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In Guatemala City, however, an independent movement exists, where activists have occupied the street in front of Congress since the 22nd of August 2011. Here, warm houses were not sacrificed for tents, rather miserable hovels have been exchanged for tents. Activists from the slums have pledged not to leave until the “Housing Law” is approved – demanding a solution for the housing crisis in Guatemala. A lack of affordable accommodation forces uncountable Guatemalans into shantytowns where precarious living conditions often have lethal consequences.

(CNN) — A daughter will walk down the aisle this year without her father. A rig survivor still awakens at night and screams. A Native American tribe in Louisiana now eats pork, chicken and beans instead of oysters and crab.

And the voice of a Cajun musician puts everything into perspective about last year’s oil spill. For years, Tab Benoit had strummed a dire tune of the pillaging of Louisiana’s coast.

“Before all this, you’d try to warn people about problems that were coming, and they’d think you’re a conspiracy theorist,” he says. “The blowout wasn’t a mystery. … It’s not like it was a surprise, ya’ know.”

A year into the nation’s worst oil disaster, BP has launched a public-elations campaign about “making it right.” In a 20-minute video released on the company’s website, group Chef Eecutive Bob Dudley sits at a polished wood table and says the disaster is a “tragedy we deeply regret at BP.”

“In everything we’ve done since that day, we’ve tried to act as a responsible company should,” he says. “I know it will take time to win back people’s respect and it will take actions rather than words. But I hope this helps to demonstrate that we are sorry, that we learned the lessons and we are committed to earning back your trust.”

The video then chronicles BP’s efforts to contain the spill in the days, weeks,and months following the April 20, 2010, explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform.

The plume of crude billowing into the Gulf of Mexico has stopped, and images of oil-soaked birds have subsided. But take a closer look at the Gulf region and you’ll find shattered lives and angry — yet determined — residents.

“One day at a time”
About 50 friends and family members of chief driller Dewey Revette gathered this past Sunday for a fish fry in Mississippi.  It was the first time everyone had been together since he and 10 others were killed in the explosion.

“Just wishing that Dewey was there,” says Sherri Revette, his wife of 26 years. Little things like cleaning the gutters or buying a lawnmower became monumental tasks over the last year.  ”I don’t know what to do,” Sherri says.

And signs of life continue all around. Their first grandchild is due June 30. The boy will be named Dewey.

“I have to try to figure out a way to be excited and not sad,” Sherri says. “That was one of our main dreams, and he wanted a grandson so bad.”

Their youngest daughter, Alicia, always hoped her dad would walk her down the aisle. This October, she’ll be getting married.

“It’s going to be hard,” Sherri says, “on the happiest day of her life, knowing her father’s not going to be there.”

After Sunday’s fish fry, Sherri took friends and relatives to a nearby cemetery where a headstone for Dewey rests.  On the back, there’s an image of Deepwater Horizon “so 100 years from now, the next generations will remember that Dewey was one of the 11 on the rig.”

“He’s missed, and I’m just taking it one day at a time,” she says.  ”We lost 11 good men that shouldn’t have been lost.” She repeats: “It should never have happened.”

The nightmare won’t leave
Matthew Jacobs wakes up screaming in the middle of the night.  He was among the 115 survivors of Deepwater Horizon.  ”It’s something that I just can’t get out of my head,” he says.  Every day, he thinks about his 11 colleagues killed on the rig.

“My mind goes right back to the drill floor,” he says, “and the 11 men.” According to his medical records, Jacobs has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and he takes medication for depression, sleep problems, and other issues.  He visits psychologists regularly. He says he’s undergone 10 weeks of physical therapy for bulging discs in his back.

“It’s basically changed my life completely since this happened,” he says. “Certain things I don’t do because I just don’t feel comfortable. I love fishing and I just don’t feel comfortable doing it because it’s on the water. I’m really claustrophobic now and I feel it every time I get in the elevator.”

Jacobs is still an employee of Transocean, which owned the Deepwater Horizon [drilling rig], but hasn’t worked on a rig since the disaster. He says he’ll never work offshore again.  He’s suing Transocean for pain and suffering and loss of wages.

