Gumbo, gumption and Gulf Coast Blues revisited

Interest remains strong in Spokane filmmaker’s oil chronicle

These days, he’s lifting fencing with rougher and rougher hands – not exactly the mitts of a film editor.

His face is burnt by the sun, and the shadowy basalt up-bursts near the Mount Spokane farm he and his girlfriend share are his treasure in his thoughts, and heart. He talks about raising rabbits, growing vegetables, and the coming hot days of summer.

The Gulf Coast debacle and terror campaign by British Petroleum are not far from Marc Gauthier’s mind, though.

He shuttles through the 70-minute film, “Gulf Coast Blues: Oil in Our Veins.” Showing highlights for 50-minute campus time slots. He punctuates the frustration he experienced last year trying to get help for birds and animals, the shame of living in a country addicted to oil and mired in political and bureaucratic malaise and intentional incompetence.

“You just have to go out there and get involved in something in your community … and don’t take no for an answer,” Gauthier said. The crowd at a recent showing at Spokane Falls Community College was sparse – 40 – considering the topic, the local angle, the magnificent applicability of a Spokane guy who took on an issue 2,000 miles away.

One 30-year-old student came up to him after the event and expressed how tough the economic times are: “My three boys are selling tomato plants to help us get by.”

Gauthier listened to the SFCC student, who just a year ago made a hefty $40 an hour installing alarm systems, a job gone belly-up because of Wall Street, K-Street and the unraveling of the American education system and consumer-dying economy.

The male student kept repeating how he has to keep teaching his kids about sustainability and conservation because the public schools are not. Sustainability, localism, and new ways to lift families and communities to a survival mode were topics many in the audience in Building 24 broached.

Students and others were held in rapt concentration as Marc Gauthier talked activism, filmmaking, and what it means to be a 36-year-old with a double degree from the Evergreen State College and SFCC/SCC coursework from long ago.

“I knew I had to do something with my training in wildlife biology when I saw the news of the oil,” he told the audience as part of the school’s theme, Survival: Enduring Humanity (see http://www.spokanefalls.edu/college/Theme/Home.aspx )

The book, Zeitoun, is part of the year-long theme as a common reader. It’s about a Syrian-American construction contractor, essentially a hero, who stayed behind during the dark days after New Orleans was gutted by Katrina and government ineptitude. (For more on Abdulrahman Zeitoun, go here: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/27/exclusivezeitoun_how_a_hero_in_new_


I’ve had Marc on my radio show, “Tipping Points: Voices from the Edge" (see here: http://www.kyrs.org/showprofile.cfm?id=1234986643431 ), and we’ve reconvened the story of 480 million gallons of crude, methane and so-called dispersant dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.

“Those people I came to know and befriend are worse off now than when I was there for the first traces of oil hitting Grand Isle’s shores,” he said.

One of the scenes the SFCC crowd saw included the poignant exposure of Marc’s emotions as he tried holding back tears May 20, 2010, when he witnessed the oil sheen, oil globules and toxic vapors rising as Gulf dolphins, covered in oil, breached the surface for air.

Since then, we’ve learned that tens of thousands of marine animals died, and we know BP and their thugs collected animal species and shipped them off to be immolated.

One of the remarkable aspects of this May 25 event was the students who talked to Marc one-on-one before the screening as he served up drinks and food in the building’s foyer. More than 120 people enjoyed Northern Lights Brewery’s coleslaw, vegetarian gumbo and lemonade. Sarah Dyer, SFCC student and Northern Lights cook, was more than happy to share food in what she described as “rotten economic times.”

In the audience were several canoe guides from the Chewelah-based Voyages of Rediscovery outdoor river trip company. Annie Forman and Adam Wicks-Arshack (look for a story on their experiential learning non-profit in DTE soon), Evergreen College grads, asked Marc about safety — his own — during the initial thuggery BP and the U.S. government unleashed onto locals and paid clean-up folk, as well as the media.

One scene (see trailer here: http://www.downtoearthnw.com/stories/2010/jul/23/local-filmmaker-one-step-closer-premiering/?video) has Marc frustrated by the lack of coordination by BP, the National Guard and other governments, and so he travels into the swamps outside the Grand Isle area to stash his video tapes after receiving dozens of threats and intimations of “go on back to your Pacific Northwest … this isn’t your affair” from many sources.

On the SFCC campus, Marc caught the air of downtrodden students who see fewer opportunities to be part of a green, sustainable and alternative energy future. Many argued about the retreating overpaid administrators and state lawmakers gutting their futures, literally, by hacking at course offerings, sacking faculty and generally failing to make concerted efforts to keep Washington’s economy going with a vibrant community college system feeding into four-year schools.

