"Spill" reinforces oil bad will for American Indians

[G_j]

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9FP63H02.htm

Spill reinforces oil bad will for American Indians

By CAIN BURDEAU

POINTE-AU-CHIEN, Louisiana

Like many American Indians on the bayou, Emary Billiot blames oil companies for ruining his ancestral marsh over the decades. Still, he's always been able to fish -- but now even that is not a certainty.
<snip>

Since the 1930s, oil and natural gas companies dug about 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) of canals, straight as Arizona highways, through the oak and cypress forests, black mangroves, bird rushes and golden marshes. If lined up in a row, the canals would stretch nearly halfway around the world.

They funneled salt water into the marshes, killing trees and grass and hastening erosion. Some scientists say drilling caused half of Louisiana's land loss, or about 1,000 square miles (2,590 square kilometers).

"If you see pictures from the sky, how many haphazard cuts were made in the land, it blows your mind," said Patty Ferguson, a member of the Pointe-Au-Chien tribe. "We weren't just fishermen. We raised crops, we had wells. We can't anymore because of the salt water intrusion."

As companies intensified their search for petroleum in the 20th century, communities where the Choctaw, Chitimacha, Houma, Attakapas and Biloxi tribes married Europeans in the 1800s have seen their way of life disappear.

"This is not a two-week story, but a hundred-year story," said Michael Dardar, historian with the United Houma Nation tribe. "Coastal erosion, land loss and more vulnerability to hurricanes and flooding all trace back to this century of unchecked economic development."

<snip>

[Canuckistanian]

1. What was the reason for all those canals?

Are they just for transportation?

[G_j]

2. Petrolium exploration, and ship traffic

according to this article

http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/gone-with-wetlands/

The Big Uneasy
Gone With the Water

Written by Joel K. Bourne, Jr.
Republished from the pages of National Geographic magazine
<snip>

A cocktail of natural and human factors is putting the coast under. Delta soils naturally compact and sink over time, eventually giving way to open water unless fresh layers of sediment offset the subsidence. The Mississippi's spring floods once maintained that balance, but the annual deluges were often disastrous. After a devastating flood in 1927, levees were raised along the river and lined with concrete, effectively funneling the marsh-building sediments to the deep waters of the Gulf. Since the 1950s engineers have also cut more than 8,000 miles (12,875 kilometers) of canals through the marsh for petroleum exploration and ship traffic. These new ditches sliced the wetlands into a giant jigsaw puzzle, increasing erosion and allowing lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate brackish and freshwater marshes.

(interesting article, more:)

<snip>
The state's first oil well was punched in south Louisiana in 1901, and the world's first offshore rig went into operation in the Gulf of Mexico in 1947. During the boom years in the early 1970s, fully half of the state's budget was derived from petroleum revenues. Though much of the production has moved into deeper waters, oil and gas wells remain a fixture of the coast, as ubiquitous as shrimp boats and brown pelicans.

The deep offshore wells now account for nearly a third of all domestic oil production, while Louisiana's Offshore Oil Port, a series of platforms anchored 18 miles (29 kilometers) offshore, unloads a nonstop line of supertankers that deliver up to 15 percent of the nation's foreign oil. Most of that black gold comes ashore via a maze of pipelines buried in the Louisiana muck. Numerous refineries, the nation's largest natural gas pipeline hub, even the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are all protected from hurricanes and storm surge by Louisiana's vanishing marsh.

You can smell the petrodollars burning at Port Fourchon, the offshore oil industry's sprawling home port on the central Louisiana coast. Brawny helicopters shuttle 6,000 workers to the rigs from here each week, while hundreds of supply boats deliver everything from toilet paper to drinking water to drilling lube. A thousand trucks a day keep the port humming around the clock, yet Louisiana 1, the two-lane highway that connects it to the world, seems to flood every other high tide. During storms the port becomes an island, which is why port officials like Davie Breaux are clamoring for the state to build a 17-mile-long (27.4-kilometer-long) elevated highway to the port. It's also why Breaux thinks spending 14 billion dollars to save the coast would be a bargain.

"We'll go to war and spend billions of dollars to protect oil and gas interests overseas," Breaux says as he drives his truck past platform anchors the size of two-story houses. "But here at home?" He shrugs. "Where else you gonna drill? Not California. Not Florida. Not in ANWR.

