Cherri Foytlin's blog

This is part one of a three part series featuring an insider look at the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico - including environmental practices, worker-related injuries and deaths, and the industry’s economic and political influence - through the lens of thirty-five-year oil worker Randy Comeaux.

With the kids out of school and things slow for the holidays, I have been using the opportunity to get myself better organized a bit for the year to come. I have amassed quite the collection of business cards, papers, reports – bills too, lol – over the last five years of this journey, and it has been both daunting and liberating to weed out that which has been uselessly taking up space in my life.

Brandon Ballengée wears many hats. And, as a visual artist, biologist and environmental activist, he often wears them simultaneously.

According to his website, he, “creates transdisciplinary artworks inspired from his ecological field and laboratory research.”

As Ballengée explains, “I’m kind of a strange hybrid mix between an artist and a biologist.”

Undeterred by the blazing sun and high humidity of a mid-August afternoon in Biloxi, Mississippi, Tuat Nguyen and Bien Do moved nimbly around their shrimp boat, making last-minute preparations to leave for Lake Borgne, where the Louisiana shrimp season would open in a few days.

The last five days have been a bullet ride. So many great events, panels and activities, ceremonies, catching up with old friends, meeting new allies, walking with an estimated 410,000 caring souls for the People’s Climate March, and finally, flooding the streets of Wall Street.

Marine toxicologist and Exxon Valdez survivor Dr. Riki Ott, who first sounded the alarm regarding the abundant use of chemical dispersants in the early days of the 2010 BP Deepwater Drilling Disaster, is once again touring the Gulf.

Today rusted out swings gently sway in the wind on the playground of the Old Settlement School in Golden Meadow, Louisiana... Although the segregated Indian school has been closed for nearly five decades, the sense of community has not been forgotten on the property, which is now the Main Office of the United Houma Nation.