Marking the third anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and celebrating the 43rd anniversary of Earth Day, Loyola University New Orleans’ Environment Program and the Loyola Film Buffs Institute will screen the film, “Dirty Energy.” It highlights the personal stories of Louisiana fishermen and locals impacted by the oil spill. The screening is set for Monday, April 22 at 7 p.m. in Miller Hall on Loyola’s main campus.

The director Bryan Hopkins, as well as film participants Aaron Viles, deputy director of the Gulf Restoration Network, and George Barisich of the St. Bernard Fisherman’s Association, will be on hand for a Q-and-A session with the audience following the film. Loyola sociology professor Anthony E. Ladd, Ph.D., will moderate the session. The Center for the Study of New Orleans is also co-sponsoring the event.

“This is an excellent and hard-hitting film that reviews the history of the events leading up to the BP disaster and the continuing ecological and health impacts of both the blowout and the dispersant used to ‘clean up’ the oil,” Ladd said.

One undergraduate researcher at Loyola University New Orleans spent much of the past summer deep in the mud of the Mississippi River Delta studying how major disasters such as the 2010 BP oil spill and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 affect aquatic life today. Senior Environmental Science major Thomas Sevick will report the project’s unexpected research findings during Loyola’s Biology Undergraduate Research Symposium Friday, April 5. The symposium features more than a dozen undergraduate students presenting ground-breaking research.

Sevick collaborated on the project with biology professor Frank Jordan, Ph.D., chair of Loyola’s Department of Biological Sciences. The two are comparing data on the number and variety of fishes, shrimp, crabs and other creatures in the Mississippi River Delta before and after Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill.

Given the extent and severity of the BP oil spill, they predicted that the abundance and diversity of aquatic organisms would be reduced. What they uncovered astonished them both. Preliminary findings show that the number and variety of shrimp, crabs and fishes actually increased following major environmental disturbances.

“It’s surprising,” Sevick said. “And we’re definitely not saying that the oil spill was a good thing, but our research tells us that the Mississippi River Delta is really resilient.” Sevick believes this resiliency is a great sign for coastal wetlands, which are important nursery grounds for commercially and recreationally important species.

Sevick will highlight those findings at the Biology Undergraduate Research Symposium scheduled from 12:30 to 5 p.m. in Nunemaker Auditorium located on the third floor of Monroe Hall on Loyola’s main campus. His presentation on “Post-Disturbance Abundance and Diversity of Marsh Nekton in the Mississippi River Delta” is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. The symposium is followed by a crawfish social from 5 to 7:30 p.m. in Dixon Court at the St. Charles Ave. entrance of the Communications/Music Complex.

The researchers used large, square traps to catch all types of live aquatic life, including the kinds of shrimp, crab and fishes important to the state’s seafood industry. While Jordan and Sevick were picking lots of creatures out of the traps last summer, local fishermen were also doing well.

“This kind of resilience could just be the nature of the Mississippi River Delta,” Sevick said. “It’s important that we find out why this ecosystem is so resilient.”

It’s gratifying for Sevick to participate in such ground-breaking research as an undergraduate student. “It reassures you that you can go headfirst into grad school,” Sevick said. His research was funded in part by Louisiana Sea Grant’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, and this was Sevick’s first-ever research grant.

The research isn’t just great for Sevick’s resume, it’s also connects his passion for the state’s fishing industry.

“I grew up here in New Orleans, so I’m really passionate about the fisheries here,” Sevick said. “That was a big deal to work on something that I cared about.”

Sevick is currently considering graduate school options and is also interested in pursuing a career with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

Sevick will be one of the very first Environmental Science majors to graduate from Loyola and the first to complete departmental honors research in the Environment Program. Jordan has recruited two additional Environmental Science majors—Jenny Simon and Samantha Stieffel—to continue research on fishes and other aquatic organisms that depend on Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.

For media interviews or high-resolution images, please contact Mikel Pak, Loyola’s associate director of public affairs, at 504-861-5448.

In Fall 2010, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier, J.D. ’70, was selected to preside over more than 300 lawsuits brought by fishermen, rig workers and others, stemming from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The trial was scheduled to begin March 5, but BP and the plaintiffs’ attorneys agreed to settle. On March 8, Barbier ordered a court-appointed administrator to oversee the process of the settlement.

