(Can you believe I found this travel case just like this?
Did it belong to an ornithologist collecting specimens?
A hunter? Well, now it’s mine, and it holds stationary.)
Dead birds, dead fish, dead dolphins, dead people.
This is what I’ve been having bad dreams about,
the heavy weight pressing down on my chest for
almost half a year now. It’s been about five months
since Deepwater Horizon blew, and now this one.
How many more will falter under some fatal error,
and further poison the Gulf with crude? Man, I’ve
been quiet about it for a little while now because
no way around it – this is just beyond depressing,
beyond heartbreaking. The cover-ups and media
blackouts designed to keep our eyes trained on
a bright horizon festooned with dazzling drivel,
the shambling of celebrity trainwrecks infinitely
more intriguing than a bunch of oily birds, or sad
fishermen, or ruined beaches. But all this time,
I’ve been silently doing what I always do when
I don’t know what else to do: I sift information.
I collect snippets, I read everything I can, I
make long lists. I obsess, because if I don’t,
the deep sorrow at what we are doing to this
earth starts to make me feel like I want to lay
down and never get up. Instead, I keep my eyes
open. I look and look until I can’t anymore, and
then I try and go find some beauty in this world.
I look at that instead, I share it here – but it’s not
enough. I have to share these things, and I hope
that you’ll look too. This is what’s happening, my
friends. Everyday it gets closer, so if you reckon
it’s just not part of your immediate reality – well,
just wait. At some point, it will be. Maybe when we
all have to wear masks or respirators just to go
outside? Maybe then. Maybe not. Anyway, this
is all the stuff I’ve been reading since April –
some of it hopefully you’ve seen already,
but if not, take some time to go through even
a little of the links below. If you get through
them all, you deserve a major treat – maybe
a banana split! Seriously. I know it’s overload,
but I have to share all this stuff. It’s all out there,
but it’s so easy just to go to the next thing. Isn’t it?
✸ The Gulf’s Other Time Bombs
The spider web of gas pipelines lurking under the Gulf.
✸ New Photos and Flyover of Mariner Platform
“Pilot Schumaker has been documenting the aftermath
of the BP Deepwater Horizon Macondo wellhead explosion
since May. Reached this evening for comment, Schumaker said,
Along the way, as we arrived at blue water, we saw three distinct
large pods (20-30 individuals) of gold-colored rays, and a large school
(25-30 individuals) of bottlenose dolphins near them. All of these were
in a region with moderate amounts of fairly healthy-looking sargassum.
But Schumaker also said that the Gulf did not look healthy as she flew to the platform.
Prior to reaching blue water, the first 50 miles off shore are a very strange
thick milky green with some strange black streaks spread throughout, with no
healthy sargassum and no signs of life. Where there is still blue water, and there
are many such places, there typically are bottlenose dolphins and good sargassum.
The rays were a welcome sight for sure, though, as I have not seen those within
75 miles of shore for nearly two months now.
All the more reason that media should not abandon the Gulf of Mexico just yet.”
✸ With Neighbors Unaware, Toxic Spill at a BP Plant
✸ ProPublica: BP Texas Refinery Had Huge Toxic Release Just Before Gulf Blowout
✸ Gulf Seafood Gets Chemically Tested for Oil, Not Dispersant
✸ Mycoremediation and Its Applications to Oil Spills
✸ Gulf Oil Plume Is Not Breaking Down Fast, Research Says
✸ The BP oil disaster “that never materialised”
✸ BP Spill: Catastrophe, Sure. Disaster? Nah.
“Given the size and far-reaching devastation of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill,
you may have assumed that it qualifies as a federal disaster.
Though you’d have been wrong, you wouldn’t have been alone.”
— By Mac McClelland
“Since May, Catholic Charities of New Orleans has been delivering more than
$100,000 worth of emergency grocery and bill assistance; last week, the organization
announced that it’s out of money. “Right now we have people standing in food lines,”
says Costanza. ‘If this were a federal disaster, we’d get disaster food stamps. We’d
get disaster case management. Disaster mental health. Disaster unemployment.’
The Stafford Act would also activate an interagency task force that includes the
American Red Cross, which so far, Costanza says, ‘didn’t raise a dime.
Neither did the Salvation Army.’
The fate of the fishermen rendered unemployed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill
suggests the devastation that can occur in the absence of federal aid. Victims
were ultimately able to extract $1.1 billion in compensation from the company,
but only after 19 years of litigation. ‘A lot of them are dead, or bankrupt, or divorced,’
says Brian O’Neill, the lawyer who tried the case. ‘The impact of the spill on both the
natural environment and their abilities to make a living resulted in huge social disruption
in the fishing communities. There were increased rates of alcoholism, domestic violence.
Whatever social services existed were unable to handle it. Some communities didn’t survive
or are half the size they were in 1988. Whatever assistance BP is giving these people now,
that will taper off drastically when this is off the front page.'”
✸ The BP Cover-Up
— By Julia Whitty
“No one is ready for it. Not the Minerals Management Service, catering submissively
to BP’s laughable Gulf oil-spill ‘plan,’ a document featuring wildly inaccurate wildlife
assessments (including walruses and other species nonexistent in the Gulf)
and an on-call expert who’s been dead for years.”

