“You walk out of these meetings and you hear two hours of jargon, and you really don’t know what you heard, until you walk out and it starts going through in your head. I’d listen to everything they had to say, and reviewed it in my head, and I’m sitting in front of the building talking to people, and it just hit me. They didn’t even talk about people. You wouldn’t have noticed that they didn’t talk about people because they were so involved in all this other stuff that you had to go back and see what they didn’t say to figure out what they were gonna do.
“And what they didn’t say was anything about people. And I was like, man, New Orleans is in deep trouble. The [Hurricane] Pam scenario was about a hurricane that would hit port directly and it would push the river over the banks of the levies there and the river would flood New Orleans. But to me they just seemed more concerned with the oil stuff and the oil port than about the city of New Orleans, which is why I really started focusing in on all of the musicians that I could get in New Orleans.”
Silencing the Voice of the Wetlands
“Our organization [Voice of the Wetlands] is wide open for anybody to jump in. We’re trying to hold back all of the powers so that we can gather more people to be a force against these powers. If you talk to Walter Williams [2] [creator of Mr. Bill from Saturday Night Live fame], they thought this American wetlands thing would be great, until Shell Oil goes all over it. Then it’s like he [Williams] can’t talk about oil now, because Shell is funding it? When you see the IMAX thing, the first thing you see is Shell Oil. As long as it’s like that, we’re never going to fix it. As long as Shell Oil is funding the awareness tools, we’re never going to fix this.
“I know that that film was a weird circumstance, because we had made this movie called Hurricane Warning, and it was about what could happen. And we started working on this project two years before Katrina. And then right at the end of filming, right on cue, the whole [Katrina] thing happened. So they had to get more money to come in to finish it with Katrina added in. [special effects and Katrina footage]
“There were new days of filming and a lot more editing and trying to get the storyline right. It must have been edited 10 or 20 times to make it all fit the story. So they needed more money, so I’m guessing that’s where Shell came in.
“We didn’t touch oil [in the IMAX film], so it was Shell-friendly. It’s a good introduction, but it aggravates me when we see ‘we can just do it, we know how.’ And we aren’t doing any of it, and we’re not going to do any of it as long as these oil companies are making record profits and all, as long as the EPA restrictions are lifted off the oil companies as they are right now. [3]
“And all of the other things that happened after Katrina to help the oil companies out have hurt us worse. Those things have never been talked about and have never been addressed. They were only talked about when they happened, when the EPA restrictions were lifted, which means they put an oil rig anywhere anytime, they can dig new canals.”[4]
Black Gold Rush
“Right after the hurricane, they were digging new canals. I saw, I was out there in my boat. Here the world just saw us flood because of this [Katrina], and we did get introduced to the fact that the wetlands are our real protection, and here oil companies are right in here instantly digging again. It’s wide open. It’s a gold rush down here. This town [Houma] is, probably after Katrina, another 30 or 40 thousand people. This town was 80,000 before Katrina, and now it’s way beyond. All of that is oil. That’s the only real industry out here.
“My dad owns a pipe company; he’s the guy that puts threads on the pipes so that they can screw them together. That’s all he does is mass production threading, but he’s got patents on them. All these companies have to come to him for high-pressured gas well applications. He has to do the work. He’s made millions, and I was always taught by my family—I don’t think I’m any different than most American families—if it’s legal, and you can make a living doing it, then it’s good. And I didn’t believe that. And I still don’t believe that. Just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s good.”
Killing the Delta
“But then again my family will gladly move out of here. They don’t have any ties here, not like me. I love this place. I understand the importance of Louisiana, for the United States to survive, for the globe to survive. You hear all about this global warming, and you look at all the stuff that supposedly causes it, and the stuff that could be fixing it. Everybody knows that the delta of a river, that those lush forests of swamps and trees are like natural filters, and oxygen makers. And we just killed a huge amount of it. We killed the third largest river on the planet’s delta. We killed one of our big atmosphere scrubbers. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that maybe we should pay more attention to the delta of the Mississippi river.”
Saving the Swamps
“If they were gonna tell us honestly, you’re gonna have to move because we’re going to open to the river back up into here, and we’re gonna buy your place off—this is not anything new, they’ve done this before. These man-made lakes. They buy people’s property off because they’re gonna raise the water level. If they were gonna tell us that they were gonna flood this area, I would go for it. I can at least put a camp out here on stilts, and live farther north where it’s not gonna flood, that’s no problem for me. As long as I know that we can still have swamps and marshes.
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