Rocky Kistner's blog

Washington’s political wars rarely match reality back home.

The second memorial of the nation’s worst oil catastrophe has come and gone, forever linked to Earth Day and seared into the psyches of millions of Gulf residents and fishermen. In recent weeks, the media has unleashed a torrent of stories about the devastating impacts of the nation’s worst oil spill disaster;

Rocky Kistner

Apr 27 2012

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“Never let injustice shut you up. When you see injustice you must stand up. It’s going to hurt sometimes. It’s going to cost you something. But you can never, never allow injustice in your presence and sit silently by and let it happen. You cannot do that.” – Gulf resident Linda St. Martin from Stories from the Gulf.

In the Dakotas, members of the proud Lakota Nation rose in protest this week to join a  48-hour hunger strike in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline—and all tar sands pipelines—they say will destroy precious water resources and ancestral lands in the U.S and in Canada.  

Dead dolphin on Mississippi Beach in 2011                   Photo: Laurel Lockamy

Since BP’s catastrophic oil blowout nearly two years ago, Laurel Lockamy has gotten pretty good at photographing the dead. She’s snapped images of dozens of lifeless turtles and dolphins, countless dead fish, birds, armadillos and nutria and pretty much anything that crawls, swims or flies near the white sandy Mississippi beaches of her Gulfport home.

With news that President Obama will fast track the building of the southern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, Texans in its path say their health and property rights are endangered by a torrent of corrosive tar sands oil from Canada.

Gloria Trevino doesn’t need a Washington politician to tell her that a daily gusher of Canadian tar sands crude won’t do her air in south Houston any favors. Surrounded by massive petrochemical plants, she and her neighbors in this industrial community already breathe some of the dirtiest air in the country. Her small one-story pink stucco house is sandwiched between giant multi-colored steel storage containers like a tiny doll house stuck in the middle of a field of gigantic cooking pots. 

Down in Texas there’s an old saying; “You can put your boots in the oven but it don’t make them biscuits.”

BP's newest PR salvo touting its Gulf cleanup hit a nerve with many residents still struggling to get their lives back (one ad captured this BP beach protest in the background). The oil behemoth's slickly produced pleas for Americans to “come on down” to the Gulf where the weather is warm, the food is sublime and the beaches are sparkling clean--at least in the commercials--has long stuck in the craw of people whose shrimp boxes are bare and whose beaches and bayous are sometimes littered with sticky tar balls and bloated dolphi

As I write this, I am traveling on a bus to New York to speak at a screening of The Big Fix, Josh and Rebecca Tickell’s powerful documentary about the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig that spewed nearly 200 million gallons of Louisiana crude along the coastlines and marshes of four Gulf states, changing the lives of millions. This film is mandatory viewing for those who want to know what really happened on the ground along the bayous and beaches of a coast that is wedded to oil.