✸ Kindra Arnesen speaks out
This woman is my new hero. Please listen to what she has to say.
✸ You Are Not Authorized to See These Pictures of the Oil Spill, Citizen … Do Not Look!
✸ Spill Photogs Could Face Felony Charges Under New Coast Guard Directive
“In a blog post over the weekend, journalist Georgianne Nienaber argued
that this new regulation effectively prevents photographers from getting near
affected areas. ‘If the Coast Guard has its way, all media, not just independent
writers and photographers… will be fined $40,000 and receive Class D felony
convictions for providing the truth about oiled birds and dolphins, in addition to
broken, filthy, unmanned boom material that is trapping oil in the marshlands
and estuaries. One to five years in prison is a definite possibility for ‘willful violation’
of the latest Coast Guard directive that flies in the face of the First Amendment.
And, I guarantee you that writers and photographers will continue to try our best
to use cameras and words to explain to those who have not been there exactly
what is happening on our Gulf Shores. If we don’t continue to try, Americans will
no longer see the images and read the words that have been a voice for the
voiceless fishermen and women, coastal residents of the Delta, and the battered wildlife.”
– Georgianne Nienaber
Haiti relief worker, investigative journalist,
author of Gorilla Dreams: The Legacy of Dian Fossey
(and my other new hero)
✸ Trouble Down Below
Much of the spill’s damage will play out in the ocean’s deepest layers.
✸ Are We Losing Interest in the Oil Spill?
✸ BP board game foreshadows Gulf disaster
✸ Visual Guides to Sustainable Seafood
✸ The week in seafood: shortages and high prices put customers and restaurants on alert
✸ Organic Produce Cheatsheet from My Paper Crane
(Might as well include this too! It’s quite useful.)

✸ Top New Orleans chef sues BP over seafood losses
“Susan Spicer, one of New Orleans’ most prominent and highly regarded chefs,
has sued BP Plc for damages to restaurants that have lost normal seafood supplies
because of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. ‘I just hope that my motivations will not be misinterpreted,’
she said from her restaurant Bayona in her first interview since the suit was filed Friday.
‘It’s more about solidarity in this region than about getting my piece of the pie.
I can’t say I expect to see a dollar out of this thing. I am just angry.’”
✸ BP’s Next Disaster
✸ Six Things To Do About the BP Gulf Disaster
✸ Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it
“The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines
around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta
have had to live with environmental catastrophes for decades”
– John Vidal
“Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno: ‘Oil companies do not value our life;
they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and
fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable.'”
✸ Why Are Indian Farmers Committing Suicide?
by Vandana Shiva
“The factors that have caused 200,000 suicides in India are rooted
in the policies of trade liberalization and corporate globalization which
ensnare farmers in a spiral of indebtedness, generating despair.”
It’s all connected. We are all connected.
“It is no surprise that as the sea turns black in the gulf with no end in sight
in the midst of the biggest ecological disaster in US history, CocoRosie are
the only ones to hit the zeitgeist with an album filled with psychic omniscience,
entitled “Grey Oceans.” And yet it seems to be the album the indie US press
doesn’t want to talk about. Bianca and Sierra Casady paints pictures of lost
children across a broken land, feral, elemental spirits who roam the dreamscapes
of our world, naming perpetrators, painting their memories, recovering and reclaiming power.
They are unafraid to manifest their vision that the application of magical creativity could be a
balm for aching souls in a struggling world.”
– Antony Hegarty from Op-Ed: An Artists’
Dialogue On CocoRosie’s Grey Oceans
Something to heal your heart after all of that sadness:

CocoRosie – Lemonade
Maybe the best music video ever made.
“Journeying inward, into the forest-dark ember, led by crystal light,
the voicing of whales and ancient souls passed, we embarked;
slipping with muddy foothold, on a destination-less ride through
darkened waters filled with starry-eyed daughters. We have had
many guides, some dead ones, some alive, some sisters with names
pronounceable, others, just an inkling, the last heat of summer, seeping
up, out of the evening sunned soil in september. We close our eyes,
to hear the decoration, a burnt out corn field, a sad place to remember,
the story of a heartless crow, his countless cackles haunting, his mission,
misogyny. We dual waves, heavy laden with salt, of foisted female identity,
underlying, trinity is crying, she mourns so sweetly. Heavy on our hearts,
the weight of time; the earth who lost her balance
and fell into the snowy depths of industrial mucus.”
– CocoRosie

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, but it seemed right to share it tonight:
I’ve been thinking about the rain. Another thunderstorm, and as I relish it, my poor old blind dog
is cowering at every rumble of thunder. He’s pacing, and has to be as close as possible to me
at all times. I pat him and reassure him, but he won’t really calm down until after the storm has
passed. I know how he feels. Back when I lived in New Orleans, rain meant something else to
me. Drought was something unthinkable in that city. Like clockwork, those muggy, tropical summer
afternoons would be punctuated halfway through by epic downpours. Those storms would somehow
always catch me on my bike, in the middle of the French Quarter, late for work again. The rain would
come at you sideways, and there was nothing you could do, except try and take cover under one of
the wide balconies or awnings, pulling the wooden shutters close around you to make a fort.
You were just going to get wet, no matter what, so you might as well take cover in a dim bar
with all the hapless tourists in plastic ponchos. Their cheap umbrellas would litter the banquette
outside – wrecked frames, inverted tulips in black and plaid, flipped inside out by huge gusts of wind.

(Photo by Mary-Jane Maybury )
I lived for about five years in a crumbling mansion on the corner of Bourbon and Esplanade.
It was the grandest place I’d ever lived in, and I was more than willing to put up with the fact
that it was literally falling apart because it was so incredibly beautiful as well as insanely cheap.
The apartment I had on the top floor was sprawling, ornate with double balconies and a crystal
chandelier in the bedroom. For a time, we slept on a futon mattress on the floor directly beneath
it, and would stare up for hours, transfixed by the cracks that radiated out from it like a glass wedding
cake on a crazed porcelain platter. I always laughed, saying that it wouldn’t be such a bad way to go –
done in by falling chandelier. After half the plaster in the other room came down over the guest bed,
narrowly missing my elderly cat, we decided to move the bed out of the way.

(Photo by Mary-Jane Maybury )
There were leaks in every room. Over the Italian marble fireplaces, in the kitchen, the parlor –
and most annoyingly, right over the toilet paper holder. I was so stubbornly in denial about the leaks,
that I insisted on keeping my things right where they belonged – as if the leaks would get the picture,
and one day seal up and move along. I kept an altar on the marble mantle, with all my most important
treasures – knowing full well that they’d just get soaked there. Roll after soggy roll of toilet-paper was
sacrificed to my inability to think of a better place to keep it. I’d have fits of anxiety whenever it started
to rain while I was traveling. I’d want to rush back home immediately and move all the important stuff
out of the way of all the indoor waterfalls. One night while I was in New York, it started to storm hard,
setting my heart to racing before I even knew why. I was already reaching for my phone to call home
and remind them to check on the leaks when it hit me that it might not be raining in New Orleans.

