Fish and Oil: Sorrow, Survival and Solidarity in Louisiana’s Bayou | Amazon Watch
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Fish and Oil: Sorrow, Survival and Solidarity in Louisiana’s Bayou

September 23, 2010 | Mitch Anderson | Campaign Update

I spent the early summer in southern Louisiana, in a region I had never visited before.  My first impression was of a long profound melancholy that seemed to reside in the landscape: the spires of drilling rigs, the faint smell 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 that preceded the BP oil disaster, irreversible and wrong.

“Fish and oil, fish and oil.”  I heard this couplet many times – over fried shrimp dinners, on boat tours, in community forums, and walking along the desolate beach on the flooded Isle de Jean Charles.  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 preserve 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 an unsustainable 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. 

Mud-stained and rain-soaked American flags droop over rickety abandoned houses. Oil clean up crews and bird rehabilitation units work on converted seafood loading docks. Miles of snaking orange boom lies abandoned on desolate beaches. The heavy weight of industrial language is spoken over gumbo dinners:  boom, sand berm, relief well, spill zone, oil sheen, treatment plan, containment dome, top kill, controlled burn, and 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.  

Oil, salt, a sinking marsh, and the sheer strength and resilience of the Houma people.  I have never been so saddened and inspired.  Over my life I have seen the way a soul can break under the weight of abuse, the way a spirit can succumb after years of destruction, the way hope can fade when a people are abandoned.  But in the bayou of southern Louisiana, as in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I saw an unbreakable dignity – a spirit that declared: there is beauty in the world and it is worth fighting for. 

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