The General is Back at the Front

New Orleans’ battalion of online revolutionaries convened for the eighth annual Rising Tide event at Xavier University on Saturday with a surprisingly traditional hero headlining as keynote speaker. United States Army three-star General Russel Honoré, who was thrust into the vacuum of leadership to establish order out of chaos after Hurricane Katrina, allied with the blogging community.

At the Superdome, the general had commanded weapons be lowered and infants be lifted from the arms of struggling mothers, quickly transforming an enforcement operation into a humanitarian mission. Progress was finally made with the addition of strong leadership.

At Rising Tide last weekend, Gen. Honoré could easily have been mistaken for a conventioneer, dressed in a plain black business suit and patriotic necktie. But standing beneath a projection of the famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River, the bloggers saw a clear resemblance.

During the Revolutionary War, soldiers didn’t have proper weapons, uniforms or boats. (Presumably, bloggers have only the weapons of words.) Most of Washington’s troops were AWOL and that general crossed the Delaware in a tiny boat from TOPS program, Honoré said. (TOPS stands for “take other people’s stuff” – a disaster tactic that was adopted once more when the levees broke.)

While touting his new book, “Leadership in the New Normal,” the now retired general described how bloggers can learn from the Katrina experience, applying those lessons to the current fight to preserve safe water, safe air and safe food. Environmental justice is his new battle cry.

The general does not object to business, including tourism, but “if you break it, clean it up.”

Lobbyists changed the language of the Clean Water Act so now the EPA literally has to be invited into the state.

Louisiana is so business- friendly, our government allows industry to self-regulate, he said. In the old plantation system, owners lived on the land being cultivated. Now, companies despoiling the land and water are not even based in the United States, he added.

“If the oil and gas business is doing so much for the state of Louisiana, why are we the poorest in the union?” he demanded. (Filmmaker Spike Lee raised the same question.) Oil that contaminates the Gulf of Mexico will ultimately destroy our seafood, the general said. Chefs must begin to understand that.

“This fight for equity is a war you can win because you are on the right side,” the general told the rapt audience.

 “Every generation has something big to do,” Honoré said. “Do you want South American shrimp? Chinese crawfish?” The crowd’s anwer was a resounding “no.”

“This is our war. This is what this generation has to do.”

Get involved in environmental and social justice, he told the audience. Bloggers are the underground revolutionaries, the community you don’t see.

“What’s going to make a difference are citizens with a common purpose. We can do better and what’s going to cause that to happen is leadership.”

When questions were opened to the attendees, a blogger stepped to the microphone. Run for governor, he pleaded.

Farmers and fisherman along the Mississippi exchange notes

By Amy Wold, The Advocate

They may speak differently, dress differently and make their living off the land in different ways, but the Barnyard to Boatyard Conservation Exchange gave farmers in South Dakota and fishermen in south Louisiana a chance to see just how connected they are

A contingent of South Dakota farmers came to south Louisiana in July to learn about issues Louisiana faces, from the annual dead zone of low oxygen off the coast to coastal land loss. Then in early August, fishermen from south Louisiana traveled to South Dakota, where farmers shared their conservation techniques and led tours of dairy farms and ethanol plants.

The Barnyard to Boatyard exchange is the brainchild of Tim Kizer, private lands field representative with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, which sponsors the program. Kizer also is an entrepreneur from Arkansas who has spent time hunting and fishing on both ends of the Mississippi River.

While bird hunting in South Dakota last year, he said, he witnessed the drought the state was enduring. A week later, he was in Louisiana fishing for red fish.

“It dawned on me that people at both ends really have no idea how connected they are,” Kizer said. “We just need to learn more about not only how ecologically connected they are but also politically connected.”

For instance, with the battle going on over the Farm Bill in Washington D.C., many Louisiana fishermen didn’t realize how the legislation impacts them.

“People in coastal Louisiana don’t understand how critical that fight is to them,” Kizer said.

Parts of the Farm Bill touch on efforts to reduce nutrient load in waters that drain into the Mississippi River and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. These nutrients — much of it from fertilizer — lead to the formation of the low-oxygen “dead zone.”

Although some of the participants were eager to get involved in the Barnyard to Boatyard exchange, others weren’t so sure what they were getting into.

“At the time, I wasn’t all that interested in going up there. I like to stay here and fish,” said Capt. Howard Cuevas, owner of Xspecktations Coastal Charters out of Dulac and Cocodrie. Once he got to South Dakota, however, he learned about the issues the farmers were facing, including having too much sediment building up behind dams along the Missouri River.

“They’ve got just the opposite of what we have going on down here,” Cuevas said, referring to the need for sediment in Louisiana marshes.

The coastal land loss in Louisiana was one of the things the Louisiana group wanted to talk to the upriver participants who visited Cocodrie in July.

“I’ve been making my living off the land for 33 years,” said Capt. Ryan Lambert, owner of Cajun Fishing Adventures in Buras. “And we’re losing it so fast.”

Lambert, an outspoken advocate for coastal restoration, said the exchange was an education for both groups.

“If we managed our health care system the way we manage the river system, we’d all have measles and small pox,” he said.

Lambert said he was impressed with the no-tillage work farmers are using to leave more ground cover to prevent erosion and the precise methods some farmers are using to strategically place fertilizer to minimize any nutrients running off into water bodies. Nutrients from farms, cities and other sources flow into the Mississippi River and lead to the annual formation of a low-oxygen zone off the coast every summer.

