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