Dyer laughed when she recognized one “overpaid” dean walking in the building near the food – “Why is he always walking around with such a dour face?” We overheard another SFCC staffer blurt out – “You aren’t serving students on that nice Chinaware, are you?”

On that warm day Marc stood speaking with dynamic, interested and uninformed students about the oil industry, the overreliance on fossil fuel, and the fight ahead: “You all have to take your education and make community solutions to all these problems we have with oil and the environment … it’s up to you, the future generations.”

It was a good day to be a human, in a building named in Salish for “community gathering place, where community and commerce come together” — sn-w’ey’-mn.

“Man, I never thought vegetarian gumbo could be so tasty,” one Running Start student told us.

Marc smiled, his face ruddy from outdoor work: “After you eat that, be sure to hear what oil companies and your government do not want you to know.”

Stay tuned for more Gulf Coast Blues: Oil in Our Veins screenings, and look for Marc’s produce in local restaurants.

BP and Oil and the Future of the Gulf

Rose Aguilar spoke with Riki Ott on the sixth-month anniversary of the BP oil disaster -one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S. history.

In 1989, Ott, a marine toxicologist who lives in Cordova, Alaska, experienced firsthand the devastating effects of the Exxon Valdex oil disaster.

She's spent five of the past six months traveling back and forth between Louisiana and Florida to gather information about what's really happening in the Gulf and share the lessons she learned about long-term illnesses and deaths of clean-up workers and residents. She's planning to return in January.





Toxicologist speaks about the so-called missing oil, the missing science, the missing regulation.

Part II - Riki Ott on the Gulf: "These People Have Oil in Their Bodies."
In this interview with Rose Aguilar, Riki Ott talks about the health crisis caused by the BP oil disaster in the Gulf. She says she's currently dealing with three or four autopsies and knows of people who are down to 4.7% of their lung capacity and have enlarged hearts. "These people have oil in their bodies," she said.
She believes four to five million people in the Gulf were exposed to either acute or intermediate levels of oil at dangerous levels.





Part III - Riki Ott on BP: "They've Got Our Politicians Completely Hamstrung."
In this interview with Rose Aguilar, Riki Ott talks about whether BP will ever be held responsible for the oil disaster, BP's partnership with NOAA in schools, the oil disaster's long-term effects on the ecosystem, the citizen uprising in the South, and the most effective way to save the planet from further destruction.

The Age of Stupid -- Must See Movie (at home, or community viewing!)

It Takes Just the Right Amount of Stupidity to Sink the Titanic (in this case, Earth)–

The Film, The Age of Stupid, Should Be on Everyone’s Netflix List

By Paul K. Haeder

One has to laugh at the film reviews of the clear, far-ranging and focused climate change “documentary,” The Age of Stupid, because, A, most put it down or take issue with it on some very bizarre levels, and, B, some even compare it negatively to “An Inconvenient Truth” (not a movie, just a Power Point, and, really, nonsense, a lecture, and with Gore, to boot) as if that film is the litmus test for all climate change films.

These armchair critics are, well, just showing their own colors -- that we are in an age of stupidity. Their critiques are based largely on the movie creating too much doom and gloom, which is a good jumping off point to illustrate certain parallel axioms to the actual term “age of stupid,” coined by one of the film’s subject, an oil scientist, lauding Shell for great environmental work but lamenting our consumer drenched society.

These coined axioms are apropos for both movie shills and our general population:

age of fear
age of messaging
age of posturing
age of blogging
age of self-importance
age of rationalization
age of cynicism
age of infantilism
age of self-aggrandizement
age of I-can-think-of-better-things than you can write, do, film, make, exhibit, create

This film, premiering in February 2009, is really elegant in its scrappy feel and doomsayer elegance. We get under the skin of six main real characters’ narratives. One big issue movie reviewers have this polemic is it wields too much stick and not enough carrot. Wow. Terrible.

Franny Armstrong created a sci-fi multilevel documentary, with strong (FIVE) narratives that allow for the common climate change delayer or denier to be waylaid by the reality of climate change and rising oceans. The fact is less than one percent of scientists polled do not believe the earth is currently in a climate (warming up) change model whereas 60 percent of the American public denies climate is even happening. From that point of view, this movie is a must-see.

You don’t need “An Inconvenient Truth” or “The Eleventh Hour” to grasp the urgency of Franny’s film.