A hearing was held in July 2010 in Boise, Idaho, by a seven-judge panel, known as the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, to decide how to tie together hundreds of spill-related lawsuits.

Thomas Sims of the law firm Baron & Budd, P.C., which argued for Barbier to oversee the consolidated cases, said, “Barbier will be a great judge. He knows how to work with plaintiffs and defendants to get the case moving forward with minimal court involvement.”

In addition, Barbier has also handled many cases related to Hurricane Katrina, including the first federal trial in Louisiana in 2007 brought by policyholders against State Farm Insurance over damage from the devastating 2005 hurricane.

Barbier has strong ties to the Gulf Coast region. A native of New Orleans, he attended Southeastern Louisiana University and Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. He was in private practice for several years in New Orleans before former President Bill Clinton called him for the federal bench in 1998. Barbier is a 14-year veteran of the federal bench.

For more information, please contact James Shields in the Office of Public Affairs at 504-861-5888 or jshields@loyno.edu.

How should government plan for the worst-case scenario? A year after the BP blowout, which claimed 11 lives and spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the question is more than academic.

Nor is it limited to that event. Earlier this month 12 people were killed and 200 injured when an explosion ripped through a metro station in Belarus during rush hour. A week before, Southwest Airlines passengers watched in horror as a chunk of their plane’s roofing tore away from the fuselage, forcing an emergency (and, thankfully, safe) landing.

Did I mention that Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, crippled by last month’s tsunami, is still streaming radioactive iodide into the air?

The truth is that even with the events of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina in our recent past, we are still not paying enough attention to catastrophic threats. And when we do, we go about it the wrong way. Low-probability, high-impact events — sometimes called “black swans” — are notoriously hard to plan for.

Policy makers are used to managing threats to safety or the environment according to a loose formula in which risk is the product of an event’s probability multiplied by its potential harm. This equation helps government set priorities. The probability-impact relationship informs a wide array of government standards, from the quality of your drinking water to the wattage in your car’s headlights.

But what if you don’t know the probability of an event or the full dimensions of its impact? If that formula is your only decision-making tool, a black swan will eat you for lunch.

Estimating the probability of a worst case is often impossible because they occur so rarely. Our measurements of hurricanes in the Gulf go back only a few decades; and climate change will likely alter those trends. Before last year, a catastrophic blowout in the Gulf had never occurred.

Even when you can ballpark a low probability, psychologists note that people underestimate the significance. We’re pretty good at comparing, say, a 50 percent risk to a 25 percent risk. But when risks fall below 1 percent, we stare at our shoes and reduce all likelihood to zero. That’s why you probably don’t think much about a major earthquake striking Manhattan or a tsunami battering the Oregon coast, even though each has happened and will probably happen again.

Experts fall prey to this bias, as well. While assessing flood-control measures before Katrina, scientists used storm models that intentionally left out data from two previous hurricanes on the theory that their force was atypical. When officials at BP performed analyses before beginning operations in the Gulf, they similarly down played the threat of undersea blowouts on the grounds that they were unlikely.

In addition, because black swans come in so many shapes and sizes, it is hard to imagine their full impact beforehand or to predict how the next one will be triggered. Too often we look only behind us, preparing ourselves for the last disaster. We imagine we can avoid our problems with narrow fixes. Worried about leaking tankers off the Alaska coast? Require double-hulled vessels. Terrorists with shoe bombs? Slide your heels and loafers through a scanner. Sonar shut-off valves for blowout preventers sound like a good idea and will probably come next. But we need more.

The way out of this quandary is to supplement standard risk management strategies with a robust array of planning and economic initiatives designed to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience on a broad scale, doing as much as is reasonably affordable and preferring options that provide multiple benefits. Such a strategy would present risk categories from a holistic perspective. It would educate policy makers and the public about a range of plausible worse cases and work toward acceptable resolutions. In addition to asking, “What would make this oil rig safer?” we would ask, “What would make us less vulnerable to the risk of blowouts and more resilient afterwards?”

In addition to oil rig safety, the answer might include a host of other concerns like strengthening deep-sea fisheries and shoreline ecosystems, developing contingency plans for native tribes that rely on fish, diversifying coastal economies and diversifying our sources of energy production.