At the end of last year, when Transocean gave bonuses to employees and touted a stellar safety year, Jacobs says, “It made me sick to my stomach.”  Transocean later apologized for its handling of the bonuses, and five top executives said they would donate their safety bonuses to the families of the 11 workers killed.

What happened on April 20, 2010, Jacobs says, will forever be with him.
“You have to live your life now taking medicine every day to try to keep the nightmares from coming back,” he says.  ”It’s always in the back of your mind, and I think about it every day.”

Avoiding oysters for a year
In the Louisiana marshes, members of the Pointe Aux Chenes Indian Tribe say the spill has affected everything.

“It changed our way of life for sure,” says tribe member Theresa Dardar. “We’re not eating like we usually eat.”

The nearby marshes are still slickened with oil, she says.

The tribe is made up of about 700 members whose ancestors were forced from their lands and resettled to Louisiana more than 100 years ago. Coastal erosion had already hit the tribe hard. Then the spill hit.

Her family used to eat seafood every day.  Now, they eat shrimp only on Fridays.  The rest of the week, it’s chicken, pork and beans.

She says she hasn’t had an oyster since “before the spill.”  That especially hurts because she longs for the oysters of the past.

“We love fresh oysters,” she says.  ”My husband even more so.  He was tempted to get some recently, but he said no, he wouldn’t take a chance.”

Dardar says the tribe had independent tests conducted on local shrimp, oysters and crab — and the results showed some were tainted. “We don’t trust the tests that the state and federal governments did.”

The Food and Drug Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have consistently said thousands of tests “prove Gulf seafood is safe from oil and dispersant contamination.”

Her anger, Dardar says, is directed straight at BP.

“I’ve become angry”
On a recent French Quarter spring morning, with the sun shining and the birds singing, Al Sunseri struggled to be cheerful.  A year ago, just after the spill, he was still hanging on as best he could to business as usual. After all, P&J Oyster Company had survived a lot of calamities in its 135-year history. He was certain it could weather this one. Now, he’s not so sure.

“This was always full,” he says, pointing to cold storage rooms that now gape empty.  ”Lots of activity going on . Shuckers lined up along this stall. We had around 20 employees, give or take a few.”

Today the company is down to Sunseri, his brother [Sal], and a few part-timers. Rather than reeling in the magnificent hauls of fresh Louisiana oysters prized by top chefs, they now spend almost all their time buying and re-selling oysters from other Gulf states where the impact was less devastating. And they fume about BP’s promises to make everything right in the wake of the spill.

“I expected them to follow through on that,” he says, standing near a now-unused processing table.  ”As time went on, I found out that isn’t what was occurring.  And I’ve become angry.”

Although his attorney won’t let him talk numbers, Sunseri says his business has been reduced to a small fraction of what it once was.  A claim filed in November with the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, the agency set up to handle claims for BP, has finally produced a check, but Sunseri says it was for far less than what he has lost.

The top Gulf Coast Claims Facility official, while declining to comment directly on that case, says the organization is continuing to address such complaints and concerns.

Still, for Sunseri, a future that seemed assured before the spill remains in limbo. He wonders when the market for Gulf seafood will bounce back; he wonders how the Louisiana oyster beds will recover; and he wonders if he will ever see the day when he can truly say the oil spill is a thing of the past.

Florida politician: “Damn right”
When brown tar balls began to wash up on the white-sand beaches of Destin and Fort Walton Beach, Florida, last year, county officials weren’t willing to wait for BP, the Coast Guard or any other agency to make it stop.

Okaloosa County officials attracted national attention when they went against federal plans and added skimmers, barges, extra oil-absorbing boom and an air wall to push oil away. They estimated it could cost about $6 million per month in funds they didn’t have, but they refused to wait on what they saw as bureaucracy and reactive safety procedures.

The move “actually worked to our advantage.  It forced the issue with the Coast Guard, BP, everybody,” said Wayne Harris, Chairman of the Okaloosa County Commission.

The good news?  ”We didn’t need it, thank God.” Relatively little oil landed on their beaches, and it never took over the fresh-and-salt water Choctawhatchee Bay.