(Photo by Mary-Jane Maybury )
When the hurricanes got worse, storms changed for me. Growing up in Texas, I’d always loved a big,
bombastic thunderstorm. I loved the smell of it – heady metal, asphalt and ozone. I loved how fast the
sky could darken, the big sheets of water drenching the parched earth. Some branches might come down,
and you had to watch out for lightning, but that was it. The practice of boarding up windows and evacuating
before a storm was something new, and it wasn’t long before the onset of each new tropical depression or
incipient hurricane was enough to send me into a ripe panic. It was this that eventually chased me out of
New Orleans – the fear of packing, running, battening down the hatches from June to October. It was too
much. The last straw came with a tropical storm that hit New Orleans about a month before Katrina.
No one was making much a of a big deal about it – I caught some murmurings in Matassa’s grocery
store, but nobody was really stocking up. The old man at the front counter reminded me to bring my
stuff in off the balcony, and I wish I’d listened to him. Later that night the wind picked up, and started
tossing my potted plants around like missiles. Earlier that afternoon everyone was just calling Cindy
a tropical storm, but by the time she’d hit us she was classified as a category 1 hurricane. I wasn’t
expecting her strength, not at all. The cast-iron light fixtures that hung from chains on the covered
gallery were whipping around like medieval maces, all the glass smashed out. The big solid oaks
were tossing their limbs, suddenly horribly fluid, and seeming to be more water than wood.
My sweetheart at the time was out there somewhere, in the storm – on his way to come see me,
but it had been hours and I couldn’t imagine him out on his bike in that weather. Or worse, I could –
and did, horrified by images of him being brained by flying branches or debris, laying face-down
somewhere as the gutters filled up with mud. The power went out, and I didn’t even own a flashlight,
nor did I have any candles at the ready. I sat cowering in the dark, watching the storm and trying to
make call friends, but the lines were down. I didn’t have a television, didn’t play the radio, and I hadn’t
yet learned to become an addict of meteorology and storm-tracker websites. I felt so alone, and more
afraid of the weather than I had ever been before – the unexpected power of it, the sucker-punch.
Some hollering from down below rousted me from my brooding, and who but my sweet lover, clad
head to toe in yellow rain-gear, was calling up to me and struggling to lock his bike up in stinging gale.
I couldn’t fathom it, how he had made it to me, or that he had even tried – but man, was I grateful to see
him warm and safe and holed up under blankets in the dark, making me laugh. We made jokes about
the awful sounds coming from the roof. It sounded like it was about to blow off any minute, and little did
we know – it actually was. A month later, when Katrina hit, that’s exactly what happened. The big pieces
of copper that had been tacked down over the patchy roof of our nearly 200 year old house had just peeled
off and flown down the street. Our neighbors across the way stayed through it all, and said they watched the
pieces fly from their front window. I suppose some part of me knew it then, after Cindy, because as that next
morning dawned all calm and bright, I knew I had to go. Out of the blue, I decided I needed to get back to my
hometown. I couldn’t live with the constant threat of annihilation of my home, and all that I held dear. I made
the decision to leave New Orleans after the next Mardi Gras. My grandfather and I went on a trip to Serbia,
Greece and Spain for the whole next month, and two days after my arrival back home – Katrina hit.
I evacuated with my unpacked bags of dirty traveling clothes, my mother’s violin, a box of photos
and my laptop. I went back a month later to salvage what I could from the wreckage, and moved to
Austin, Texas – the place where I was born and raised. I fell deeply in love with an dear friend, quite
unexpectedly – and we bought a house together, and planted an orchard of fruit trees, and a big garden.
I pay attention to the weather now like an old-timer, and I only feel anxiety when it doesn’t rain. The long
summer droughts here can be vicious, and I wish I didn’t know what it is to pray for even a drop. Standing
in the doorway this afternoon, watching the garden get soaked I was thinking about how good it is for us
further west to catch the outlying bands from the big storms in the Gulf, and feeling simultaneously guilty.
I’d never wish for a hurricane, especially now that the effects of a major storm could be so far beyond
catastrophic. How many fervent wishes and spells and prayers did I add to the well of voices chanting
the deluge away from us in Crescent City? Now I follow the ancient charms to bring water, fill the resevoirs.
Drop a stone, watch the ripples – this is living that adage directly, feeling the ripple dump right down on you,
wondering if it’s soiled with oil and Corexit. The Mississippi river changes between its head and its tail –
it sheds it’s skin like a snake halfway down, becomes thicker and clogged with poison. You can dip your
toe in it in Minnesota, but I can guarantee it’s not the same river you’d be crazy to touch in New Orleans.
When I lived there, I remember feeling awful for being so glad when a hurricane would hit Alabama
or Florida instead of Louisiana. I’m thinking about blessings and curses,
about living in such exciting times, and I’m thinking about the rain.