“It will get better and better,” he said about improvements in farming techniques designed to reduce impact on the environment.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported on Aug. 27 that conservation efforts in the lower Mississippi River basin reduced sediment loss by 35 percent, nitrogen loss by 21 percent and phosphorous by 52 percent. Nitrogen and phosphorous are what feed the annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico every summer. Although the report covers farmland in Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee, it’s the kind of results the South Dakota farmers spoke about as well.

Farmers who participated in the exchange said they learned a lot about the issues facing Louisiana as well.

“First off, the hospitality was second to none,” said Walt Bones, a former South Dakota secretary of agriculture who is a fourth-generation family farmer in that state.

Bones decided to participate in the exchange because he wanted to learn more about what was going on in Louisiana, but he had some reservations.

“I also kind of went down there a little defensive,” he said, because agriculture is often singled out as the cause of the dead zone. “I wasn’t sure what to expect.”

He was intrigued by what he called the “hypoxic paradox” of having a dead zone, but then going out with the fishermen and catching great fish.

The participants and Kizer said they want the exchange to be a yearly event to connect people on both ends of the river not only for education but for taking action on issues that impact both groups.

“Our end goal is to create lifelong friends among these people,” Kizer said. “We want a whole new kind of activism.”

It appears to have worked. Lambert is making plans to return to South Dakota to do some pheasant hunting with friends he made up there.

Ways to save the Gulf Coast

Concrete ways to save the Gulf Coast: Kindra Arnesen

Published: Wednesday, April 20, 2011, 6:15 AM

 By Contributing Op-Ed columnist 

MICHAEL DeMOCKER / THE TIMES-PICAYUNEClint Dauphinet of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries turns a shovel of oiled sand Tuesday, April 19, from just beneath the surface on a sand spit island near South Pass to show that oil remains in coastal marshes one year after the BP oil spill.

I've lived my whole life down in the bayou. I've shucked oysters since I was a teenager, and now I'm proud to be a fisherman's wife with two beautiful children. I wouldn't live anywhere else. But our lives got turned upside down the day the BP well blew a year ago, and they've never been the same since.

Our community has suffered greatly over the past year. Many of our fishermen worked on the oil spill cleanup and got sick from the toxic fumes of the oil and chemical dispersants. Our livelihoods are threatened by oil in the water that still washes in as tar balls and oil mats off our shores. Some of our marshes remain heavily oiled, and it's not clear when they will ever be clean again.

So you would think that a year after the greatest oil disaster in American history, our political leaders would have jumped into action to pass laws to keep anything like this from happening again. Sadly, the answer is no. In fact, our politicians seem more concerned about shutting down the government than they do about helping the very people who elected them into office.

So last week, I went to Washington to talk to my congressional delegation about passing legislation that enacts recommendations of the presidential oil commission, protects us from future disasters and rebuilds our rapidly eroding coastline.

We need to create an independent offshore safety authority to increase the role of science to determine which areas we need to protect from drilling and improve our oil spill response plans, which are painfully inadequate. And most of all, we need to take immediate action to make sure the blowout preventers and equipment on our oil rigs are safe and work as designed.

Congress owes it to all of us to make sure the industry is held accountable for future oil spills. Currently, oil spill polluters are only required to cover $75 million in damages resulting from an oil spill. That's less than 1 percent of BP's $14 billion profit in 2009. The $75 million liability cap doesn't even come close to the true cost of these catastrophes.

Offshore oil drilling is a dirty, dangerous business. But the current laws on the books simply don't hold companies responsible for the risks they are taking while they make bigger profits every year.

My brother worked in the oil fields, and many people I know closely do, too. They deserve better protections from our political leaders so a blowout never again puts our livelihoods at risk.

We along the Gulf have suffered the most from this political indifference. Our lawmakers need to place a higher value on the safety of our community and the survival of our threatened fisheries along the Gulf coast.

After all, we provide jobs for our community and help feed the people of this country. We demand that our lawmakers make sure we can continue to do so.

Kindra Arnesen, a Venice native, will be featured in a film produced by the Natural Resources Defense Council called "Stories from the Gulf." It will premiere on the Discovery Channel's "Planet Green" on Saturday at 1:30 p.m.

© 2011 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

The Gulf is important to us all

I've been reading about the long-term environmental effects of the BP spill. Y'all realize we're all affected by this disaster, right? You like shrimp in yo' gumbo? Enjoy a dozen raw oysters? I read somewhere they found oil in crabs. So far, no known effects on the fish because they could swim away, but nobody knows for sure.

Let's not forget the marshes and the impact of the oil floating up against the grasses. Marshes slow the speed of hurricanes. Scientists are studying the bird population, in particular, the brown pelican, which had just come off the endangered species list.

Every year, the average amount of coastal land lost in Louisiana is four times the blast area of the Hiroshima bomb, said Alexander Kolker, an adjunct professor and research scientist at Tulane University. Ninety percent of U.S. coastal wetland loss has been in Louisiana, home of fisheries and thousands of migrating birds.

Beyond the immediate BP oil disaster, the long-term history of impact to Louisiana’s coastal zone is “turning out to be the more important story,” said Kolker, who teaches Earth and Environmental Sciences. This history includes previous oil spills, natural hydrocarbon seeps and a landscape that loses nearly 24 square miles of land every year.

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