This year, at least, the parasailing, jet skiing, and fishing [are] back, along with expanded service on Vision Airlines, Harris said.

Still, the county is considering joining a lawsuit related to a “nightmare” claims process and is slowly rebuilding after fear of oil rocked the tourism economy. Harris said his constituents supported county officials’ decision to stop oil at any cost, and they’re still hanging with them one year later.

“I’m thankful the commission had the strength of character to do what’s right,” Harris said.  ”You ask if I’d do it again — you’re damn right I would.”

Domestic abuse hot lines skyrocket
In the weeks and months after the oil disaster, Beth Meeks saw her business boom.  Given her job as Executive Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence, that was horrible news.

Shelters filled up, programs lost funding, and hot line calls grew on a whole by 20% — the majority coming from the southern part of the state closest to the Gulf.

But as she said then — and reiterates now — the disaster didn’t create abuse where it didn’t exist before. The fact that offenders were out of work, experiencing heightened stress, and spending time at home around those they abused made matters worse.

A year later, Meeks says survivors of domestic violence are still coming to shelters and reaching out for help in waves. As delayed layoffs occurred and savings dried up, the stress may have hit families at different times, she says.

The overall need, Meeks says, has been enormous, with some programs now reporting a 50 to 80% increase in phone calls and shelter bed use.

She oversees 20 state-funded domestic violence programs, 14 of which are in the southern part of the state and most affected by the oil disaster fallout.  Among those, she says, half are reporting higher rates of substance abuse and two-thirds are noting increased levels of depression in survivors, with more asking for mental-health services.

At the same time, anecdotally, programs are also hearing from survivors about a more rapid escalation in violence, as well as greater severity of violence, meaning more emergency-room visits.

The passage of time has compounded the problems for many, Meeks says. And all of this comes just as donations from individuals — in many cases people tied to the fishing or oil industries — have plummeted.  While the United Way used to be a big source of financial support, its help took a nosedive because the organization relies on local communities and corporations that often match employee gifts.

BP, meantime, provided $500,000 to domestic violence shelters, Meeks says, but that funding didn’t make up for the money programs lost. The program that benefited most from BP dollars received no more than $80,000, she says, but it lost $100,000.  Many programs have cut staff.

The BP support runs out in June, Meeks adds. “No one knows what will happen then.”

Musician: Get off your butt
When Cajun musician Tab Benoit strums a tune, he wants people to listen. He’d been warning people for years about the deteriorating Louisiana wetlands, the deterioration’s harmful consequences, and what he perceived as a lack of concern by Big Oil, government and the public.

“Now, here we are,” he says, “we get to use the coast of Louisiana as an example of the front line of change you don’t want.  That kind of rolls everything up into a nutshell, ya’ know.”

Benoit lives out on the bayou.  Before he became a musician, he was a pilot who flew pipeline patrol.  ”You’d see a problem down there, report it and it wouldn’t get fixed.”

“I’m not angry at BP,” Benoit adds.  ”I’m angry at us. … It’s given me more information to get the public aware of these things.  When something like this happens, people around the country go: What’s gong on down in Louisiana?”

He says what’s happened in Louisiana is a microcosm of complacency in America.  ”Without public pressure, there is no power.  And we continue to get steamrolled by big corporations.  It’s not just oil.  It’s across the board.” That, he says, is the real wake-up call.

“My goal is to try to get the public off their butts,” he says.  ”To me, that’s bigger and more powerful than the oil itself.”

*[CNN's Wayne Drash, Chuck Haddad, Tom Foreman, Jamie Gumbrecht and Jessica Ravitz contributed to this report.]

Yesterday‚s sudden death of Right Livelihood Award Laureate Hermann Scheer bereft the world of one its most dedicated and successful advocates for renewable energy and energy independence.

Hermann Scheer, Member of the German Parliament and President of Eurosolar, had been named by TIME magazine as a ‘Hero for the Green Century’ in 2002. He died unexpectedly in Berlin on October 14th.

Interview: Governments are puppets

Amy Goodman (RLA 2008) from Democracy Now!, USA, conducted one of the last interviews with Hermann Scheer (RLA 1999) at the 30th Anniversary Conference of the Right Livelihood Award in Bonn, Germany, last month.

