People doing something to help the Gulf Coast

I haven’t written about the oil disaster. It’s not really a spill. A spill is what happens when something gets a hole in it, or gets knocked over. This was a blowout and the oil is still pumping out… so spill is not the right term. Anyhow, I haven’t written about it despite it being on my mind because the details of who all is really to blame, what is being hidden from us, how bad things really are are tough to keep on top of and many people in the “blogosphere” are doing a good job. Carl Safina’s blog and Deep Sea News have been doing particularly good jobs of this. These are links to recent posts on each of these sites, but they both have many informative and thoughtful ones of late.

I am writing this because I have a semi-personal connection that I want to share. I did a semester in college with the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program. A key component of this semester’s program are 3 field seminars: one offshore voyage, one west-coast road trip, and a third that has changed since I was in the program. When I was there we spent a weekend on Nantucket to get a taste of island life. In the last few years they have been taking the students to the Gulf Coast. These trips are typically an amazing combination of experiential education (think lecture on salmon farming at a salmon farm), interdisciplinary education (you travel with your science, history, literature, and policy professors), cultural experience, and fun.

Over the last few years through the trips to the Gulf, folks in this program have developed strong personal connections to the community on Grand Isle, which is one of the places that has been hardest hit my this disaster. This community depends on the fishing, oil, and tourism industries for its livelihood, and all three are effectively gone. It has reached the point where the grocery store on the island may not be able to stay open. Because of the personal connections people in this program have built they have had many first hand communications with people on Grand Isle. I recently heard the director of the program (Jim Carlton) speak at a mini-reunion and he described the strange feeling of seeing the people he knows on the evening news over and over again.

People from the Williams-Mystic Program have decided to try to do something to help the folks of Grand Isle directly (very little of the BP money for helping people out of work has actually reached this community). A fund has been set up to allow the grocery store to remain open (therefore allowing people to remain on the island where they live) and establish lines of credit at the store for residents. Two people from the program have been sent down to Grand Isle to help set this up and try to document what is actually happening. They have set up a blog here that provides a nice perspective - that of non-media real people spending extended amounts of time on Grand Isle. If you have been wishing there was something you that would actually help the people affected by this disaster, please consider donating to New Englanders For the Gulf even if you are not from New England. Spread the world.