After meeting with Speed, I continue down Claiborne, heading to what’s left of the Lower Ninth Ward. Six years post-Katrina, the neighborhood has yet to recover. It’s eerie; there are a few houses that have been rebuilt on stilts, but the vast majority of the area is just overrun by vegetation.

On nearly ever telephone pole there are adverts for services that say, “WE CUT TALL GRASS.” The geography of the place is important to note – it’s way below sea level – flanked by levees and canals. The neighborhood is your standard grid layout, square blocks with parallel streets. Now imagine removing 80% of the houses, with the rest being a mix of decrepit and destroyed and new. The streets aren’t straight anymore, encroached upon by dirt and grass.

Here, derelict houses are marked with the famous Katrina X: a simple quadrant system of spray paint on the front door. If the X only has a single line, it means a hasty search. The north quadrant of the X has the date of the search, the east marks notations for hazardous chemicals or dead animals, the south is for body count (human), and the west is initialed by the search team.

It’s insane to be looking at this. Some of the dates are from November! That’s how long it took to deal with the search. On the doors where there are body counts, neighbors often spray paint epitaphs on the house, wishing the fallen well into the next world.

I walk into a dilapidated building that looks to be some sort of old automotive garage. Being a person of poetic sensibility, I’m constantly seeing images that serve as metaphor.

Above my head, the second floor of the building is slowly disintegrating. Large holes have formed and in one, a half destroyed office chair is dangling through, ready to fall at any moment, like a water drop on the end of an icicle. Animals have been living here – feral cats, rats, and insects. Lots of insects.

In another house, furniture is piled in rotting heaps, no doubt from floating in the flood. When the waters receded, they were left where they were, and thus, everything is scattered.

Broken and torn children’s toys scatter the front lawns. Cement is covered with dirt and oil residue.

I’m overwhelmed – which has been the constant feeling for weeks. I’m texting friends about what I’m seeing because I can’t handle seeing this by myself. But no one is responding. It’s fitting given what transpired here.

Editor’s note: Stiv Wilson has been reporting from the Gulf and New Orleans this summer. To learn more, read his investigations of the oil spill and catch the first installment of “Her Name Is Katrina.”

The post Her Name Is Katrina, Part Two: The Lower Ninth Ward appeared first on EcoSalon.

It’s our last day in NOLA (New Orleans, Louisiana – as the locals call it), and my schedule is free. After being on the go-go-go traveling all over the region and processing some of the hardest emotions I’ve ever felt, I’m ready to go home.

Go home, yes, but not forget.

Whenever you talk with anyone down here about the BP spill, the story invariably starts with “before Katrina” or “after Katrina.” Her impact is still felt deeply by the people here, every day. The trauma has given them a signature resiliency that emanates from them as they describe their condition, their lives, their hopes and fears for the future.

Separating myself from the group, I take the day to photograph New Orleans: I want to get my art on. So, I’m off, driving a rental minivan in some of the poorest ghettos I’ve ever been to – not just of this country but of anywhere in the world. Here’s me, white sweaty guy, shiny minivan and pricey camera. I’m awkward.

People train their eyes on me  as I pass by on the street. It’s not possible to have the windows up, ensconcing myself in air conditioned comfort, because my camera has to stay at the temperature and dewpoint outside or it will fog. This is a beneficial thing. Driving this slowly down streets with tinted windows might make some people nervous; there is violence here and that creeping car move is something that causes panic.

I wave a lot when people stare.  And they, thankfully, wave back. I’m hoping that the ubiquitous southern hospitality that I’ve felt down here extends to these hard knock places as I cruise streets off Claiborne, taking in the geography, the sea level, and the infamous Superdome.

What I find is unrelenting urban decay in parish after parish. There are houses that should be torn down, windows that should be replaced, live power lines dangling, trash and addicts in castaway couches. Many are so far gone they don’t even register my presence.  There are signs up everywhere for cheap and easy D.N.A. tests (who is your daddy?).

My nerves are hot. Emotions are overwhelming because what I’m looking at is so foreign for a first world country, my country. Sure, I’ve seen a few places approaching this – Detroit, East St. Louis, Watts, Appalachia – but the degradation takes the proverbial cake. And it’s all the worse because it’s caused by poverty mixed with the devastation of severe weather. It’s a combination that lends itself to an aesthetic reality that isn’t relegated to abandoned cars on the street, but cars that were turned over in floods and moved up onto schoolyard playgrounds, where, when the water receded they remained to rot, now alien and utterly destroyed. Anything valuable on them has been stripped already, and they’re rusting and forgotten, machines raped by a formidable tempest.