In this interview, Hermann Scheer once more made his case for a decentralised energy system relying on renewable energies. He calls it a “fight between centralization and decentralization, between energy dictatorship and energy participation in the energy democracy. And because nothing works without energy, it‚s a fight between democratic values and technocratical values.”

Watch the interview by clicking here

Scheer leaves a big void

Hermann Scheer received the Right Livelihood Award in 1999 “for his indefatigable work for the promotion of solar energy worldwide.” The Right Livelihood Award Foundation was deeply saddened to learn about the death of Hermann Scheer.

“Hermann leaves a big void on a personal, as well as on a political, level. He pinpointed fossil and nuclear energy production as the major danger of our time and showed the world how this threat can be averted. There are only a few people who have done more for the future of our planet. Our thoughts are with his family, who supported this work.

Hermann Scheer was a practical visionary and political person at his very core. He fought tirelessly for the cause of a 100% renewable energy future, often cross party lines, never putting his career first. The German Renewable Energy Law, which essentially goes back to Herman Scheer, now serves as a role model worldwide.

To see how much Herman Scheer was able to achieve as a parliamentarian and civil society activist gives hope for our political system. He has influenced and inspired thousands of colleagues and fellow activists around the world. They will continue his work, but will have very big shoes to fill.”

Ole von Uexkull, Executive Director of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation

Alex Miller, an EMT from New Mexico, spent time in Haiti after the earthquake working for a clinic in the town of Petit Goave near Port-au-Prince. He realized the clinic could use an ambulance for transporting patients so when he returned to the U.S. he began to fundraise for one. Longtime Plenty donor and former Plenty volunteer with the Plenty Ambulance Service in the South Bronx 30 years ago, Robert Reifel heard about Alex’s effort and decided to contribute through Plenty. In the photo above Robert presents Alex with a check for $2,000, money that helped buy the ambulance. The two are holding up a display of pictures of the ambulance and of the clinic in Haiti.

By Jonathan M. Katz, Associated Press Writer – Mon Jun 21, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Haiti has made little progress in rebuilding in the five months since its earthquake, because of an absence of leadership, disagreements among donors and general disorganization, a U.S. Senate report says.

Obtained Monday by The Associated Press, the eight-page report is meant to give Congress a picture of Haiti today as U.S. legislators consider authorizing $2 billion to support the country’s reconstruction.

That picture is grim: Millions displaced from their homes, rubble and collapsed buildings still dominating the landscape. Three weeks into hurricane season, with tropical rains lashing the capital daily, construction is being held up by land disputes and customs delays while plans for moving people out of tent-and-tarp settlements remain in “early draft form,” it says.

The report was written by staff of Sen. John Kerry, the Massachuetts Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and other Democrats who interviewed U.S., Haitian, United Nations and other officials and visited resettlement camps, hospitals and schools throughout the quake zone.

“While many immediate humanitarian relief priorities appear to have been met, there are troubling signs that the recovery and longer term rebuilding activities are flagging,” said the report, which is scheduled to be released Tuesday.

Three times it says the rebuilding process has “stalled” since the Jan. 12 disaster.

The report also criticizes the government of Haitian President Rene Preval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, saying it has “not done an effective job of communicating to Haitians that it is in charge and ready to lead the rebuilding effort.” The report calls on Preval to take a “more visible and active role, despite the difficulties.”

Bellerive responded to the criticism in a Monday interview with the AP. He said officials are working hard behind the scenes to ensure reconstruction does not simply mean the rebuilding of barely livable slums.

“We understand the impatience and we are the ones more frustrated than anybody,” the prime minister said. “It took some time. I believe four months (since a U.N. donors’ conference in March) to plan the refoundation from such a disaster is pretty acceptable.”

With a chuckle, he also said it is unfair for U.S. officials to take him to task when the Senate still has not approved aid money that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton promised at the donors’ conference.

“They ask me to move more projects when the money is still on hold,” Bellerive said.

In all, just 2 percent of the $5.3 billion in near-term aid pledges have actually been delivered, up from 1 percent last week.

