The Louisiana Flag is emblazoned with a momma brown pelican bleeding from three red cuts as hungry chicks huddle below. The image is known as the “pelican of piety,” a symbol of Christian devotion so deep that a mother would give her own blood to feed her children if she had no other food to offer. Forty thousand browns nest in Louisiana, which has earned it the title of “Pelican State.” Pelecanus occidentalis, the brown pelican, was virtually wiped out a hundred years ago due to human slaughter. The birds were making a comeback but declined in the 1970’s due to the widespread use of DDT. But in the last thirty years, the population rebounded and the state bird was delisted from the Endangered Species Act last year.
Most people with a bit of vacation time before them might opt for a spa or a romantic get-away, but I went to the Pelican State. I needed to witness it, to see first hand the extent of the damage incurred in the largest environmental disaster in this country. I flew to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in order to interview religious leaders facing the impacts of the oil spill. On my travels I was surprised by the deep scars of tragedy that Katrina left. Boarded up bungalows in the Lower Ninth Ward still bear spray-painted instructions for rescue workers who floated through flooded streets five years ago. Battered shells of shopping centers sit empty, their parking lots left weedy and buckled. Further south, stretches of roads have no commerce, churches or houses in places marked as towns on the map. But despite these deep cuts and the fact that 100,000 people still haven’t returned after fleeing the flooded land, residents of New Orleans and the coast, like the pelicans, have been bouncing back.
This is what makes the April 20 oil rig explosion and spill particularly painful. In the wake of Katrina, Louisiana, like Florida, Alabama and Mississippi, must face the impacts of the largest environmental disaster in US history. In coming to this beleaguered place, I was ready to howl and moan. I expected to meet the betrayed, forlorn people whom I saw every night on the news. But I didn’t find them. Instead I saw people ready to help commercial fishermen struggling to feed their families. I met some folks who were cautiously optimistic that the spill’s legacy would become a teaching moment in deepwater drilling. I met those who were furious at BP, but scared about an offshore oil moratorium. And I met those who thought that Louisianans had only themselves to blame. But the prevailing feeling was “if we survived the hurricane, we can survive this oil spill.”
A hundred days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon the cap seems to be holding and the clean-up is progressing in fits and starts. Though surface oil seems to be less evident, efforts will become more erratic as the summer moves further into hurricane season. If everything goes according to the best-case scenario, the spill at 5,000 feet deep and at 50 miles off shore will be broken down largely by the microbes in this dynamic semi-tropical ecosystem. Unlike Alaska’s Exxon Valdez disaster, life in the Gulf is constantly growing, decaying, and renewing. But there has never been a leak so significant on American shores and we have no idea what the long-term impacts will be. Especially in an ecosystem so badly compromised already.
Like the vulning pelican, Louisianans have their own self-inflicted wounds. At the turn of the century, levees were built to allow for navigation between the Mississippi River and the Gulf. This prevented natural flooding of the wetlands, which had always replenished the marshes with fresh water and the mud to anchor large trees and prevent erosion. Mud now flows into the Gulf, along with agricultural run-off, and a dead zone stretches between 6,000 and 7,000 miles beyond the river’s mouth. In addition to the navigation impacts, between 1955 and 1978 the oil industry dredged and drained coastal wetlands in order to build pipelines to carry large deposits of oil and natural gas to refineries just north of the Gulf. Now saline water mixes with freshwater marshes, killing sensitive grasses which again causes erosion. Every year Louisiana looses 20,000 acres of wetlands, contributing to loss of habitat and the last line of defense in the between a raging hurricane and New Orleans.
The first signs I saw of the oil disaster were actually just that, signs. “Save our Seafood,” read banners throughout downtown New Orleans. After several trips to the Big Easy, I can see how much Louisianans love their food. Depriving them of a shrimp po’ boy for lunch is akin to stealing tango from Argentina. In a state where veins of brackish water run through marshes and cypress swamps, the very soul of Louisiana lies embodied in fruits of the sea. Eating is a ritual, a reaffirmation, and a celebration. Every sauce-drenched bite pays homage to Creole and Cajun generations of mamaws and papaws. Since fishing was banned in many areas in the wake of the spill, many restaurants were forced to pull local seafood items from their menus. You could almost hear dem rattlin’ bones of ancestors rolling in their graves.