I meet a guy named Speed who is smoking the last roach of a self-rolled cigarette. As he inhales, I observe the heavy nicotine stains on his index finger. His lips have sores, probably burns. He asks me what I’m doing. I tell him I’m photographing the place to tell a story – I want to tell him that some of us haven’t forgotten, but I don’t. Speed is jittery as he talks, classic in-between-fix behavior, probably heroin. His movements at once seem threatening and thankful. As he spouts, I can tell he’s a friend, and, circumstance notwithstanding, he still loves his neighborhood, his place in the universe. Yes, I’m talking to a junkie with a sincere pride of place. And it’s amazing.

Speed gives me a short tour of the neighborhood and he describes what the place was like when the water was here. He points out the water lines on the houses. The foundations that are cracked. The places where his friends and neighbors died. And he talks about the the people who haven’t received FEMA checks and that he doesn’t think this neighborhood will ever get back to, what, normal? All of the sudden, it crashes in on me: This is what the world looks like when your government is impotent.

Speed and I part ways; he’s urging me to check out the Lower Ninth Ward, where as he says, “People have it tough.”

The post Her Name Is Katrina and She Knows a Junkie Named Speed, Part 1 appeared first on EcoSalon.

We’re standing on a very remote dock on Grand Bayou, a chain of wetlands interspersed with human made channels where natural gas lines run out to rigs in the open Gulf. These pipes lay on the mud, running some four miles out to sea to their source and inland to a storage facility where the fuel is collected and brought to market.

Once again, standing in the remnants of architecture destroyed by Katrina, we are overwhelmed by the true identity of this place. Hurricane Katrina is like the B.C. and A.D. of the Gulf Coast, a place and time that demarcates two distinct realities.

Some residents hate BP, some think they’re doing a good job (to varying degrees), but everyone I’ve spoken to has three things in common: they have an uncanny sense of place, they have no self-pity, and the aftermath of Katrina affects their lives everyday.

By the water, there is a basketball hoop with no backboard but a perfectly intact net. The court below isn’t visible – it’s buried by mud and vegetation overgrowth. We’d hoped to meet a fisherman from a local tribe, Jeremiah, with whom we’d made arrangements with to take us out into the affected areas in his boat. Crabbing is closed in the open bays but not in these fingered channels. But Jeremiah, we learn, is already out. No boat equals no story.

Serendipitously, another reporter I’m with finds Brian Gainey, a 20-year-old third generation crabber who moors his boat here. For a little gas money, we can get a ride. He’s with his high school friend Carol Hart, who serves as crew, and he’s going to check on his crab traps laid a few days ago. Brian operates about 500 traps when in full swing, and he drives nearly four hours each way to get here from his home in Mississippi. His workday begins at 4 a.m. and doesn’t end until 8 p.m.

His boat moors for free because his family’s name is respected by the residents of this small, tribal wetland community. But now, his work is severely limited because the outer bays are contaminated. As we tour the marshes with their egrets and herons, we see firsthand why people live here. It’s beautiful. Hot, and beautiful.

Crabs, Brian says, avoid polluted water and have moved into the channels where the oil hasn’t saturated. And though he’s catching, the market rate for his effort has dropped considerably. “Gulf Seafood,” is hardly a selling point with seafood buyers these days. Menus all over the world are being reprinted. Safety is a topic for another post pending, but the perception in the market is that it’s tainted.

But back on the bayou, Brian’s working. His father isn’t; he’s instead accepting the BP checks for out-of-work fisherman, some $5,000 a month. Brian explains that he can generate this amount – gross – in three days of crabbing at pre-spill market prices. Late summer is prime crabbing, and Brian can easily pull in 20 thousand a month. Though he’s thankful to BP for his dad’s payments, it’s unclear how long they’ll last. They are only promised through August and he doesn’t know if they’ll continue beyond that. No one knows. Unknowing is the sentiment that prevails everywhere.

Brian is angry about the situation and he blames BP for all of the problems affecting his way of life, but he also believes that BP is doing everything they can right now. That they’re taking care of business.

This is the crux of life here: The entire economics of this region, with the exception of tourism (which is utterly destroyed), hangs in the balance of a healthy seafood economy and a healthy oil economy. But depending on whom you ask, BP is either a savior for giving jobs, or the devil for destroying the sea. Brian is somewhere in between. He doesn’t fish because he doesn’t have other options, but like most fishermen I’ve talked to, he does this because he loves it.

The post BP and The Bayou: Oil and Water Mix appeared first on EcoSalon.

Last week I wrote about about my friend Mary Osborne’s trip to the Gulf. Writing it hit me a hard emotionally, as I’m preparing to tour the area with a delegation of people from my hometown of Portland, Oregon in the next few weeks. Right now, we’re doing logistics, fundraisers, etc., readying ourselves for time on the ground interviewing, hearing stories and communing with the gulf residents.