The report expresses concerns that even once the money is in hand, it will not move quickly enough to help. The funds are managed by a 26-member reconstruction commission led by Bellerive and former U.S. President Bill Clinton that started its operations last week.

While the report calls the commission the “best near-term prospect for driving rebuilding,” it also says the panel “has the potential to dramatically slow things down through cumbersome bureaucratic obstacles at a time when Haiti cannot afford to delay.”

The report notes disagreements among donors over strategy, approach and priorities, saying the disputes “are undercutting recovery and rebuilding.”

The reconstruction panel includes representatives of donors who pledged at least $100 million in cash or $200 million of debt relief, including the United States, Venezuela, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank.

Bellerive said the report’s criticism that the panel has been too slow in organizing is already moot. “We had a meeting, we have an office, we have administrative support,” he said.

One thing on which all parties agree is the importance of November elections. The legislature has almost entirely dissolved after members’ terms expired because the quake forced the cancellation of February legislative elections. Preval’s five-year term ends next February; an attempt to prolong his term by several months if elections are not held resulted in protesters clashing with police in front of the ruins of the presidential palace.

Failing to hold the November elections on time, even despite the losses of the electoral commission’s headquarters and records, could imperil “Haiti’s fragile democracy,” the report says. But it expresses limited optimism that a plan for holding the vote is “apparently imminent.”

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — With graffiti and protests, from sweltering tents to air-conditioned offices, Haitians are desperately trying to get a message to their government and the world: enough with the status quo.

The simple phrase “Aba Préval” (Down with Préval, a reference to Haiti’s president, René Préval) has become shorthand for a long list of frustrations, and an epithet expressing a broader fear — that Haitians will be stuck in limbo indefinitely, and that the opportunity to reinvent Haiti is being lost.

While few have given up entirely on the dream that a more efficient, more just Haiti might rise from the rubble, increasingly, hope is giving way to stalemate and bitterness. “Is this really it?” Haitians ask. They complain that the politically connected are benefiting most from reconstruction work that has barely begun. They shake their heads at crime’s coming back, unproductive politicians and aid groups that are struggling with tarpaulin metropolises that look more permanent every day.

“We’re going to be in this position forever,” said Patrick Moussignac, the owner of Radio Caraïbes, a popular station broadcasting from a tent downtown. “We could be living on the streets for 10 or 20 years.”

Government officials have repeatedly called for patience. And among American and United Nations officials, there is a sense that Mr. Préval and his deputies have become more engaged, putting in long days at an annex behind the damaged presidential palace.

United Nations officials now calmly predict that elections will take place by the end of the year, but no clear alternative to Mr. Préval has emerged.

But in the meantime, until the next government takes office? “We are in a period of perilous stagnation,” said Robert Fatton Jr., a historian at the University of Virginia who was born in Haiti but is now an American citizen.

Parliament is now essentially disbanded; power lies with Mr. Préval, his cabinet and a reconstruction commission led by the Haitian prime minister and former President Bill Clinton.

Haitians are not especially pleased. Freshly painted graffiti on main thoroughfares now declare “Aba Okipasyon” (Down With the Occupation) and call for the ouster of NGOs, or nongovernmental organizations.

Mostly, Haitians say they just want someone in charge, telling them what to expect. “The people need a response,” said Michèle Pierre-Louis, the prime minister under Mr. Préval until last year. Because the president has not told families in tents or business owners what they might receive to rebuild, she said, “they do not know where he is leading them.”

Missed opportunities are beginning to mount. Immediately after the earthquake, Ms. Pierre-Louis said, Haiti’s central bank should have guaranteed loans or loosened its collateral requirements to help small businesses trying to reopen.

Before Parliament closed, she added, lawmakers could have made it easier for members of the Haitian diaspora to invest — perhaps by easing rules requiring that joint ventures be 51 percent Haitian-owned.

That might have opened the country to more people like Alain Armand, 36, a Haitian-American lawyer from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who is now trying to open several businesses here in Port-au-Prince, the capital, including a bed and breakfast.

Trying is the operative word, he said: “It costs $3,000, and it takes at least three months to get incorporated. There is no organized structure in which we, outsiders to NGO-land, can operate.”

