Putting things into perspective

At a town hall meeting the other night, the people of Louisiana talked about how they had been effected by the Transocean spill.  The emotion exhibited by everyone really put things into perspective.  A netmaker talked about lost heritage, the intrinsic value of the land, and how he's not going to be able to teach his son his net making business.   A parish presidents talked about how it is starting to "tear our communities apart".  For example, the Vessels of Opportunity program, which is working to employ local fisherman in the cleanup effort,  has only a limited number of positions available.  Fisherman who were not employed by this program begin to question why others were.  It's all very messy and the stakes are very high.  Culture, livelihood, heritage, everything is on the table.  But it's not only the locals who will be affected.  Other parts of the country will be affected by this as well.  "About 40 percent of the nation's commercial seafood harvests come from the Gulf Coast, according to NOAA data from 2008" CNN.  This means that restaraunts which serve seafood may be out of business or have to increase their prices. We need to recognize that we are all connected in this mess and that what affects one of us affects all of us.  I would say that I'm half hopeful... I have hope because there are so many great people helping in the effort to clean up but I'm despaired because of how daunting everything seems.
 Check out this link to an account of what happened with the Transocean oil rig on April 20.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/05/gulf-mexico-oil-leak-bp-transocean.html


Anyhow, I should be back in Carbondale within the next few days.  I feel that we saw everything that we needed to see in order to give us a clear picture of what is going on.  We will be doing a bunch of video editing (which seems kind of daunting) and we'll hopefully have our short documentary finished by June 3rd.

News From DC

I'm at a coffee shop yet again.  My plan is to do some video editing, although I havn't done any yet.  I've been chatting with my contact in DC, Grady Lenkin.  He's been sharing with me his opinions and ideas around the oil spill.  in short we talked about government's reliance on BP to solve the crisis, the magnitude of the oil's impact, and both our different perspectives which have been influenced by our location.  First off, grady said that congress could be stepping up more, and that if we don't act extremely soon we will have missed our chance to change the outcome.  Grady says, "the problem is that everything just moves so slowly here".  The response needs to fit the urgency of the need, which is very large.  As I write an untold amount of oil is spewing out of the well and more places are becoming affected.  Who knows if the beaches that have already been hit will recover from what has already hit them.   Every day we waste is very valuable...  With respect to bp it is a new frontier of disaster management.  Never before has anyone had to deal with a disaster of this nature.  I am hopeful, but things also seem very gloomy.  The government should step in and give fixing this problem the respect that it deserves.  As Grady alluded to, the politicians that are talking the talk about solving this crisis need to connect their words to their action and DO SOMETHING!

Sign by local Grand Isle teenager, Hanna Lemoine, age 17

Debrief on Grand Isle, back in N.O.

We left grand isle today at about 3 PM. Our attempt to get on to a boat did not work out. Many of the local boat captains that we approached were working for BP, and therefore, they were under contract not to bring people out to see the spill. We ended up talking with a couple of locals who ran a charter boat company in Grand Isle. They were just coming back from taking a news reporter from New York out to see the oil that is circulating freely in the ocean. They didn't see any oil in the place that it had been the day before. The winds and tides had changed that day and that they did not see any oil or oil sheen. She said that the oil is not gone, it has only moved temporarily to a different location. I could tell she was very worried about their life on the island. She told us that "if they don't get the oil stopped soon they might have to close the city". I could only imagine how devastating it would be to be forced out of the place you call home. While we were at the marina we also saw about 3 dolphins. It reminded me of the documentary "The Cove", which exposes the brutality of the dolphin trade in some parts of Japan. A species that is so beautiful is being threatened by the mistakes of humans. And it's not only the dolphins. The birds, fish, and all the wildlife that makes its home in the wetlands and ocean of the gulf coast. What is scariest about the disaster is that it is completely uncharted territory. Never before has anyone had to deal with a disaster that is occuring one mile below the oceans surface.

Many of the citizens in grand isle are fed up with the way that BP has handled the crisis. They say that they haven't acted fast enough and that if it was another town in the U.S. they would have already cleaned the spill up.

After leaving the Marina we decided to go get some food. We went to a high school french class fundraiser lunch, which we had heard about a few days prior from a lady at the local high school. It was a good place to go because we ended up getting an interview from a knowledgeable young adult.
Right now were at the India House youth hostel in New Orleans. We are indulging in some much needed relaxation from our escapade in Grand Isle. The combination of running around all day, every day, for three days straight mixed with the heat and lack of air conditioning led to us feeling pretty tired by the end of it.
I'm sitting next to an Austrian, Sarah, who is also writing a blog about her travels as well. It's been fun trying to practice some of my German with them, although I've forgot quite a bit since my travels there.

Let's see, what else has happened...

We went to a candlelight vigil in order to spread awareness about the oil spill. Sadly, it was very windy so not very many of the candles could. It worked out, as things usually do, and we ended up sitting in a circle around a couple of candles and saying some words. The location for the vigil was on a pier right next to a highway and what I found most intriguing was the people that were fishing all around us. Probably about 30-40 people were lined up next to us with their fishing poles in hand and their lines falling into the water. it surprised me that people were still fishing despite the obvious signs of oil in the water.
























































Anyhow, I'm going to sign off. Tomorrow we will be doing a lot of video editing. We may try and go to get some more interviews if we need to.

Check out some more photos at

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jared.F.Carlson

Oil at Ground Zero