Planning for resilience is like eating a healthy diet. You don’t eat right only to avoid colon cancer; you eat right because it makes your body stronger, more vital and less vulnerable to risks of all kinds. No one can say what the next black swan will look like. All we know is that it’s coming.

As the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill approaches, Loyola University New Orleans will host the 2010-11 President’s Forum, “Oil and Water: Spotlight on the Gulf” on Wednesday, April 27, at 7:30 p.m. in Monroe Hall’s Nunemaker Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

The forum will provide first-hand accounts and analysis from experts who witnessed the environmental disaster up close. It will also explore the issue of climate change, what it means to our coast, the continued damage caused by the BP oil spill, and the lingering health and economic concerns of Gulf Coast citizens.

The event will feature a distinguished and diverse panel of experts in their fields.

Virginia Burkett, Ph.D., executive director of the U.S. Geological Survey, is a nationally and internationally recognized leader in research on the impacts of climate change on our natural ecosystems. Dr. Burkett was an early leader in the advocacy movement for addressing climate change when she began to focus on the issue in the 1990s. She is renowned as one of the most knowledgeable scientists in her field and was a lead author of sections of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third and Fourth Assessment Reports, for which Vice President Al Gore received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Amy Harmon recently provided extensive coverage on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill for the New York Times. Harmon spent months examining nearly every aspect of the oil spill, from its damaging effects on the environment to the plight of the fishermen nearly driven into bankruptcy as the seafood industry struggles to recover. She has written more than a half-dozen articles on the far reaching consequences of the oil spill, as well as contributing to the ongoing discussion on The Times’ environment and energy blog.

Gulf Restoration Network Executive Director Cynthia Sarthou has taken an active role in repairing the Gulf’s damaged ecosystem in the wake of the oil spill. In October 2010, she and other concerned parties joined forces in filing a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency in response to the use of possibly toxic dispersants used by companies charged in cleaning up the oil slick. She is also fighting Congress’ attempts to slash the budget that would drastically cut funding for clean water and clean air programs, national parks and clean energy programs.

Robert A. Thomas, Ph.D., director of Loyola’s Center for Environmental Communication, will serve as moderator. In addition to being an expert on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its disastrous effects on the Gulf Coast’s fragile ecosystem, Thomas was the founding director of the Louisiana Nature Center and is past president of the Association of Nature Center Administrators. He was named Conservation Educator of the Year in 1986 and since the 2010 BP oil spill, Thomas joined the Louisiana Office of Tourism’s Expert Bureau to help improve Louisiana’s image nationally and has appeared in hundreds of news stories dedicated to the spill. He also has led more than 200 post-Katrina recovery tours of the New Orleans area.

Loyola University’s President’s Forum on Current Issues and Controversies seeks to explore and discuss some of the most compelling contemporary issues facing us today. Featuring internationally recognized scholars, the forum’s goal is to develop a dialogue with the larger community that helps us deepen our understanding and challenges us to move toward a more just and enlightened society.

For more information on the President’s Forum or to schedule an interview, contact Matt Lambert at 504-861-5448 or by e-mail at mlambert@loyno.edu.

Listen to Jim Gabour’s interview with Intelligence Squared. A summary follows.

As scientists continue to debate the severity of the Deepwater Horizon spill and the likelihood of lasting damage to ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico, questions are being asked about how politicians have responded. Some have accused Barack Obama of wild over-reaction to the spill, and of using it as a vehicle for anti-corporate propaganda. They argue that he was playing to the gallery in order to win back some popularity ahead of the mid-term elections. The finger has also been pointed at green groups who, some say, are deliberately playing up the scale of the spill in order to discourage us from using oil at all. Others argue that it was a huge catastrophe, and that the Gulf of Mexico and the Louisiana coastline have been devastated by the spill, and will continue to be so for years to come.

Jim Gabour

There has certainly been a sensational atmosphere to all of this. At the same time as people are screaming for help, they are doing ad campaigns saying that the beaches are here and ready for visitors.

The magnification by the media doesn’t actually help. The tourism and seafood seasons have effectively been killed by the media. As far away as New York, people are ordering sea food and refusing it if it comes from the Gulf.

For those who have lost their livelihoods, it cannot be hyped enough. The world will collectively forget soon, that’s how it goes. But oyster beds have been ruined for the next five to ten years. As one fisherman said; “you can fool the people, but you can’t fool the fish.”