I met with the religion reporter Bruce Nolan from the New Orleans Times Picayune, the highly awarded newspaper that won twenty Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of Katrina. He gave me a list of names and numbers of preachers and priests working with fishing communities that have been affected by the spill. Bruce also explained the impacts of Katrina, and gave me a snapshot of post-Katrina New Orleans. I heard about regional reactions to the oil spill and the power of faith leaders in Louisiana, whom so many rely on in times of uncertainty.
Bruce shared one aspect of Katrina that astonished him—the highly coordinated interfaith emergency response. Right after Katrina, different faiths came with their respective aid organizations and instantly asserted themselves in collaborative niches throughout the relief effort. The first on the scene were Southern Baptists who arrived in New Orleans less than 24 hours after Katrina with 18-wheeler mobile kitchens to serve hot meals to the survivors and rescue teams. Next came Catholic Relief and Methodists who worked to council the homeless, hand out vouchers to Wal-Mart and the Family Dollar, and issue checks for utilities bills. Jewish aid groups sent clothing, food, and raised money for community restoration. Mennonites came with their carpentry skills to help rebuild homes. Each denomination had a skill and each worked together through the relief. Bruce marveled at their efficiency and their charity. I couldn’t help but wonder if these coalitions could team up to be proactive, rather than reactive.
After making calls and setting up meetings, I drove down to Chalmette in St. Bernard Parish where the impacts of Katrina were still so raw and evident. Reverend Henry Ballard of Christian Fellowship Church showed me where the water line had been in his church. “About ten feet, where the exit sign was…,” he explained. Henry had organized a daily prayer group for fishing families in St. Bernard Parish, driving 45 minutes to Hopedale where people show up every morning to get hired by BP for the day, laying and repairing boom. “We (local pastors) had been meeting the last three and a half years,” he explained. “We can work together for service projects and prayer. We were an organized group.” Now Henry’s group is taking turns to travel to Shell Beach, Hopedale and Delacroix--the sites of the clean-up operations in Saint Bernard Parish. With catholic Relief Services, they care for the families who are suffering due to restrictions on fishing. But it’s not just fishing families that are suffering. It’s the local guy who sold ice to keep the fish fresh. The trucker who hauled it to New Orleans. The restaurant that served the catch and the laundry service that washed the restaurants linens. Henry even told me that he heard of some churches in Alabama that are filing claims with BP over empty collection plates.
Next stop was Our Lady of Lourdes, a tiny church on a two lane highway, tucked under giant oaks and curtains of Spanish moss, where I met Father John. He ministers to two congregations in St Bernard and 60% of his congregants are fisherman. Set up next to Lourdes is a large mobile Catholic Relief truck. Catholic Relief is issuing vouchers for groceries and giving out small checks for incidentals. The week prior to my visit, Kenneth Feinberg, the man in charge of dividing BP’s $20 billion settlement was in the area meeting people affected by the spill. He has his work cut out for him—those laid off from fishing and the oil industries are simply the tip of the iceberg. The entire economy down here depends on fish and oil. The two are so closely linked that Morgan City, a nearby port, holds the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival every year. This will be its 75th year, and according to the planners, rain or shine or spill, the show will go on from September 2-6.
Lafitte, Louisiana is a town of about 3,000 folks. Until the last few years, most of them fished the coast to make a living, but apparently Chinese imports of shrimp and crabs have priced them out of the market. I was told when I visited St. Anthony’s Church that only a hundred or so families in their community work in the industry. Wearing a giant straw hat over a glistening brow, still wet from mowing the large front lawn of his church, Father Ryan showed me into his tiny, crowded office. Born in Ireland, he had been in Louisiana since 1972, and in Lafitte for almost as long. His town sits below the levees and could easily be wiped out by a big hurricane, but community members can’t decide where to put a levee, he told me, so instead they built a brand new $6,000,000 library in addition to the old one. He points to political corruption, greediness, lack of good education, and the fact that without a repaired coast, southern Louisiana is literally sunk. “I don’t know how many more hits we can take,” he said matter-of-factly.
