Support for the Gulf coast continues to grow!! Companies, individuals, and kids from across the country are finding creative and constructive ways to respond to the disaster in the Gulf and support GRN. In addition to making donations directly to GRN, check out these events and products that are raising funds for GRN's response to BP's oil drilling disaster. Please support them, and their donations to GRN will help us continue our work. Lots more partnerships are in the works, so keep checking the blog for new listings.
Â
Events supporting Gulf Restoration Network
Thursday, July 1 Gulf Coast Benefit: Coast to Coast Concerts www.gulfcoastbenefit.com Across the country, at a venue near you!
As the BP deepwater drilling disaster stretches into its third month, the community impacts are significant and getting worse. For the newest episode of our ongoing YouTube series, we revisit the Atakapa-Ishka people of Grand Bayou Community in lower Plaquemines Parish. Please watch as tribal representatives recount the oil in their marsh, covering their oyster leases and jeopardizing their future. This was a tough video to create, and the impacts of this disaster really hit me hard as I was seeing it through the eyes of the people who live off this land, now ruined by BP's crude.
Heartbreaking images of oiled pelicans, sea turtles, and marsh underscore the environmental crisis facing the region. The Gulf Restoration Network continues to push for a more effective clean up and containment effort, and remains committed to bringing you authentic voices from the Gulf's affected communities.
Our call to action for this YouTube episode links to our new collaborative campaign, Gulf Future. This effort lays out a simple three-part strategy to learn the lessons of this disaster:
Clean up the oil industry's mess in the Gulf,
Get coastal communities the resources they need to fight for their future,
Create a clean energy future so this never happens again.
So please watch, rate, and share the video, and learn more about the effect of BP's oil hitting home. Then click through to Gulf Future, and help empower a community-led response to this disaster.
On Thursday and Friday of last week, I took two more flyovers to the “Source” of the BP drilling disaster and over sensitive marshland like the Delta National Wildlife Refuge (DNWR). It has been over two months since this disaster began and yet there seems to be no end in sight to this atrocity. On both days I flew at a relatively low altitude over the DNWR and was heartbroken to see the refuge getting slammed with oil. I will be heading down into the DNWR later on this week by boat and will be capturing more evidence of the carnage.In the meantime, the pictures posted herein are from the "source" and a few from above DNWR.
Â
Â
It's worth mentioning though that on my first day out into the DNWR by boat, just a few days after the Horizon sank, I zigzagged through the DNWR looking for impacts, but all I found was lush vegetation, a multitude of fish, birds, and animals. The area looked healthy as did the alligators, pelicans, peregrine falcons, and other bird species that peak during the spring. On that day I was full of hope and optimism. I remember thinking to myself that the oil couldn’t possibly make it all the way into this delicate, magnificent estuary. Surely the oil would stop flowing into the Gulf, thereby, threatening the delta. Man, was I wrong. It is clear from these photos taken only days ago, that BP and the Unified Command still do not have a handle on this disaster. Now, the DNWR is in the bull’s-eye and taking a direct hit.
Jonathan Henderson is the Coastal Resiliency Organizer for GRN
Hands Across the Sand in Gulfport, Photo Courtesy of Gabrielle Chapin
Last Saturday, I joined concerned citizens from across Mississippi at a Hands Across the Sand event in Gulfport. At noon, we linked hands along the beach to send a strong message in support of a clean energy future. It was inspiring to see such a great crowd of people join together to protect our coast and communities, but the events of the last few days along Mississippi’s Gulf coast are a sobering reminder that we have quite a ways to go.
Up until now, the Mississippi Sound and mainland have avoided many of the most severe oil impacts that other parts of the Gulf coast have experienced. Unfortunately, their luck seems to be changing over the last few days. The Sun Herald reported on Monday that oil “washed ashore in quantity for the first time Sunday on the Mississippi Coast” in Jackson County and other locations. The map below (click to enlarge) shows where oil was reported by the federal response teams on Monday.
The state of Mississippi and federal government have had over two months to develop a plan for how to protect Mississippi’s coast and communities and the scrambling response to this recent onslaught of oil makes one doubt that this time has been well spent. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, other state officials, and Representative Gene Taylor have spent much of the last two months working to minimize the impacts of this disaster in the public eye. For example, Rep. Taylor compared the spill to “chocolate milk” and assured reporters that it “is tending to break up naturally” while Governor Barbour recently told NBC’s Meet the Press that the temporary drilling moratorium on 33 deepwater drilling rigs was worse than the oil drilling disaster.
The precarious journeys of sea turtle hatchlings in Florida just became more challenging.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is working with NOAA and sea turtle experts to launch an audacious, but necessary plan: excavate endangered sea turtle nests from panhandle beaches and move them to the east coast to hatch.
