Voices of the Gulf

Across the nation’s breadbasket, many farmers are out of time waiting for cooling rains to salvage crops blistered by one of the hottest and driest summers on record. But up in the frigid arctic, another battle with nature is playing out; the race against ice. [...Read more]

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At the Gulf Organized Fisheries in Solidarity & Hope,(Go FISH) conference held August 4th in Westwego, oysterman Byron Encalade of Pointe a la Hache, La. was adamant. Encalade described his Gulf oyster grounds as such: “No spatting at all, nothing. The whole public sea grounds on the east bank of the river, except for a very small area…there is not one spat to be found. That is disturbing. Very disturbing.” [...Read more]

 Ashley Alleman and her husband knew something was wrong months ago. Amid reports of unexplained bubbling in nearby Bayou Corne, they’d been feeling strange rumblings beneath their home, rumblings they’d never felt before. [...Read more]

A couple of days ago a friend of mine and I decided to embark on a fateful trip. We had heard that not far from our current location, (a fisherman’s meeting about the BP settlement, near New Orleans), a sink hole approximately 200 feet wide had formed and that it was threatening a nearby bayou community.

According to our sources, the depression was forcing the evacuation of 150 families. [...Read more]

By Wesley Ware, BreakOUT! The Consent Decree between the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) released last week is the furthest the Department of Justice has ever gone in addressing profiling a [...Read more]

Crossposted from Facing South. Number of people arrested last week following a protest at the Olympic Clock in London's Trafalgar Square, where activists posing as representatives of BP and other notorious polluters that are so-called "sustainability partners" for this year's Olympic ga [...Read more]

By Dr Lance Hill, crossposted from the Louisiana Justice Institute, originally posted on Diane Ravitch's blog. Charter schools that perform better by recruiting and retaining better students don’t exist in a vacuum: skimming the best and most prof [...Read more]

By Zack Carter, Alabama Fisheries Cooperative, A Multicultural Fisher & Seafood Worker-Owned Cooperative (Belle Fontaine, Ala.)  A well-written and informative introduction to this unbelievable story of corruption – which can only be understood as a brazen attempt to turn an $18 million Katrina housing development into a [...Read more]

One thing is for sure: When it comes to how the billions of dollars in BP fines slated for the Gulf Coast is used by the states, advocates, watch-dog groups and citizens alike best keep their nose on the money trail. Businesses and political leaders are already making plans for the use of those funds. [...Read more]