Reading the headlines, we typically hear only about BP crap this, or Obama crap that, but we don’t hear much from the voices being affected; the people who can’t wake up from the nightmare. One journalist, Mac McClelland, a humanitarian writer for Mother Jones has been detailing the crisis in the gulf from an authentic, human perspective – talking to residents and getting involved in the community where this horror is taking place. Her stories are hard to hear at times – finally, this spring, residents were hoping for a big boom in tourism dollars after years of residue from Katrina. Well, we all know what happened.

Oil is both a blessing and a curse for states like Louisiana. The oil and gas industry essentially changed this state from an agrarian society to an industrial player. Oil and gas accounts for some 320,000 jobs in this region, which is no small sum. What statistics like this tell me is that I have to ditch my presumptions, my preconceived notions of what story I want to tell. It’s going to be way more complex than I can imagine, and it’s going to hurt the heart.

The goal is to bring stories back to Portland, and share them with our community. I was in a meeting with our media team, talking to our videographer who was on the fence about going. I’ll be directing a lot of what we focus on, and his simple question to me was, “What is this film about?” I couldn’t answer. That’s the rub exactly. I’ve worked on documentaries before, and typically you go into the whole deal with a treatment or at least a shot list. But we’re going to be Dante searching for Virgil here, and I’m overwhelmed. I have no idea what we’re going to see down there. Sure, we’ll see oil, and we’ll see birds in pain, but what are the cacophony of thought bubbles drifting out from front stoops?  What are the permutations of fisherman who have lost their livelihoods? Their identity? There are so many questions.

I guess I’m going to listen to my heart as we wander and do my best. I’m going to listen for the quiet voices in the room and work on telling their stories. You’ll hear them all on EcoSalon in the coming weeks.

Here is a video from Louisiana resident and TED speaker Casey DeMoss Roberts, talking about the intricate relationship between two very different but interconnected ways of life – shrimp and petroleum.  We’re about to feel this, firsthand. Heavy.

Image: Shrimp Petrofest

The post Shrimp, Petroleum and a Hurricane Named Katrina appeared first on EcoSalon.

This week Green TV showed us two kinds of eco-disasters. An HBO drama tackled the environmental devastation in New Orleans and Planet Green exposed crimes against tigers.

“Treme” Shows Perseverance in the Face of Nature’s Fury

HBO’s New Orleans drama Treme may not seem like a straightforward choice for “I Want My Green TV.” But with everything that’s been going on in the Gulf with the BP Oil Spill, it’s hard not to think about the hardships the fine citizens of the Big Easy have endured over the last few years.

After all, the spill is not the first man made disaster to happen in New Orleans in 2005. Yes, Mother Nature sent Katrina but she didn’t build the insufficient levees. And there certainly are government agencies that could have chipped in then (and now) to help rebuild faster, more efficiently, and much more in tune with ongoing local environmental concerns – Brad Pitt and his Make it Right housing development aside.

Treme takes place in the aftermath of Katrina, and this week’s episode, “All on a Mardi Gras Day,” celebrated Fat Tuesday – almost six months to the day of the devastating hurricane. The show rode a lot of emotional ups and downs as characters embraced the spirit of the day while reconciling the recent devastation of their homes and families.

Every week, the series shows the delicate balance between the ugly truth of a city ravaged by environmental fury and the beauty of the healing power of human perseverance. As John Goodman’s character pointed out to his daughter, “It’s good to get out and see the destruction. It’s good. Get off the isle of denial every once in a while and be reminded how much of this city is still wrecked.”

Planet Green Doc Exposes Illegal Tiger Trade

This past weekend, Planet Green premiered the award-winning documentary, Dangerous Trade. In the hour-long film, a team of eco-crime investigators from the Environmental Investigation Agency (a sort modern day Green “Mod Squad”) investigate the seedy underworld of illegal tiger trades in China.

What they find is infuriating, horribly sad, and highly profitable. And there lies the reason why it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. According to the doc, China is the largest consumer of tiger products for skins, taxidermy, and medicine. And apparently the military turns a blind eye to the issue for their own profit and political reasons.

Ironically, this is the Chinese Year of the Tiger and with three subspecies already extinct and only an estimated 3,100 of the glorious animals left in the world – yes, we said the world – ending the illegal tiger trade is more important than ever. This fall there will even be a Global Tiger Summit in Russia (who knew?!) to commit to taking action toward saving the tiger.

We’re guessing somewhere that Tony is screaming, “that’s grrrrrrreat!”

Tune in next time to see what’s cropping up on green TV.

Image: Tryburn

The post I Want My Green TV: From Louisiana Disasters to the Tiger Trade appeared first on EcoSalon.