Though Father Ryan was the reluctant to talk with me when I had called him to set up an appointment, he spent the entire afternoon with me, occasionally telling me, “I only have 10 more minutes, sweetie,” in his Irish brogue. He told me about his hopelessness over the situation and the erosion of the coast due to 10,000 miles of canals in wetlands built for pipelines. When I asked him about a project that bundles Christmas trees from New Orleans, hauling them south and dumping them into eroded areas in the hopes of building buffers, he laughed and shook his head. “Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel,” he says and asks me if I know the passage in the Book of Matthew. I don’t, I admit, but I get the gist. When you focus on petty stuff, you miss the big picture.
When I apologized for all the time I had taken, he turned to me and asked if I’d been to the swamp. “Um, not yet.” It was 97 degrees, muggy, and it was the last place I wanted to go. But I knew this was a great opportunity. And so, even though he had “only ten minutes,” we went to a trail and entered another world. Walking through giant Cypress rooted in murky brown water, he seemed less melancholy. “This is the way it should be,” he said, dodging Spanish moss and slapping deer flies that crowded below the rim of his hat.
I had told him of my interest in bird protection and he suddenly called out, “There, look, it’s one of your friends,” pointing to a white heron as it glided through the gray-green forest. Even if Father Ryan was hopeless about the state of the environment as he pondered it from behind his desk, here he seemed contented amid the buzz of cicadas and the mysterious dull splashes of water in the lagoons. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked me several times. He showed me cypress knees puking up out of the water. “They look like a bunch of old men, don’t they?” he asked. Then he implored me to take home a piece of Spanish moss. When he got to the end of the trail and back to the car, Father Ryan went back to being cynical. “I’m not sure why you wanted to see me. I can’t help much.” But he really did help. I saw his heavy heart lighten in the swamp, and he confirmed for me that nature is a tonic, even to the most hardened. Thoreau said “in wilderness, is the preservation of the world.” I’d like to think it is our salvation as well.
My last day, I traveled to Avery Island, home to Henry McIlhenny, a place famous for Tabasco Sauce and its protected coastal birds. Father Ryan had made me promise not to leave Louisiana without going to the rookery, because my dissertation is on pastors in the southern United States working to protect birds during the ravages of the millinery trade. McIlhenny is also known for his books Autobiography of an Egret and Bird City. According to local lore, McIlhenny heard about a Rajah who built a rookery of exotic birds for his queen, and after his death, as the bamboo infrastructure fell into disrepair, the birds continued to nest there, year after year. In 1892, as egrets faced extinction at the hands of the plume traders, McIlhenny went into the swamps and captured seven egrets and put them in a wire cage with artificial nests. When the migratory season arrived, he released them, and to his great delight, they returned in the spring from spending a winter in South America. Today, due to his efforts, 20,000 egrets live in an area called Bird City. The cacophony of their cries is a true celebration of McIlhenny genius. Their boisterous song represents the resilience of nature and the ability of humanity to tackle and solve conservation issue. Unfortunately, we as a species react when things are dire. Extinction gets our attention. Oil-covered birds get our attention. Huddled homeless masses stranded by a monster hurricane gets our attention. In Louisiana, I hope there is some time for careful strategic planning. What if these interfaith coalitions that coalesced during Katrina demanded coastal restoration and new policy for drilling? This team would prove unstoppable!
I flew back on the plane with the state coordinator of International Bird Rescue who was going home to celebrate her mother’s birthday. When I asked her how things were going down on the coast, she was positive, maybe even a bit boastful. She said, and I paraphrase ‘we’ve been through this before. We know what we’re doing. We’ve got birds recovering in facilities all over Florida, Louisiana and Alabama.’ She was reassuring. Yes, our Earth is resilient, but the more damage it incurs, the less it will bounce back.
I’m home in Montana. It’s in the 70’s. The sky is blue. My Spanish moss is laying flat in a notebook. And I feel better than I thought I would with my small exploration in Louisiana. I am left with two distinct impressions. I don’t think things are hopeless, like my friend Father Ryan. But I also don’t think we can count on response teams forever, no matter how well they do their jobs. Louisiana has incredibly impressive, highly skilled and organized teams. But it’s time to get out in front of disaster. The pelican of piety can feed her chicks her own blood when there is no other food around, but eventually she too will run dry no matter how many times we bandage her.
Betsy Gaines Quammen
The Tributary Fund Founder and President