This noble gambit is necessary because newly hatched turtles on the gulf side will not survive the swim into the oil and dispersant tainted waters in the Gulf from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil drilling disaster. Sea turtles are known to travel long distances over their lifetimes and return to their exact beach nesting locations. Not much is known about how the newly hatched sea turtles will react to their new locations, or if they will return to their original or translplanted hatching location.
The Gulf Restoration Network will follow this story.
It just seems that the Gulf can’t catch a break. Coastal Louisiana is at the epicenter of three human-caused environmental disasters: the BP deepwater drilling disaster, coastal wetland destruction, and the annual Dead Zone. The Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) just released their prediction of the third part of the Gulf destruction trifecta, and the predictions aren’t good. According to a prediction released yesterday, based on May nitrogen pollution loading in the Mississippi River, the Dead Zone (or by its more scientific name, the hypoxic zone) will be approximately 7,776 mi2, or about the size of New Jersey. If these predictions come to pass, the 2010 Dead Zone will be the 5th largest ever measured since 1985, when they began measuring the Zone.
Now enter the oil. Researchers are not clear what impact the oil will have on the Dead Zone. According to the LUMCON report, “the oil spill could enhance the size of the hypoxic zone through the microbial breakdown of oil, which consumes oxygen, but the oil could also limit the growth of the hypoxia-fueling algae because of its toxicity, or because a surface sheen reflects light.” Bad news all around. As the release understatedly says, “It is clear, however that the combination of the hypoxic zone and the oil spill is not good for local fisheries.”
Last week we launched the new Gulf Future campaign, a collaborative effort to increase public support for the coastal communities affected by the BP oil drilling disaster. Gulf Future is supported by a coalition of environmental and public interest organizations that have joined together to strongly recommend that policymakers:
Restore the Gulf and hold BP financially accountable for all clean-up and impacts over the long-term;
Ensure that coastal and fishing communities have the resources to fight for their future;
Prevent future calamities by supporting the use of clean and renewable energy, stopping dangerous deep water drilling, and creating effective regulation of the oil industry.
We know that bringing the nation together to accomplish these goals will put us on the path to restoration and create a better future not just for the Gulf Coast, but for the entire country.
Visit GulfFuture.org today to make a donation and receive a petroleum-free black wristband to show your solidarity with the people of the Gulf. Supporters will be wearing these black wristbands until the oil stops gushing from BP’s Deepwater Horizon well.
To celebrate the launch of this critical campaign, concerts are being held across the nation to benefit communities and wildlife affected by the disaster this Thursday. Ticket sales from the July 1st Gulf Coast Benefit concerts will be donated to Gulf Restoration Network and the Gulf Coast Fund, co-founders of Gulf Future. To find an event near you visit the Gulf Coast Benefit website.
Bayona Corporation recently brought a class action lawsuit on behalf of restaurants in New Orleans who are impacted by the ongoing oil spill. The lawsuit is more about the restaurant industry in New Orleans than about Susan Spicer and Bayona. Spicer said, “It is not as if the situation is under control and we are in the process of recovery. We still don’t know how long it will continue and how drastic the effects will be on our industry and our culture.”
In spite of the oil spill, Bayona and many New Orleans restaurants are able to put out amazing food and meet their customers’ needs. “It is important for people to realize that all of great reasons to come to New Orleans still exist,” Spicer said. Although this lawsuit encompasses current damages, prospective damages to the New Orleans restaurant industry are the primary focus. Spicer said, “Just as after Katrina certain restaurants were able to survive, we are now losing many of the smaller restaurants and seafood related businesses that make up the fabric of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.”
Since the BP oil drilling disaster began over two months ago, the first thing I do on many mornings is check the oil sheen tracking maps to see what part of our beautiful region is likely to be in the crosshairs. These trajectory maps only reflect the areas likely to see oil on any given day, rather than an overall outlook of what areas have already been oiled. On many days, there are only a few red-X's along the coastline to mark areas of potential landfill.
However, the daily tracking map today looks more like a map of cumulative impacts and then some - with a nearly solid red line along the coast from Terrebonne Bay in Louisiana to Mississippi's barrier islands to coastal Alabama and Pensacola, Florida. Even worse, the three day projection map (on the right) shows landfalls expanding further to the east and west, and reaching the mainland in Mississippi. If these projections hold up, this kind of sustained and geographically wide area of oil along our shores would be unprecedented.
The precarious journeys of sea turtle hatchlings in Florida just became more challenging.
Bayona Corporation recently brought a class action lawsuit on behalf of restaurants in New Orleans who are impacted by the ongoing oil spill. The lawsuit is more about the restaurant industry in New Orleans than about Susan Spicer and Bayona. Spicer said, “It is not as if the situation is under control and we are in the process of recovery. We still don’t know how long it will continue and how drastic the effects will be on our industry and our culture.”