Add to that, prescient actions have been precipitated from this movie. One example is the President of the Maldives, Mohammed Nasheed, announced by a special video feed that his country would be the first to go carbon neutral – by 2019. That announcement took place at the UK premiere of the movie March 15, 2009

If you do a Metacrawler.com search of Nasheed or “Maldives carbon neutral,” you’ll find plenty on his courageous acts to save his island nation from global warming-precipitated ocean rising, also called inundation or island extinction. Nasheed, a former jailed journalist and activist against previous dictatorial governments in his country, has written about his nation’s ocean rising plight in the Huffington Post, and even the New York Times has written a six-page feature on his political force and environmental urgency.

Check it out:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mohamed-nasheed/climate-change-requires-a_b_292747.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/magazine/10MALDIVES-t.html?_r=3

The film is set in 2055, with one last guy standing, an archivist in a sci-fi modeled multi-story vault in the middle of a world of oceans 60 feet higher than they are at today. The archive is the repository of “all” the “great” art and archaeological and library works of the world, both physical evidence of culture and in digital form.

That’s Pete Postlethwaite as our narrator-archivist, his famed wrinkle-strewn face looking at a high-tech computer, the screen being us, the audience, as he goes through various stories from 2005-through 2008, which are the years starting the true age of stupid.

Real stories are brought up on the screen as the archivist laments our age, now, and how we just failed to act, to move, to see the importance of stopping fossil fuel burning and rampant consumption. The solutions are at our fingertips, in 2005, fifty years before his transmission bolts into space taking with it all the evidence of our self-destructing societies’ practices.

There’s an oil worker – a scientist -- in New Orleans defending “big oil” but lamenting the catastrophe of this super-charged hurricane Katrina, which destroyed one of his homes. All the while, he defends Shell and contends how green and great the company.

Then we see a family whose father-husband is a wind turbine developer in the UK facing homeowners fighting the turbines’ negative effects on their sense of view shed aesthetics.

A young woman in Nigeria is shown wanting to be a doctor, wanting to do good for her community, and wanting the American dream of a good life and fame. She washes fish caught in rivers with laundry soap to “clean” them of the oil muck Shell spreads in the waterways as a byproduct of their drilling operation.

Then there’s an octogenarian in the French Alps who takes the Brit wind farm developer and his family on a hike, demonstrating the dramatic glacier melt he’s seen as a mountaineer for over 65 years. He’s fighting endless streams of truck traffic coming into his community and a proposal to double the tunnel capacity.

Then, a brother and sister, climate refugees, so to speak (envirogees) are shown living in Jordan but wanting to return to their native Iraq; the 12-year-old boy vows to kill Americans for killing his father over a war for oil.

We see one of India’s finest capitalists, a thirty-something multi-millionaire who is starting up an Mumbai-based airline he hopes will fly every Indian anywhere they want to go.

This film ties in many aspects of our consumer-driven society, and shows how fragile our culture is with leaders and community groups whose thinking is far from systems oriented, or holistic, necessary traits to get through the climate change mess.

The precautionary principle and carrying capacity as a concept are many times thrown out the window. The age of stupid is now.

There’s humor, to be sure, in this film, but the stick is way bigger than the carrot, so blogs like Treehugger get pissed off when confronted with this generally urgent (negative) and scientifically real (apocalyptic) message.

Look, Jeh Wadia, the Mumbai capitalist depicted in the film, believes he is doing good by helping the Indian economy with a low cost airline. He hates the train system. to his credit, he realizes the carbon footprint of one private jet trip (he makes dozens a year), and knows the cost of that single trip would pay for a nice school house or water treatment plant in a small Indian village.

The age of contradictions.

That’s the age of stupid. He believes the jet setting somehow will lift 1 billion people out of poverty. He’s steeled to make a go of his start up airline. The film then juxtaposes Piers Guy’s uphill struggle as a self-aware wind farm developer, as he and his wife calculated their carbon footprint.

In one fell swoop, they calculate that one airline trip with their four kids will blow their entire carbon footprint reserve for the entire year.

Piers Guy in the film faces an irate community activist group in Bedfordshire opposed to 8 (downsized from 19) wind turbines on an abandoned World War Two airfield, near a high octane drag racing strip.

Potential lower property values is their rationale for opposing clean energy.
Franny’s climate advisor, Mark Lynas, is also depicted in the film. He’s the author of “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet,” and in the film he warns of a real tipping point around 2015 if the world doesn’t act now to reduce carbon emissions. Once global temperatures warm more than two degrees, he and thousands of other scientists say, all will be lost.
Albedo effect. Lag time. Feedback loops. Failing crops. Drying up watersheds. The list goes on and on.

