David Underhill of the Mobile Alabama Sierra Club discusses the one year anniversary of BP’s Gulf oil disaster at Fairhope’s Earth Day festival (see video below)
by Glynn Wilson
FAIRHOPE, Ala., April 23 — When the British Petroleum corporation issued a press release this past week announcing that the multinational behemoth would commit $1 billion for Gulf Coast restoration projects, every news organization in the world ran a story about it. But where were the reporters and editors asking the tough questions, such as: Is the $1 billion enough? What is the plan for restoration? What does the company and the government plan to restore?
No amount of money can bring back all the dead wildlife, rotting at the bottom of the sea. The company can be forced by the government to pay for cleaning a large percentage of the oil and chemical dispersants out of the beach sand in many places. But they can’t restore the lost eggs of hundreds of species nesting and spawning in the marshes and bayous of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Nor can they heal all the sick and dying people along the coast who were exposed to the oil and chemicals in the air and water.
They can pay people, businesses and local governments for lost income for last year, when the largest and worst environmental disaster in U.S. industrial history hit the Gulf of Mexico when BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well blew up on April 20 and spewed crude from the Macondo well-head for nearly three months. But they can’t bring back all the businesses and people who simply closed up shop and fled the Gulf Coast. And no matter how many millions they spend on advertising to try to sell the American public on coming back to visit the coast and to eat the Gulf seafood, it will never convince anywhere near all the people that all is safe.
“BP has come nowhere close to paying the actual cost of the damage done, and they are not going to come anywhere close to paying the actual cost,” says David Underhill of the Mobile Sierra Club, interviewed on Saturday during the Earth Day festivities in Fairhope overlooking Mobile Bay.
David Underhill of the Mobile Sierra Club paddles around an ancient cypress tree in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
MOBILE BAY, Ala. — The sugar ants have overrun Meaher State Park on the old causeway connecting Mobile and Baldwin Counties in the middle of Mobile Bay and on the edge of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. As I sit here sipping the morning coffee listening to the birds and watching the alligators hunt in the morning still waters, I can’t help but wonder what Alabama’s premiere scientist, E.O. Wilson, would say about the massive sugar ant invasion.
They are marching through this place like the cars and trucks that form a constant line across the new causeway off in the distance. Surely Wilson would not suggest just feeding these ants some peanut butter, his advice for people who are always asking what to do about the ants that invade their kitchens.
Wilson, a Mobile native who has been called one of the deans of American science and one of the top 100 minds of the 20th century, and a specialist in ants as well as Sociobiology, recently made a journey into the Delta with a team of reporters and photographers from the Mobile Press-Register. (See video below).
While the reporter for the conservative Newhouse paper asked about ants, and Wilson talked about water moccasins, dragonflies and why he has come home, they failed to get his assessment of the effects of the BP oil disaster on the ecosystem.
The final sun is setting on this anniversary trip to the Gulf Coast. I’m still working on an overall anniversary story on the BP oil blowout, plus a followup on the human health effects from the oil and chemicals, with video. There’s also a column floating around in my head, but for now, I got back to the Mobile Bay campground just in time to catch a few frames of this scene, where from this vantage point, the sun looks like a fireball going down through the skyscrapers of downtown Mobile, Alabama.
GULF SHORES, Ala. — At least one great blue-heron seems to still make a home around the fishing of Little Lagoon and the pass on West Beach in Gulf Shores. There used to be an entire colony. I photographed a dead one here on October 11, 2010.
The brown pelican population seems to be coming back to the area. I spotted and photographed several fairly large flocks from the Flora-Bama Lounge on the Alabama-Florida line to the end of West Beach and the Fort Morgan peninsula over the past couple of days (see below).
GULF SHORES, Ala. — Sometimes if you put yourself in a position in nature and turn up your powers of observation, you get lucky. I had been hearing the bobwhites call for two days and nights.
Then this morning while I was still sipping coffee, two Northern bobwhites [colinus virginianus] wandered into the camp site next to mine in Gulf State Park, feeding on the ground. I was able to shoot more than a dozen frames with the new 750 mm lens before they scurried off into the underbrush out of sight.
Earth Day events are planned all along the Gulf Coast this weekend, and they will hold special significance this year on the one year anniversary of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
An Earth Day party will be held Friday from noon till 4 p.m. at The Hangout in Gulf Shores with live music by Gulf Shores High School band Katawompus. There will also be crafts, games and other “family-friendly” activities. The third annual Clean Coast Expo will also be held Friday at the Erie Meyer Civic Center from 1 to 7:30 p.m. A number of “green” companies are to set up. There will also be an electronics recycling event Friday at the Gulf Shores Museum from 3 to 7 p.m.
Foley’s first Earth Day Extravaganza is set for 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday at Graham Creek Nature Preserve, with a 2-mile fun run at 9 a.m., hourly “eco-tours,” and a recycling station.
Then, the 22nd annual Earth Day celebration in Fairhope is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Fairhope Municipal Pier Park. More than 40 exhibitors are scheduled to set up and there will be live music and plenty of food — and perhaps a little political protest theater.
All photos, video, editing and opinions stated are those of John Wathen
The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is far from over.
Fishermen are put in the position of being FORCED to go out into water they know in their hearts is not safe for sale, according to Videographer John Wathen.
“Many of the fishermen I know personally will not eat the catch from their own boats,” he said on his BPOilSlick Blog. “If they speak out they are chastised by their fellow fishermen for putting their jobs in jeopardy. These people should be compensated for every day they have to stay out of the fishing grounds until the waters are truly safe for human consumption.”
It is heartbreaking what is happening in Louisiana but that is not all of the story, he says.
Here is the link to participate in a 15 minute, anonymous questionnaire measuring how coastal residents, tourism workers, commercial/recreational fishermen, marine workers and clean-up workers are coping with the effects of the BP oil spill.
This research is being conducted to help give a voice to the industry/communities that have been hit hard emotionally by the spill. The results will be propagated widely to spread the word about mental health in the Gulf and how we can help our communities post-spill.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