(Photo by Richelle Forsey)
“Last week i was in New Orleans and happened to spot the only ‘surviving’ Banksy in the city.
‘Rain Girl’ – ‘Apparently there was some kind of storm here a few years ago’, is the only one of
Banksy’s New Orleans pieces saved from Fred Radtkes’ aka the Gray Ghost paint roller.
It’s on the side of the Drop-In Center at 1428 Rampart St. and under a sheet of plexi-glass.
It is one of a dozen or so he created on/for/around the 3rd anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
If the home/building owners had a chance, they could have made a fortune from the Banksy
pieces (apparently they increased the property values by 75, 000 – 200,000 USD), instead a
moron with too much time on his hands covered them up. In October of 2008, said moron,
Fred Radtke finally went too far with his gray touch and defaced a comissioned mural on
the wall of 2930 Burgundy St. owned by Southern Waterproofing. According to the locals
he was fined and ordered to pay for the re-painting of the mural.
He should have been banned from purchasing paint.”
– Richelle Forsey
✸ From Democracy Now: all their coverage on Hurricane Katrina over the past five years.
✸ William Gibson on “New Orleans: The City They Couldn’t Disneyland”
✸ Katrina “Survivors” versus “Internally Displaced Persons” More Than Mere Semantics
(Thanks to Clayton Cubitt for this one.)
✸ Sticking a Happy Face on Katrina
— By Mac McClelland, who is my newest hero. She saw Obama speak in New Orleans
for the Katrina Anniversary the other day, and had this to say:
“Obama: ‘No need to dwell on what you all experienced during Katrina.’
Beg to differ, Mr. President. Lest the govt let that happen again.”
✸ Post-Katrina, Graffiti Said It All
✸ Traces Of Katrina: New Orleans Suicide Rate Still Up
✸ Finally unpacking boxes, feeling at home: A guest column by Louis Maistros
“But recovery? The word feels good in my ear, the sound of it nearly redeeming —
but it doesn’t entirely ring true. What happened to us in the summer of 2005 isn’t
something you recover from. It’s something that you stand up to if you’re able,
and it’s something you may conspire to defy if you choose — but you never really
recover from it. In the beginning we dreamed of being whole again and so marched
blindly in the direction of that dream, never really knowing how the story would resolve,
or even if it could resolve. We’re still on that road and still can’t say for sure where it will
take us, but we have to believe it’ll be someplace better.
The Katrina experience was a rude thing that dared to define each of us without our
permission. It changed who we are, informed who we’ll be, and altered our perception
of where we came from. Pre-Katrina life has become a thing of nostalgia, like Elvis Presley
and sock hops, not quite real anymore but ever-precious in our hearts. Many years from now
our grandchildren will ask us in wide-eyed wonder about it all — and we’ll tell. And then we’ll
go on about our recovery even as the wetness of our eyes contradicts the words on our lips.”
– Louis Maistros

(Photo by Tony Allen-Mills)
If you’ve still got it in you, here’s some collected writings
about my experiences with Hurricane Katrina,
in reverse chronological order. Dig in:
✸ Hurricane Katrina: Four Years Later
✸ New Orleans in August
✸ One Year
✸ Lower Ninth Aftermath
✸ MARDI GRAS APRÈS L’ORAGE
✸ AFTERMATH: REVELATIONS
✸ JUST WHEN YOU THINK IT CAN’T GET ANY WORSE
✸ Calamity
✸ The Triumph of Death
✸ What can you do?
✸ Katrina