Three Voices Papers for This Special Issue of New Solutions —Environmental Justice in the U.S. Gulf Coast Region

The U.S. states along the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida) have often been described as America’s Energy Colony. This region is festooned with polluting industries, storage and waste disposal sites for toxic substances, and a history of generally lax approaches to environmental public health and enforcement of regulations. This issue of New Solutions includes three interviews of groups and individuals who work for environmental justice in the Gulf Coast region. The interviewees provide key insights into the diverse cultural texture and social fabric of the Gulf. Their range of Gulf locales and population groups embody different styles of engagement and different relationships to organizing, disseminating health and environmental risk information, and advocating for social and environmental justice. As members of a Citizen Science Network, they collaborated intensively for five years under the umbrella structure of the Gulf Coast Health Alliance: Health Risks Related to the Macondo Spill (GC-HARMS) project. The short profiles below provide a thumbnail of the major themes and focus areas elaborated in each interview—actually more of an extended conversation among comrades and friends—from which these themes emerged.

Marylee Orr (Executive & Founding Director) and her son, Michael Orr (Communications Director), of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) recall the massive trauma among fishing families and oil workers (on platforms, hauling cargo, and serving in the Vessels of Opportunity program) alike caused by the Deep Water Horizon (DWH) spill: the state/federal closures of fishing grounds and the moratorium on oil exploration and production activity during the clean-up efforts. They recount the history of their organization’s vision and growth, their role in regional environmental justice efforts, and outline how they developed an approach to rapid response community empowerment based on colearning, respect, consensus, and action—a vision that parallels the work of Paulo Freire and the practice values of community-based participatory research. They also advise us to visit the collaborative seafood sampling site map and toxicology primer they built and archived during GC-HARMS—visit http://gcharms.leanweb.org/seafood-sampling-map/.

GC-HARMS MacArthur Prize-winning Community Scientist Wilma Subra (New Iberia, Louisiana) chronicles the arc of her career as a public health advocate informing communities of their active and potential risks in a region where oil production infrastructure, petrochemical refining and production plants, and hazardous waste storage and treatment facilities are as common as live oaks and red fish. A pioneer in the growing field of Do-It-Yourself Citizen Science, Wilma also shares her views on community engagement, in general, and how citizen scientists were an essential component in the response to the DWH oil rig explosion and spill.

Thomas Dardar, Principal Chief of the United Houma Nation (Houma, Louisiana), explores tribal efforts to cope with outcomes of industrial practices and climate change such as land loss and deterioration of natural marshlands while maintaining and perpetuating traditional values based on multigenerational ties to their land base and the bayous and estuarial waters they fish. Dardar attended the COP 21 (Conference of the Parties) climate conference in Paris (2015) to advocate for indigenous peoples disproportionately affected by climate change impacts.

The next issue of New Solutions will continue this in-depth look at environmental justice activists in the Deep South featuring interviews with the Reverend James Black and his daughter, Joi Black-Tate (Center for Environmental & Economic Justice, Biloxi, Mississippi), Sharon and David Gauthe (Bayou Interfaith Shared Community Organizing, Thibodaux, Louisiana), and Dustin Nguyen (Vietnamese-American Community hub partner, Gulfport-Biloxi-D’Iberville, Mississippi). These individuals represent communities and organizations that participated in the GC-HARMS project and have long been engaged in efforts to secure environmental and social justice.

These interviews, which will comprise the Voices section for this and the next issue of New Solutions, are dedicated to all the brave and unsinkable organizations and individuals who stepped up to exercise their civil right to struggle for change and redress, demanding a commitment to environmental public health in the region, transparency throughout the abatement action decision-making process and subsequent litigation, authentic dialogue—minus the usual hierarchies and obfuscating jargon—and a complete, unvarnished truth-telling in the wake of the horrific DWH BP oil rig explosion, fire, and consequent hemorrhage of crude oil into Gulf waters. And of course, to the eleven workers killed outright in the fire, and all those who were maimed, injured, whose lives and psyches were damaged, whose livelihoods were, at best, interrupted, and at worst, erased in the wake of this painful catastrophe. We will not forget you.