A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [31]
A New Orleans businessman who loves the bayou and loves his fishing tells me, “We got hit with the country’s worst natural disaster; now we’re getting hit with the worst man-made disaster. We were finally getting past the Katrina aftermath and the stigma, with the Saints winning the Super Bowl, and many businesses finding the stimulus dollars well spent.” He tells me, “We just had this great glow going. And now it’s just starting to dawn on folks what this oil might mean. It’s the rest of my lifetime, anyway.”
He says that people are “hugely frightened” of both the disaster itself and the media’s ability to exacerbate the situation.
“This is the worst possible thing that could happen to the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” says a man in the tourism business. “It could kill family tourism. That’s our livelihood.”
The person I’m staying with overnight in New Orleans says, “Everyone’s deeply vested in the enjoyment and all the livelihoods and businesses that have been made. This is an outdoor lover’s paradise. Everything revolves around seafood, wild food, the marshes, the coast. I mean, people are very scared that it will change a way of life. You’ve got to get outside this city, go down to those areas. You’ve got to feel that.”
And so, I do.
I am now bouncing around the southern Louisiana delta region, through the mixture of poverty and affluence (mostly poverty) and the many visible reminders of Katrina. People who’d been rebounding post-Katrina now feel truly scared that their economy and their future are ruined forever. It’s quietly horrifying.
Seeing families in small boats, local people crabbing in the canals, and the enormous pride with which people rebuilt waterside fishing retreats that Katrina had wholly swept away, I feel many connections between the people here and my own loves.
For all its self-image as the laid-back land of the Big Easy, the Gulf Coast of Louisiana is a brutal and brutalized place. The work hard, the options few, the stakes high, the damage and the scars deep.
Docked near Shell Beach lies a red-hulled trawler named Blessed Assurance. These communities could always depend on the marshes and waters and fishes and shellfish, no matter what. But now, that blessed assurance is suspended indefinitely. Human dignity is its own justification, and many people here, citizens of our imperfectly united country, feel that they may have just lost theirs.
“I’d hate to think that the hurricane didn’t kill me and an oil spill did,” says the sixty-eight-year-old survivor who’d rebuilt his century-old bait-and-fuel business from scratch after Katrina utterly destroyed it. Says his forty-one-year-old son, “This marsh is going to be like a big sponge, soaking up the oil. It’s going to be bad.” Captain Doogie Robin, eighty-four, oysterman, says, “Katrina really hit us hard. And this here, I think this is going to finish us now. I think this will wipe us off the map.” A seafood dealer in Buras, Louisiana, says, “When you kill that food chain, nothing’s going to come back to this area.” A woman in Hopedale says, “If it gets in the marsh, it could be a year, it could be two years, it could be ten years.” She adds, “It all depends on what happens.”
What happens: By the first week of May, fishing is suddenly a thing of the past in 6,800 square miles of federal waters. More people whose lives depend on fishing realize they’re out of work. Just like that. And the effects ripple further. A restaurant owner catering to fishermen worries, “How is a fisherman going to be able to afford to eat if he doesn’t have a job?”
Meanwhile, the spokesman for the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board is working to—y’know—promote Louisiana seafood, assuring the public that Louisiana seafood remains available and safe. In 2008, the federal government had estimated the annual volume and value of Gulf-caught fish and shellfish at 1.3 billion pounds, worth $661 million. “We should be fine unless