Americans will keep guzzling oil, prospecting will remain in the Gulf of Mexico. Of course, not everything that’s wrong here is down to BP, (the area was used as a dumping ground for bombs after World War Two), but the habitat’s fragility has meant that the effects of the accident have been far greater than if it had happened elsewhere.

Post-election violence in Kenya, 2008.

The earthquake in Haiti, 2010.

The oil spill in the Gulf, 2010.

How is your cell phone part of the solution?

If you thought “texting donations,” you’re on the right track. But there’s another valuable resource besides monetary donations: Information.

That’s why the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has partnered with Ushahidi to develop the Oil Spill Crisis Map.

Volunteer groups, residents of the Gulf states, or anyone with a cell phone or internet connection can upload reports by

• texting (504) 27 27 OIL, that’s (504) 272-7645,
• emailing bpoilspill@gmail.com,
• tweeting #BPspillmap,
• or filling out this form

And you can get involved volunteering here.

The Ushahidi Platform, developed in Kenya, uses an approach called crowdsourcing (think outsourcing work to a crowd), allowing many individuals to do what no one could do alone: create a map, a dense web of information. This has become an invaluable resource in crisis response work. Ushahidi has been used in each of the crises mentioned above.

For the Gulf, so much work done immediately and in the long-term here will be predicated on reliable information. The leak may have been stopped, but the long road to ecological and economic recovery has just begun, and an accurate picture of the damage to the Gulf will be vital in that recovery.

I am not sure why each tragedy walking into town these past months seems to come hand-in-hand with a celebration of some sort.  Maybe a sentient ethereal balance is at work in the cosmos, knowing the long-suffering population of New Orleans might finally buckle if there wasn’t some sort of good to balance out he bad.  Maybe this is just the way we live.

Whichever it is, we are in that situation yet again.

This weekend there are 15,000 people professionally partying in New Orleans as part of the five-day summer “Tales of the Cocktail” festival.  Which continues, even as a tropical storm approaches.

Most are visitors from all over the country in town for the lectures and demonstrations on everything remotely dealing with barrooms, thriving on the myriad tastings and food parings.  And of course, there is the Serious Drinking.

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The president of one of the parishes (Louisiana’s counties) most affected by the BP spill was guest of honor at a fund-raiser in New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood on the American 4^th of July holiday.  Billy Nungesser of Plaquemines was invited to a benefit raising money for fishermen at the legendary Vaughan’s Bar at the edge of the Upper Ninth Ward.  For a politician Nungesser seemed quite real, answering any and all questions, quaffing beers and shaking hands all around, acting genuinely grateful for anything offered that would help his people.  Of course his name is being mentioned prominently as the front-runner in the upcoming state Lieutenant Governor’s race, and he would like to hear it mentioned even more frequently and loudly.

The man does get his share of media attention, especially with CNN, but he seems to be using the public eye to gather popular momentum and raise money to alleviate the parish’s deterioration under the petroleum onslaught.  In spite of being a Republican, Nungesser has been documented actually performing positive constructive acts himself, getting his hands dirty literally and metaphorically, rather than watching from Washington and critiquing others’ efforts, as has seemed indicative of others of his political affiliation.

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The United States is losing more than just redfish and oysters and shrimp and crabs these days.

Robert A Thomas, PhD, chair of environmental communication at Loyola University New Orleans, recently cited evidence that the Gulf oil-spill is having an effect on the nation’s ability to readily obtain a quality chicken-dinner.

The ongoing environmental destruction in the Gulf means that the number of invitations Thomas already receives to speak has grown exponentially in the last two months. This is possibly because his expertise and insights into BP’s effect on the American food-chain go well beyond the water. Even though this area of the Gulf of Mexico furnished some 30% of the country’s seafood before the spill, Thomas details the further impact of the destruction of coastal marshes.

At a luncheon for New Orleans businessmen, he pointed at the plates of food, a baked chicken dish, being consumed. “Why are we supposed to save the wetlands?” he asked.  “If you lose the wetlands, you lose the commercial fishing industry. No questions about it.” But, further, he added: “You remove the marsh, you remove the plankton, which removes the menhaden (a Gulf fish used extensively for fishmeal, the principal high-protein feed for poultry) which removes the chickens.”

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