came from the marshes surrounding our houses, including the annual and substantial fall spending money made from picking pecans.

Eating off the land is a good feeling, even though I can now no longer bear the thought of hunting. These days when it comes to meat, sanitary pre-packaged portions of flesh from local farms is as close as I get to the source. Still, as a child, I can remember being very proud when we brought food home, however small, something fished or netted or hunted, something that became part of a family meal.

But my parents had other occupations that regularly fed us, and what I experienced upriver is completely overshadowed by the way of life that exists on the Louisiana coastline, where a complete culture of people not only feed themselves, but send sustenance to a large portion of the nation by harboring and harvesting a naturally-recurring resource, the once-bountiful sea life of the very wetlands now being forever poisoned.

I keep remembering how heartfelt and real the culture was, the state of mind that generated the gentle but vibrant lilt of Cajun and Zydeco music, the sense of community brought on by a grande boucherie with a dozen or more families sharing the hours as a spit-roast boar turned over coals, the gathered friends sniffing spiced steaming pots filled from forty-pound bags of native crawfish caught in dozens of homemade chicken-wire traps.

It was a rich life, even if I lived it only on the periphery of the Real Thing.  When we traveled south to the coast each summer, returning home at the end of a beach afternoon, my father would often pull the car onto an oyster-shell-covered road shoulder, usually a protected patch running alongside a bridge or waterway. He’d give each of us kids a short stick with a piece of old salami or bacon or left-over chicken tied at the end of an eight-foot piece of string. Our task was to lower the bait into the brackish water, wait for a tug, then quickly bring up the attached blue crab, and shake it into a basket.  Without getting pinched. Inevitably, in less than an hour we would have the principal ingredient for the evening’s generous boiled dinner.

We are still eating marsh and lake crabs these days, but their habitat is rapidly shrinking as the oil comes further inland, and many of the people who made their living off catching them are turning elsewhere for a livelihood.

Like occupations based on natural resources, culture can also disappear or sour, whether it is due to the effects of oil or the unnatural flow of money or, in the case at hand, a combination of the two.  There is now a second revenue cash-cow polluting these southern waters.  I must mention here what would seem a minimal ancillary byproduct of gambling.

Casino blues

I have nothing against casinos.  They have been part of the coast forever, even when illegal. My father and mother went to the Biloxi casinos on their honeymoon some sixty years ago, staying at the lush Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans on their way down, and, having left much of their wedding money at the Mississippi gaming tables, being forced by economics to stay in inexpensive gender-separate dormitories at the Lee Circle YMCA on their way back home.

I have nothing against casinos, no. At least the gambling. But they have developed their own idea of culture which tends to grind down any other they encountered. Even those run by Native Americans.

Though their aesthetics as far as entertainment goes seems indicative of a very value-remote manner of celebrating the arts, I can stomach as many Deep Purple, Moody Blues, and Journey reunions as they can muster. I can deal with them wheeling out the mummy of Wayne Newton every other week to murmur the words Danke schoen three times in a thirty-minute show to a $100-a-head audience.  I can even deal with a parade of yet another dozen low-budget made-in-Taiwan Cirque du Soleil rip-offs.

But this last production is more than I can handle.

The Biloxi, Mississippi, beaches outside the casino in question has been invaded by tar-balls, the sea offshore full of dead fish and oily swells, and yet here is an advert proclaiming the premiere coastal resort casino now offering as entertainment “Mini Britney, Mini Beyonce & Mini Madonna”. The extravagantly produced show revels in a cavalcade of midget – vertically challenged? – women clad in skimpy Vegas-style costumes, singing, humping, bumping and pelvic-thrusting to songs created by the original female stars.

I stared at the newspaper ad, the picture of Mini Britney with her back arched, her small enhanced breasts and tiny hips protruding forward, her miniature body decorated in shining circles of sequins and skin-baring cutout spandex, and I thought about the casino’s theatre, which physically protrudes into the water on the beach. And the sand beneath.

I found that, quite literally, my mouth was hanging open.

The temporal coincidence of Bob Thomas’s speech, my memory’s evocation of our distant connection to a completely self-subsistent, productive and content culture, and this new glaring image of the shimmying, musical Mini girls dancing and extolling the inequities of modern teen romance at the tarred beach – all these together – have finally given me a true vision of the depth of this tragedy.

Damn.

This article first appeared in openDemocracy. It is reproduced here with permission.