Even within “NGO-land,” disappointment is settling in. Complaints about the government dragging its feet over decision-making are common. Reconstruction so far has mostly amounted to an emergency response in the form of plastic. About 564,000 tarpaulins had been distributed as of early May, enough to cover an estimated 1.7 million people; or laid out lengthwise, to run from New York City to past Albuquerque.

The tarpaulins are an enormous help, as the drenching afternoon rains begin, but they are they are not safe or strong homes. “In the beginning, we felt like it was fine for us,” said Gaela Rifort, 30, outside her tent in Pétionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. “But now, they are not enough.”

The urgent demand for more can also be seen in the perfectly formed piles of bricks that suddenly appear each day, like giant termite mounds, in the middle of major streets. Initially, rubble in the roads came from the earthquake; now it is a sign of property owners clearing their land.

Garnier Daudin, 69, a taxi driver who owns an apartment building tipped on its side in Carrefour-Feuille, a neighborhood in the capital, said he had no choice but to move it to the street. “I have renters,” he said. “It’s been five months, and the government hasn’t told me anything.”

Looking toward a nearby intersection, he added, “When we drop it there on the main street, the government will have to come get it.”

Or so he hopes. In many areas, piles that were once on the street have been pushed closer to the curb, and left there. One large mound on Route de Delmas has been walked over so many times in the past few months that bricks have been flattened into a dusty gray path — which runs by shoe sellers like Manoucheka Walker, 22, who said “the government left the pile with us” because “the government doesn’t care.”

Just behind her, on a rusty blue fence, a large “Aba Préval” had been painted in the bright red of the Haitian flag.

Reconstruction workers seem to be just as exasperated. The United Nations estimates that the quake destroyed 105,000 homes, and damaged 208,000 others, mostly in Port-au-Prince. That is a lot of rubble for the roads.

Indeed, when this reporter followed one of the new mango-colored dump trucks assigned to reconstruction, it rerouted around several of them, delaying its arrival at a canal where it collected trash pulled from the ravine to prevent flooding.

Haitian professionals like Frank St.-Juste, 48, an engineer who owns a construction company, had hoped for more. He said he thought the earthquake would lead to a more open, pragmatic government with stricter bidding procedures, urban planning and international standards.

Instead, he said he was being paid to clear damaged homes by a friend who has a contract with a nongovernmental organization that he declined to name. “It’s not the right way to do it,” he said.

At the time, he stood beside a backhoe that he owns, on a hilltop beside Fort National, which is one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the quake. He said his company was the only one assigned to the area. It was nearly dark and he was still working, but his temporarily broken-down backhoe and four trucks were hardly adequate for the densely packed neighborhood with hundreds of pulverized homes.

Asked how he chose which property to clear first, he said, “We have to start somewhere.” Later, like so many others, his mood darkened.

“There is no sense of priorities or sequencing,” he said. “There is no master plan.”

Like many American Indians on the bayou, Emary Billiot blames oil companies for ruining his ancestral marsh over the decades. Still, he’s always been able to fish — but now, with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, even that is not a certainty.

An oil spill — 5 million gallons and counting — spreading across the Gulf of Mexico has closed bays and lakes in Louisiana’s bountiful delta, including fishing grounds that feed the last American-Indian villages in three parishes. It is a bitter blow for the tribes of south Louisiana who charge that drilling has already destroyed their swamps and that oil and land companies illegally grabbed vast areas.

Only 26 families remain on the island today.

“Once the oil gets in the marshes, it’s all over, that’s where your shrimp spawn,” said Billiot, a wiry fisherman with tough hands, his fingernails caked with bayou dirt. “Then we’re in trouble,” he said in a heavy French-Indian accent.

In the month since an offshore drilling platform exploded, killing 11 workers, BP PLC has struggled to stop the leak from a blown-out underwater well. Over the weekend, engineers finally succeeded in using a stopper-and-tube combination to siphon some of the gushing oil into a tanker.

In Pointe-Au-Chien, 60-year-old Sydney Verdin felt a tingle of vengeful satisfaction at BP PLC’s misfortune over the oil spill.
“I’m happy for the oil spill. Now the oil companies are paying for it the same way we’ve had to pay for it,” said Verdin, disabled by a stroke, as he sat in his living room and watched his grandchildren play.