Is this film too negative? Come one, it isn’t and it should be a wake up call. An Inconvenient Truth was and still is a slick lite polemic. The Age of Stupid is scrappy, and the message is clear: We as a species weren’t important enough to save.

The value of the film is that these narratives and the funny cartoons about London being under water, Las Vegas inundated in sand and Sydney burning are pointing to the fact our age is so grafted to a love of and worship in capitalism.

The Age of Stupid shows not only under-developed countries are failing to provide great education and social service safety nets for their citizens, but we living in the most powerful military-dominated country are turning into a “third world” country education wise.

We have those technologies to get off carbon burning. We have planners and designers and community activists and a legion of armies ready to reshape the world into one of social grace and justice.

Maybe the Age of Stupid needs a sequel, or prequel, one depicting the “age of cow-towing” and “the story of too much stuff.” More and more, everyday people are speaking out against the current state of the American mind.

The questions are real: Why aren’t people on the streets protesting the give-away to Wall Street? How can a judge in Louisiana counter a federal ban on deepwater drilling? How can politicians spend $40 million on two-bit congressional races and not blink without the citizens taking over the streets? How can we let non-scientists say 400 million gallons of crude and Corectix are somehow miraculously disappeared, gone, in the Gulf of Mexico?

Films are funny things. They are mostly flash in the pans in an age of hyper-film making and endless film distribution. One film I have most recently been associated with, Gulf Coast Blues – Oil in Our Veins, is powerful. It’s had two premieres as part of Sustainable September, but there wasn’t a rush of greenies high-fiving or hugging Marc Gauthier, the filmmaker, for his vision and his risks.

Where does Gauthier go now? He wants to go on the road, do some face-to-face time with college faculty, students and decision makers to try and get his film “out there.”

If I didn’t have all these projects, writing engagements and community college classes to teach, hell, I’d have thrown in as a publicist and dramaturge and get this film looked at, reviewed, and used a rallying cry to fight BP.

You know the British Petroleum I speak of:

The BP of marketing fame which is spending $120 million to lie about the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The BP which was allowed to call the shots on the largest environmental crime in this country. The same BP which is writing California’s K-12 science curriculum. You know the BP – the company that helped the CIA in 1953 overthrow Iran’s popular prime minister.

What is the true half-life of these movies like the academy award winning, The Cove? Or what really is the impact of Bill McKibben and college students approaching Barak Obama last Friday with one of the original Jimmy Carter White House solar panels? What is the impact of McKibben being turned down after asking Obama to reinstall it?

Those solar panels, ripped out by Ronald Reagan, have been generating clean energy at Unity College in Maine.

The Age of Stupid is hinting at this current Age of Messaging, this Age of Political Expediency, this odd Age of False Dichotomies, the Age of False Balancing. Who sees this action (lack thereof) of not taking a 40-year-old functioning photovoltaic panel as stupid? The president is a supposedly well educated Ivy League debater?

How many Obama handlers and pencil-necked Beltway Bozos had a hand in thwarting this symbolic and teachable moment?

Unfortunately, the movie, “The Age of Stupid,” is old news, having had its premieres and splashy (mostly critical) headlines more than a year ago. However, every single day, the stupidity, timidity and confusion of our age are bankrupting this planet’s carrying capacity.

This is the Age of Stupid, to be sure.

Will Gulf Coast Blues get into the veins of people as Marc Gauthier takes this shoe-string budget movie on the road (Franny Armstrong’s “The Age of Stupid” has been dubbed low budget as well – she brought in Shakespearean heavyweight Postelthwaite to dress it up)?

What will the long-term effects be on viewers of Gauthier’s film about his own personal odyssey as a wildlife biologist and now citizen journalist?

When will we go back to the future -- the Age of Reason?



http://www.spannerfilms.net/news/maldives_become_carbon_limbo_world_champions

Energy and Gas in the News

Watchdog: New York State Regulation of Natural Gas Wells Has Been "Woefully Insufficient for Decades."



The New York-based Toxics Targeting went through the Department of Environmental Conservation’s own database of hazardous substances spills over the past thirty years. They found 270 cases documenting fires, explosions, wastewater spills, well contamination and ecological damage related to gas drilling. Many of the cases remain unresolved. The findings are contrary to repeated government assurances that existing natural gas well regulations are sufficient to safeguard the environment and public health. The state is considering allowing for gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale watershed, the source of drinking water for 15 million people, including nine million New Yorkers