Three More 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 by the Environmental Justice community as America’s Energy Colony. This region is crammed with polluting industries, toxic sites, semi-compliant plants, and refineries. The local governments and economic planning in the region have a history of ignoring inequities in health and income, siting major polluters in or closely proximate to minority communities, and they provide generally lax approaches to environmental public health and enforcement of existing regulations. As Part 2 of the special issue, “BP Oil Spill and Community Sustainability” this issue of New Solutions includes three additional interviews of groups and individuals who work for expanding the scope of access to healthcare, diminishing health disparities, and advocate for Environmental (and Climate) Justice in the Gulf Coast region. The interviewees provide a window into the diverse cultural and social dynamic overarching the Gulf. Their styles of engagement and education are rooted in the communities they serve but are also outward looking, in terms of how they view the importance of network connectivity and the shared burden of Cumulative Risk ¹ among environmental justice communities along the Gulf. As members of a Citizen Science Network and Community Health Assessment team they collaborated closely from 2011 to 2016 as community hub coordinators in the Gulf Coast Health Alliance: Health Risks related to the Macondo Spill (GC-HARMS) Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill study. ² They brought a wealth of expertise in grassroots management, organizing and networking, as well as experience in the region’s historic struggles for social justice, civil rights, and greater public environmental awareness coupled with a proactive approach to environmental regulations that incorporates the Precautionary Principle. ³ And they expertly schooled the team of researchers in how to deliver complex scientific concepts and findings in plain, jargon-free speech. In their own words, they came away with a new commitment to Community-Based Participatory Research(CBPR), particularly the research practice principles of transparency, mutuality, trust as an earned relationship, cocreation of knowledge, and respect. The short profiles below provide a thumbnail of the major themes and focus areas elaborated in each interview, and some of the context from which these themes emerge.

Sharon and David Gauthe of Bayou Interfaith Shared Community Organizing (BISCO) in Thibodaux, Louisiana, served as a risk communication and information hub for residents of Terrebonne, Lafourche, and Jefferson Parishes during the GC-HARMS project. Their outreach and education methodology is a unique blend of grassroots organizing and social work practice. They helped the research team develop seafood consumption risk messages for use at the grassroots level and convened meetings that gave local and regional public health officials an opportunity to talk directly to GC-HARMS science and outreach personnel about communicating the project risk message to local communities. For more information, visit BISCO at: http://bisco-la.org/home/about_bisco.

Dustin Nguyen serves Vietnamese-Americans living in many communities along the Mississippi coast. Mr. Nguyen is an insurance professional who, in addition to offering translation services for monolingual Vietnamese-speaking clients, often serves as a navigator for members of his community attempting to access healthcare, interpret regulations and enrollment protocols related to the Affordable Care Act, or purchase policies that suit their needs. Mr. Nguyen organized and maintained a cohort during his community’s longitudinal health assessment. In this interview, Mr. Nguyen describes the effects of the DWH disaster on Vietnamese-American fishing communities, the positive impacts of the Affordable Care Act on his community and elaborates on how this new healthcare system and participation in the GC-HARMS community health assessment has transformed access and health awareness among Vietnamese-American citizens on the Mississippi Gulf coast.

During GC-HARMS, the Center for Environmental & Economic Justice (CEEJ) managed and maintained a community health assessment cohort, organized a fishermen recruitment and training session, and convened a succession of community forums disseminating seafood consumption risk guidelines developed during the research. In this interview, The Reverend James Black (Founder and Director) and Joi Black-Tate (GC-HARMS hub coordinator) describe the historical roots of the CEEJ, the oldest continuously existing 501(c)(3) minority-led social justice organization in the area (with the exception of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Through the lens of different generational perspectives, they chronicle the evolution of CEEJ (1989) from its origins in the spirituality of the civil rights struggle of African-Americans in the Deep South to more recent Environmental Justice campaigns, such as the Agent Orange dump at the Gulfport, Mississippi, Seabee Base, gasoline and solvent plume seepage from Keesler Air Force Base, the area’s devastation during Hurricane Katrina, the DWH oil spill disaster, and the overarching problem of climate change. Finally, they recount their experiences with the impacts of the DWH disaster on their community, their interactions with researchers, and offer opinions on the CBPR research approach, and the process of crafting and delivering a risk message that truly suited the needs of their community. For additional information on CEEJ, please visit: http://www.centerforenvironmental.org/about.html.

The interviews which comprise this Voices section 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.

(Note to readers: The preceding paragraph was included in New Solutions Volume 28(3), Part 1 of this special issue. This statement of dedication is our [the community and university teams that collaborated on the GC-HARMS project] strong feeling—and we can think of no better way to express our feelings about the impacts of the DWH disaster and our commitment to an environmentally safer future for our Gulf.)