In Louisiana. I'm third generation in the oil field. We're not afraid of the industry. We just want the infrastructure to handle it."

<snip>

[G_j]

3. k..

[Canuckistanian]

4. Thanks for the link

I was curious and went to look at that region in Google Earth. it was like a gigantic maze of cuts in the earth.

You can't expect that kind of fucking around with a complex system NOT to be harmful.

[G_j]

5. imagine what this was like before 1950

[pitohui]

7. good information in this article

We'll go to war and spend billions of dollars to protect oil and gas interests overseas," Breaux says as he drives his truck past platform anchors the size of two-story houses. "But here at home?" He shrugs. "Where else you gonna drill? Not California. Not Florida. Not in ANWR.

In Louisiana. I'm third generation in the oil field. We're not afraid of the industry. We just want the infrastructure to handle it."

this state is happy to provide the fuel that keeps this country running strong, but our country hasn't been happy to provide us much in the way of support in return

people in louisiana don't hate the oil industry, they want to find a way to supply the oil AND have our own lifestyle (seafood, fishing, etc)

there has always needed to be give and take, unfortunately seems like we're willing to give and the other 49 states are happy to take and we're treated as a colony to be mined carelessly, the attitude shown toward us, i just don't know

i don't want to think ill of the rest of our nation but sometimes i wonder if you guys care at all that we're united states citizens same as you up there in any northern or western state, do you know that we too are human beings and not just cattle to be cooked?

[G_j]

8. thank you

compelling post

[G_j]

6. Oil threatens French-speaking Cajuns, native Choctaw

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100520/ts_alt_afp/usblastoilenergypollutionculturecajun

Oil threatens French-speaking Cajuns, native Choctaw

by Clement Sabourin Clement Sabourin – Thu May 20, 10:00 am ET

MONTEGUT, Louisiana (AFP) – The encroaching Gulf of Mexico oil spill may have sounded the death knell for the vanishing cultures of the last French-speaking Cajun communities and Louisiana native Americans.

Here in the deep Louisiana south, the Cajun people and the French-speaking Choctaw Indians can do nothing but maintain an anxious vigil, angrily accusing US authorities of abandoning them to their fate.

Since the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig unleashed a huge oil leak in the Gulf, no barriers have been erected to protect their home on a speck of land off the Louisiana coast called Isle de Jean Charles.
For two weeks, Clifton Hendon has been unable to go out to sea to harvest the oyster beds -- his only source of income.

Fishing has been banned in the area in the wake of the deepsea oil spill that British energy giant BP is still struggling to contain, nearly a month after the rig it leased from Transocean sank.
"I've lost hundreds of dollars," sighed the 63-year-old oysterman, one of the 80 or so last remaining French Indians, as they call themselves, living on Isle de Jean Charles.

His small, flat-bottomed boat lay idle, moored on the canal alongside the mobile home where he has lived since Hurricane Katrina destroyed his house in 2005. US officials have promised him a new home. But so far nothing.

"They have abandoned us," he said with an air of resignation.

..more..

[Tsiyu]

9. You know what really pisses me off?

When historians and anthropologists try to maintain that Native Americans weren't great environmentalists, either, and that they would have trashed this land too.

WTF?

They were here for tens of thousands of years and it was a paradise teeming with old growth forest and wildlife and it was clean.

a few hundred years later and it's a cesspool.

like native Americans would have done this kind of destruction to this land? no fucking way.

And this "Guilty conscience" attribution of environmental destructiveness to Native Americans is not new. In 1978, in a physical anthropology class at GSU, a professor tried to embarrass me the very first day of lectures by claiming this bullshit.

it sickens me...the whole mess

[G_j]

11. like Reagan's "trees polute too!" statement

complete nonsense

[Tsiyu]

12. exactly

this has been going on since europeans arrived

look at the reasons we had to have federally protected parkland

they cut down so much old growth forest back in the day, wiped out entire ecosystems without a thought extracting gold, copper, coal, damming rivers, fur-trapping...people have no idea

and it just goes on and on and on

nature isn't your sustainer, she's your ATM

like none of us actually lives here.

[voteearlyvoteoften]

10. "A hundred year story"

Civilization has wreaked havoc with the environment for 100 years. How long until civilization gets it and begins to think long term?