Rocky Kistner's blog

“Never let injustice shut you up. When you see injustice you must stand up. It’s going to hurt sometimes. It’s going to cost you something. But you can never, never allow injustice in your presence and sit silently by and let it happen. You cannot do that.” – Gulf resident Linda St. Martin from Stories from the Gulf. [...Read more]

In the Dakotas, members of the proud Lakota Nation rose in protest this week to join a  48-hour hunger strike in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline—and all tar sands pipelines—they say will destroy precious water resources and ancestral lands in the U.S and in Canada.   [...Read more]

Dead dolphin on Mississippi Beach in 2011                   Photo: Laurel Lockamy [...Read more]

With news that President Obama will fast track the building of the southern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, Texans in its path say their health and property rights are endangered by a torrent of corrosive tar sands oil from Canada. [...Read more]

Gloria Trevino doesn’t need a Washington politician to tell her that a daily gusher of Canadian tar sands crude won’t do her air in south Houston any favors. Surrounded by massive petrochemical plants, she and her neighbors in this industrial community already breathe some of the dirtiest air in the country. Her small one-story pink stucco house is sandwiched between giant multi-colored steel storage containers like a tiny doll house stuck in the middle of a field of gigantic cooking pots.  [...Read more]

Down in Texas there’s an old saying; “You can put your boots in the oven but it don’t make them biscuits.” [...Read more]

BP's newest PR salvo touting its Gulf cleanup hit a nerve with many residents still struggling to get their lives back (one ad captured this BP beach protest in the background). The oil behemoth's slickly produced pleas for Americans to “come on down” to the Gulf where the weather is warm, the food is sublime and the beaches are sparkling clean--at least in the commercials--has long stuck in the craw of people whose shrimp boxes are bare and whose beaches and bayous are some [...Read more]

As I write this, I am traveling on a bus to New York to speak at a screening of The Big Fix, Josh and Rebecca Tickell’s powerful documentary about the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig that spewed nearly 200 million gallons of Louisiana crude along the coastlines and marshes of four Gulf states, changing the lives of millions. This film is mandatory viewing for those who want to know what really happened on the ground along the bayous and beaches of a coast that is wedded to oil. [...Read more]

As Keystone XL protesters savor their victory to postpone the pipeline project, another oil policy decision this week did not turn out so well; a plan to expand drilling operations in the oil-damaged Gulf and pristine arctic. [...Read more]

Willie Seaman of Irvington, AL, lays carpet and floors for a living. But last summer, as the BP well gushed thousands of barrels of oil daily into the Gulf, Seaman signed up with the BP cleanup program, working on a shrimp boat several miles off shore. [...Read more]