Gulf Coast Call To Arms

AN UNREASONABLE WOMAN: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas, by Diane Wilson, Chelsea Green River Publishing, 2005, 391 pages, $27.50 hardback (ISBN 1-931498-88-1), $18 paperback (ISBN: 1-933392-27-4)

The topography of the Gulf Coast is primarily flat. When you're lucky enough to fly over the region from Texas to Mississippi, the expanse of coastal marshes is amazing. It is sparse and desolate, yet gorgeous. Occasionally the mudflats and coastal grasses are broken up by a river, a bay, a city, or a massive refinery.

Last year, the overactive hurricane season changed this landscape. Marshes have been scrubbed bare. Cities and towns have been devastated. Four of the U.S.'s top 10 commercial fishing ports shut down as Katrina and Rita wreaked havoc on the docks, icehouses, and boats necessary for the shrimp, crab, and oyster industries. But the seafood is still there, and fishermen will get back after it as soon as the boats are back in the water and the ports are rebuilt.

It's this beauty and bounty of the Gulf Coast that greeted chemical and manufacturing companies in the 1940s and '50s, drawn to the region by cheap natural gas, oil, and sulfur as resources to refine and sell or to use as feedstocks. This intrusion, a slower version of a hurricane, came with few defenders. There were, however, plenty of "good-old-boy politicos" willing to sell vast plots of former plantation land and help pave the way for whatever process DuPont, Formosan, or Union Carbide thought would be the most lucrative.

Enter Diane Wilson. A shrimper from Texas, she decided to fight to protect her "little corner" of the Gulf Coast. She's not a woman you would expect to find on the Gulf, but rather in Humboldt, Calif.; Eugene, Ore.; or maybe Boulder, Colo.-places where a zeal for protecting the environment is embraced. Those are places where Wilson's hunger strike and an attempt to sink her shrimp boat in the outfall of the Formosan plant she was battling would have won her accolades and committed activist followers.

But not in Seadrift, Texas. The Gulf Coast is hard on those who care about such things, as Wilson details in her amazing book "An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas." The book is an honest portrayal of the dance that occurs when passion engages power, and continues as compromise tempers conviction.

Within this sea of the chemical industry and its unquestioning supporters at all levels, Wilson surrounds herself with a collection of both noble and flawed supporting players: those who urge her to action, and those who caution restraint in her fight against pollution. One of those mentioned in esteemed terms is Willie Fontenot, a longtime activist and organizer. Fontenot spent the majority of his career with the Louisiana attorney general's office in a role allowing him to help communities throughout Louisiana engaged in fights similar to Wilson's. He has amassed an astounding body of work for an activist, which ultimately resulted in the loss of his job a few months shy of full retirement. His story serves as a cautionary tale.

Wilson crosses the line time and again in her fight. Uncovering political shenanigans, purported industry lies, and apparent government agency incompetence, Wilson travels a path challenging the status quo. Thank God she does, because in many other little corners of the coast, the status quo stinks. In places like Lake Charles and St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana, and in Port Arthur, Texas, pollution and problems from chemical companies and the aftermath of the hurricanes are the same as those exposed by Wilson in Seadrift. For these communities, while corporate press releases tout emissions reductions, accidental releases and emergency gas-flaring represent an ongoing and health-affecting fact of life.

Some readers may assert that air pollution emissions have decreased in the past 20 years. I would counter that you should spend a week in any of these communities and see how industrywide emissions reduction feels to you. Of course, I wouldn't suggest a visit to St. Bernard Parish just yet. In addition to the slow release of pollution from the Murphy Oil refinery over the years, in the wake of Katrina the flooded Murphy facility delivered 1.05 million gal of oil soup to local residents.

This type of devastation should come as no surprise, as the Gulf Coast is the nation's "energy-sacrifice zone." Exploration and drilling on land, in marshes, in shallow waters, and along the deeper continental shelf have been encouraged throughout the majority of the Gulf. Tax breaks and other incentives have encouraged oil production, but little federal or corporate assistance has been given to communities to develop ways to mitigate the impacts.

Louisiana's wetlands are perhaps the hardest hit. Spawning ground for the most productive fisheries in the lower 48 states, Louisiana's marshes also are the cultural spawning ground for much of what makes Louisiana unique: the Cajun way of life. Oil development in the marshes was first seen as another way of harvesting the Gulf Coast's bounty of resources, a way that would pay folks for a while. Then, when energy profits went flat and oil production idled, workers would be released back to living off the land as they had for generations. But as with most codependent relationships, it hasn't been a healthy one.

As the oil companies dredged canals through the marshes, saltwater followed close behind. Pushed by tides through the marsh, saltwater intrusion killed off and weakened marsh grasses. Canals also inhibited the distribution of sediments that comes with the regular flooding a healthy coastal wetland needs.

Wetlands aren't just critical habitat for fish; they're also critical defenses for people. New Orleanians have taken to calling their wetlands "horizontal levees" for the role they can play in absorbing storm surges that accompany hurricanes. For every 2 to 6 miles of healthy wetlands that a storm surge passes over, it drops in height by 1 foot. Restore the coastal marshes of southern Louisiana, and hurricanes aren't as challenging to defend against.

Unfortunately, when Katrina and Rita hammered the coast, they didn't find healthy wetlands. The two storms may have been the death blow for as much as 120 sq miles of coastal marshes that had been just hanging on, waiting for the resources to enact already-developed plans to save them. Those plans bring us right back to oil.

Coastal restoration plans currently hinge on Louisiana securing a share of the federal revenues that are generated by oil and gas activity in federal waters off the state's shore. The premise is, give the state a 50% share of that money, and it will have the financial resources to reconnect the natural processes that were fouled up, in part, by the petrochemical industry.

This revenue share is a simple solution that the Louisiana congressional delegation has been unable to pass. Intent on currying favor with the oil industry, the bills filed in Congress by Louisiana politicians to win this funding have included provisions to entice other states to jump into the oil and gas game to get a similar cut of the revenues. So instead of marshaling national sympathy for our hurricane tragedy to fix our marshes, these leaders pick fights with California, Florida, and national environmental groups.

This inability to challenge corporate interests to address significant environmental problems amounts to business as usual on the Gulf Coast and provides Wilson the outrage to fuel her fight. While she calls her book, "An Unreasonable Woman," readers may find her actions justifiable in the face of what is "unreasonable leadership." I hope that reasonable people read Wilson's book and then pick up a phone or a pen to assist her fight however they can.

Aaron Viles is campaign director for the nonprofit Gulf Restoration Network, a group of individuals and local, regional, and national groups committed to protecting and restoring the natural resources of the Gulf region.