It’s Getting Hot In Here

A few years ago I had what I thought was a brief minor life tangent– a stint organizing against industrial offshore fish farming in the Gulf of Mexico. It was, I reasoned, a breather from youth climate organizing that would take me somewhat closer to my former life in marine biology.  I didn’t expect then that those experiences would ever come anywhere near the pages of itsgettinghotinhere.  But here we are.

Since the Gulf oil disaster, I’ve grappled with how best to be helpful and how to straddle two once separate but increasingly convergent worlds of work and parts of my life.  Unexpected little memorials to the Gulf That Was have popped up along the way.  First came a mailing of the agenda for a standing Gulf Fishery Management Council meeting–sent just days before the explosion, it’s now obviously obselete.   And then, cleaning out computer files, I unearthed a spreadsheet of campaign contacts and volunteers that reads more like a “Who’s Who” guide to navigating power and influence in fishing communities of the Gulf Coast.  I didn’t think I’d hear from most of them once I returned to the climate fold, but their voices and faces have been everywhere from CNN to Senate hearings these last few weeks.

It was 2007 when I first arrived on scene in the Gulf of Mexico, on docks and charter boats and in dive shops and bait shops and fishery management council meetings.   Me, an unimposing young woman with a Northeast accent and fast-talking tendencies, business cards and a 202 area code, an evangelical looking pile of handouts, a tendency to wilt in the heat, and big opinions about issues I’d only been working on a few short months.    If you’re wondering if this story ends with some frustrated fisherman rightly throwing me overboard– well, at the time, I was wondering that too.

Here’s what happened instead:

In Houston, on meeting us for the first time, a well-respected environmental justice advocate and his son literally dropped everything to help our campaign, introduced us around the community, and even invited us to a late night family domino party.   A motorcycle riding priest-turned-social-justice-advocate rode up from Port Arthur, black leather chaps and all, to advocate on behalf of the Vietnamese shrimpers that surmount time constraints, language barriers, and in some cases, even immigration complexities to fight for their say in the decision making processes that affect their livelihoods. We handed out a lot of materials in Vietnamese on that trip, leaving Houston and 8-lane highways behind and passing miles of oil refineries lighting up the night to end up on the docks of Galveston.  (Galveston itself would soon be lighting up the night, burning in the wake of 2008′s Hurricane Ike.)

In Biloxi, an 80-something square dancing Unitarian Universalist found a ride from his weekly doctor’s appointment and rushed across town to a fishery management council meeting in time to give testimony on the importance of sustaining healthy Gulf ecosystems.  Organizing a luncheon for a few dozen people in Biloxi before that meeting unexpectedly turned into the most difficult task I’d take on all year.   Save one or two, every restaurant phone number I called was disconnected.  When we rolled into town, it became clear why: most everyplace was still closed after Katrina.  Only the casinos were going strong again.

Outside New Orleans, a shrimping family invited us over for a home-cooked meal in the house their family has lived in for generations–or had, right up until they had to move to a FEMA trailer in the front yard while gutting and rebuilding their home.  Up and down the street, the rest of the lights were out, the houses vacant. We met a Louisiana native and head of a nationwide fishermen’s association–a woman–who commands the respect of men and women alike across the Gulf region.   We didn’t meet her husband, because he was away at work.  On an oil rig. When they can afford it, their family wants to put solar panels on their roof.

In Florida we worked, but we also played- snorkeling through the reefs and turquoise waters of the Dry Tortugas, deep sea fishing off the Keys, getting up close and personal with the local dolphins, and learning the delicious taste of conch.

Back in DC, colleagues cooked up a pot of royal red shrimp fresh from an organizing trip to the Alabama coast.  The royal red fishery is tiny–only a handful of boats out of Alabama and Florida. Royal reds taste much more like lobster than they do like shrimp.  I  have been lucky to have a pretty wide culinary experience in my life, spanning cultures and continents, and even so it’s no exaggeration to say a royal red is the single most delicious thing that’s ever touched my tongue.  As this spill takes hold of the Gulf, I hope I’m not one of the last people with the opportunity to have an opinion on the matter.

All across the Gulf, charter boat operators and shrimpers and recreational fishermen and fishermen’s association leaders and state senators and environmental advocates and school teachers who couldn’t afford to give us their time did anyway, often driving from a few states over, eager to do whatever they could to help protect the Gulf.   In the New Orleans area, things were toughest: as we were apologetically told again and again, by everyone from a leader in an indigenous nation south of the city to advocacy organizations downtown, they simply couldn’t take on any new issues.  Years after Katrina, they were just trying to survive.

And now…?