Voices of the Gulf

After the BP oil disaster, Thao Chi Nguyen worked with Asian Americans for Change (AAC) to provide services and advocate for Asian American fishing communities along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. [...Read more]

Washington’s political wars rarely match reality back home. [...Read more]

By Kent H. Haughton. Lots of us on the Gulf Coast who lost our jobs or income because of the BP oil disaster have a story about the Gulf Coast Claims Facility (GCCF). For many, the process, which was supposed to pay us for the economic losses we sustained, meant rejection, underpayment, frustration, stress, and sinking into debt and financial ruin. [...Read more]

An Inspiring Community Leader from Bayou La Batre's Historic African American Community Passes. By Zack Carter. I am sad to report that one of our inspiring community elders, Stella Mae Smith of Snows Quarter, Bayou La Batre, Alabama has died. She suffered a heart attack at her home. [...Read more]

The lie that we are consistently fed in this society is that in order to find happiness, we have to have lots of stuff -- that if $1 million makes us happy, $2 million will make a person ecstatic. This concept is inaccurate. We know that because many of the richest people in the world are miserable and lonely creatures. [...Read more]

Crossposted from Facing South.  Two years after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf Coast residents continue to suffer emotional fallout from the disaster. [...Read more]

Bayou Interfaith Shared Community Organizing (BISCO) has been working with churches and communities in southern Louisiana since 1995, organizing to give bayou communities a voice. [...Read more]

At a May 1 New Orleans rally and march for immigrant rights, Ted Quant, a social activist and director of the Twomey Center for Peace through Justice at Loyola University, delivered the following speech on the history of May Day, the need for workers and communities to unite across race, and how the attack on immigrant workers [...Read more]

Roughly two weeks after the second year memorial of the BP oil disaster, a few moving parts are looking like they're coming to closure, even if not on completely amenable terms. The federal judge overseeing the trial against BP has approved settlement terms.  And Mississippi passed a law to encourage local hiring in the wake of disasters.  Meanwhile, national policymaking and politics that affect the Gulf Coast continue. [...Read more]

The St. Martin Parish School Board’s recent decision to log the cypress-tupelo swamps on land owned by the entity in the Atchafalaya Basin has become a source of controversy.

According to the Atchafalaya Basinkeeper, Dean Wilson, the source of contention surrounds the idea of clear cutting the trees, some of which were around during the time of Jesus. [...Read more]