Gulf Oil Spill Project

Over the past week I have been racing forth and back across the Gulf Coast between Louisiana and the Florida panhandle searching out the impacts of the latest human disaster created from our short-sightedness in exploring alternatives to a petroleum based existence. The past week has been interesting - on multiple levels - travel and photography are just two.

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster caught the world's attention for the past couple months and then with the capping of the well greatest human cause environmental disaster began to slip from the media's attention and the worlds - here on the Gulf, especially in Louisiana it is still very much front and center - and as I saw Monday (Aug 16th), out on places like Grand Isle (photo above) it will be for years to come . We need to know who we are, what we have done, why we let it happen, and what is the long-term impact. That's why I came - I hope to help tell that story.

Over the coming weeks as I continue to understand what this disaster means to the Gulf Coast, human lives here, the food chain, and long-term impact on and to our cultural, political and social relationship to the environment I will be blogging about it specifically in a different site you can find here at the Gulf Oil Spill Project.

Partnering with me on the project is the National Audubon Society and photographic support is being provided by Pro Photo Supply (my blog about the photojournalism can be found here) - for each of those I will also be blogging and doing other presentations. As soon as those are up and running I'll post links to them here.

Finally this blog will continue to comment on my travels and observations on the planet - perhaps more, perhaps less, depending on the craziness of the schedule. It will take a new look soon as I will be migrating it to some new blogging tools which should provide you with more imagery, video, sound all to better experience the world I'm perambulating in and through.

Thanks to everyone who is along for the journey - Gerry

UN-embedded Journalism

Excellent piece of UN-embedded journalism by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone - worth the read!

The Spill, The Scandal and the President

The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder

From the article:

Even worse, the "moratorium" on drilling announced by the president does little to prevent future disasters. The ban halts exploratory drilling at only 33 deepwater operations, shutting down less than one percent of the total wells in the Gulf. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the Cabinet-level official appointed by Obama to rein in the oil industry, boasts that "the moratorium is not a moratorium that will affect production" – which continues at 5,106 wells in the Gulf, including 591 in deep water.

Most troubling of all, the government has allowed BP to continue deep-sea production at its Atlantis rig – one of the world's largest oil platforms. Capable of drawing 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor, Atlantis is located only 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana, in waters nearly 2,000 feet deeper than BP drilled at Deepwater Horizon. According to congressional documents, the platform lacks required engineering certification for as much as 90 percent of its subsea components – a flaw that internal BP documents reveal could lead to "catastrophic" errors. In a May 19th letter to Salazar, 26 congressmen called for the rig to be shut down immediately. "We are very concerned," they wrote, "that the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon could foreshadow an accident at BP Atlantis."

Photo courtesy of al.com