Voices from the Gulf: Monique Verdin My Louisiana Love

5:33min

Howard Page of STEPS Coalition tells his story of the Rev Calvin Johnson's fight to preserve his community and Mississippi wetlands

"I've stepped back as far as I can, I can't step back anymore. I'm going to start coming forward." -Rev Calvin Johnson

Here's Captain Louis Skrmetta, talking about the first time he learned the value of clean water in the Gulf of Mexico

I had to first of all explain to my family that this is a bad deal that we shouldn’t be doing this, we should be committed to keeping our bilges clean, putting containers under the engines so that the oil in the bilge won’t go into the water.”

5min

Patty Whitney of Bayou History Center and BISCO tells of when she heard of the BP disaster in the Gulf in 2010

"The Deep Water Horizon is actually a metaphor for coastal Louisiana, we’re dead we just haven’t dropped yet. DWH was like being told you have terminal cancer. It may take awhile, but we're gone."

http://gulffuture.org

5min

David Underhill Mobile Sierra Club tells us how lifelong resistance can be a success.

And I’ve been involved here and elsewhere in uprisings against environmental atrocities and uh others that mobilized people in the streets and communities and in council meetings, um that usually failed in their announced objectives and uh haha are currently failing now in Mobile, but the resistance continues, and in necessity from all of this that I conclude that the resistance itself is a success in that it keeps you alert to what you must do with the brief time that you’re allowed on earth

http://gulffuture.org

Jennifer Bennett, an environmental engineer in Houston, TX reflects on BP's strategy to disperse the oil gushing from teh bottom of hte Mississippi Canyon in the Northern Gulf of Mexico
5min

'The solution I saw was like “oh, we’re just gonna dump some more carcinogenic crap in there! Yeah totally standard because it’s the cheapest option, and they think that’s cleanup.” I’ve been working in the environmental industry long enough to know that is cleanup and it’s not what people think it is.'

http://gulffuture.org

Sharron Stewart, in Houston, TX reflects on government repression of witnessing the disaster unfold on Gulf Beaches in Alabama

5min

'There were so many people on the island and they would not let us get anywhere near the beaches or take pictures. Or take pictures! If you got out of your car, you were followed, if you stayed in the public right of way, you were followed. And they would have confiscated my camera if I had taken a picture. That is so different from my experience of oil spill cleanups in the past when I worked for NOAA. '

http://gulffuture.org