Even before the leak, oil’s influence on the south Louisiana landscape was unmistakable. Signs warning about underground pipelines are everywhere. So are plastic poles in canals to show the pipelines’ location. Out in the marsh, oil and gas facilities are often the only lights visible at night.

Since the 1930s, oil and natural gas companies dug about 10,000 miles of canals, straight as Arizona highways, through the oak and cypress forests, black mangroves, bird rushes and golden marshes. If lined up in a row, the canals would stretch nearly halfway around the world.

They funneled salt water into the marshes, killing trees and grass and hastening erosion. Some scientists say drilling caused half of Louisiana’s land loss, or about 1,000 square miles.

“If you see pictures from the sky, how many haphazard cuts were made in the land, it blows your mind,” said Patty Ferguson, a member of the Pointe-Au-Chien tribe. “We weren’t just fishermen. We raised crops, we had wells. We can’t anymore because of the salt water intrusion.”

As companies intensified their search for petroleum in the 20th century, communities where the Choctaw, Chitimacha, Houma, Attakapas and Biloxi tribes married Europeans in the 1800s have seen their way of life disappear.

“This is not a two-week story, but a hundred-year story,” said Michael Dardar, historian with the United Houma Nation tribe. “Coastal erosion, land loss and more vulnerability to hurricanes and flooding all trace back to this century of unchecked economic development.” Oil companies have long argued that their drilling in south Louisiana consistently was approved by federal and state agencies and did not violate the law. Most attempts to get oil companies to fill in the canals have failed in court. Land claims have proven hard to win because south Louisiana’s American Indians have not won recognition as sovereign tribes by the federal government.

The damage didn’t end with the canals. U.S. Geological Survey scientists say sucking so much oil and gas out of the ground likely caused the land in many places to sink by half an inch a year. In boom days in the 1970s, Louisiana’s coastal wells pumped 360 million barrels a year, an eighth of what Saudi Arabia ships to the market today. Oil wells also discharged about a billion gallons daily of brine, thick with naturally occurring chemicals like chlorides, calcium and magnesium, as well as acids used in drilling.

To many Indians, oil has meant an unmitigated disaster.”They never done nothing for me,” Billiot said. Pointing across canals and open water at the village’s edge, he said: “You see where all that water is: It was all hard ground. You could walk from here all the way out there. They started making cuts, the water come in. It didn’t take too many days to make a canal. A big machine and they’re done. One little stream of water here, after so many years it eat up, and that’s why everything is wide open right now.

“

Wenceslaus Billiot remembers when farms and forest covered the island.

In addition, American Indians say land and oil companies seized swamps that rightfully belonged to them. They’ve sued unsuccessfully to regain vast areas now owned by large landholding and energy companies. Joel Waltzer, a New Orleans lawyer who’s worked on an aboriginal land claims lawsuit for the Pointe-Au-Chien tribe, said Indian tribes were so isolated they missed the opportunity to claim ownership of swamplands after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. “They were not English speaking; they were completely illiterate and they had no means to make it to New Orleans and make their claim,” Waltzer said.
Much of south Louisiana was claimed by the federal government and sold off at 19th-century auctions to land companies. By the 1900s, oil companies bought much of the land in south Louisiana. Allegations abound among Indians that oil companies hoodwinked them into selling even the small bits of land they owned.

Flag flying on Isle de Jean Charles.

“They take the land. That was years ago,” said Ranzel Billiot, a 30-year-old shrimper and one of Emary Billiot’s cousins. “A lot of the older people they took the land from didn’t know how to read or write.”About 40 years ago, Verdin, the 60-year-old from Pointe-Au-Chien, his father and a cousin took shotguns and stood in the way of a Louisiana Land and Exploration Co. marsh buggy crew digging a trench that was about to go through a nearby Indian burial ground. “We said: If you go one more step, you’ll risk your life,” he recalled. “They didn’t go through the burial ground. I can’t think of one Indian who ever made any money from oil.”

© 2010 NOLA.com. All rights reserved. (photos by Plenty International)