Leveraging our Connections to the Environment

I sometimes write about my deep love of the Gulf of Mexico, but probably not as much as I should given its importance to me. I was born in Pasadena Texas (near Houston) and I was raised in Clearwater Florida (near Tampa) and have called New Orleans home since 1991. I have no idea what it’s like to live out of reach of the Gulf of Mexico. I hold thousands of memories connected to the Gulf. I have found myself swimming, fishing, boating, and wading in gulf waters from St. Petersburg Florida to Galveston Texas.

Unfortunately, now the Gulf of Mexico is not only a place of joy, comfort, and belonging but also a source of extreme anxiety. Hurricanes have always been a fact of life on the Gulf Coast but now the size of them is really scary. It’s not just the enormity of the storms, but the amount of toxic debris available for the storms to disrupt.

When I met my husband in 2004, he owned a tiny flatboat and he would take me out to the marshlands south of New Orleans to go fishing. It was full of marsh grass, spoonbill rosettas, pelicans, shrimp, blue crabs, trout, and redfish. I loved watching the sunrise in the marsh. In August of 2010, I prepared to give birth to my daughter while the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was on its fourth month of hemorrhaging oil into the waters 55 miles off the coast of Louisiana. Every conversation that New Orleanians had was about the trade-off between oil in the gulf or the Corexit, the disbursement chemical, and which was more dangerous to the wildlife and the seafood. I was so happy that I was about to be a mom and so pissed off that recklessness of big oil would guarantee that my child would never experience the same Gulf of Mexico that I did. The week after my daughter was born, my husband sold his boat.

When I was a kid, my dad worked for Texas Wildlife and Fisheries. He worked primarily in the Gulf. I remember he boarded shrimp boats to check for turtle excluder devices. I remember how angry people were about using them too. I remember how earnestly he held the important duality of respecting the shrimpers who supported their families by the bounty of these waters and his responsibility to protect the gulf waters and the wildlife that it supported. At some point, in Texas, maybe in the late ’80s, the EPA noticed that there was a relationship between sportsmen and the environment. I don’t know much about it, but my dad, a Texas game warden, was now collaborating with the EPA. He did stakeouts to collect evidence of pollution and misuse of public land and water by corporations. The only thing I remember him saying about it back then was that it was a ton of work to collect the evidence of illegal activity and the fines were typically less expensive than doing the right thing.

I wasn’t old enough at the time to take in what the messaging was around that initiative, but I wish I knew if they were speaking directly to the people who were hunting and fishing with a “see something, say something” campaign. I also wonder if the political environment would make a collaboration like that possible today.

Here is what I know. It’s hard to agree to destroy what you love. If we want to preserve the environment, we have to leverage the connections people have to it. There is more to that thought, but I will leave it there.

Last weekend I volunteered for a listening project with a group called Sustaining All Life (SAL). Basically, SAL offers support to people and organizations who are trying to think about the climate crisis. A few SAL volunteers and I set up a station at the Contemporary Arts Center during a performance of the play Ocean Fillibuster. When people came out for intermission, we invited people to talk about the climate crisis.
We had a set of questions to get them started, but we mostly just wanted to get them into how they FEEL about the challenges that we and all living things are facing right now.

There were definitely some themes. We did get some people to talk about the parts of the environment that are precious to them. Most people showed us how hopeless they felt. If I am honest, that is the hardest thing to hear about and probably the most important to listen to. There were a few people that expressed frustration with greenwashing campaigns and the bullshit virtue signaling done by corporations that continue to make money off of the degradation of our collectively owned natural resources. Some people have really found their way to relatively small acts they feel they can make a difference.

Something that stuck out to me is that there just doesn’t seem to be enough felt connection and solidarity for regular people to think they could possibly have enough power to positively influence change. I hate that and I identify with it.

I have spent a bunch of my life in advertising and I really took the greenwashing comments to heart. I suppose that is because I do understand the tool/weapon of effective communication. I left advertising because I didn’t really want to manufacture desire, but what if the good guys had better use of this tool?

Right now corporations have an outsized share of voice and that voice is whispering to our deepest insecurities. The honeylike voice of big oil tells people in Louisiana that they understand and care about our wildlife and our culture. The oil and gas industry invests gazillions in telling us that the drilling they do is safe, important, and absolutely necessary to provide the jobs that will help average people make ends meet.

I would propose another narrative. There is no other threat greater to our way of life in Southeast Louisiana than the oil and gas industry. They are not community members, but carpet baggers coming to take advantage of our resources and scuttle back up north when a hurricane comes and drops tons of Corexit-contaminated water from the Gulf of Mexico into our communities. What if we spent our time reminding people that they are connected to this water? What if this was their water to defend and we helped them come together? What if we manufactured the desire to reclaim our inheritance instead of aligning ourselves with the industry that squanders it?

When my daughter was about 5 years old, we were in Dunedin Florida watching the sunset with my mom and my sister. We sat on a kind of crowded dock where people were waiting to eat at a local dockside restaurant. I asked my daughter if she knew what water we were on. She said no, and I told her that it was the Gulf of Mexico. I told her that this was her Gulf of Mexico and it was hers to love and protect. She asked me what that meant and I told her that people are always trying to put stuff in the Gulf and if she wanted to enjoy it, she would have to fight for it. She grabbed my sisters and walked around to every single person on that dock and said “Hi, I am Cecilia, and this is my Gulf of Mexico and I would appreciate it if you didn’t put anything in it that isn’t supposed to be in there. Ok?”. Obviously, they all agreed. Now she has to hold them to it and I have to help her.