The oil keeps rolling in with the tide and the aftermath of BP's spill continues while lawmakers ignore the scarred Gulf. Rosina Phillipe of the Atakapa tribe said, "There are tremendous amounts of fish kills in some places, there are porpoises still dying being washed up on the beaches, star fish coming up from the bottom and their carcasses washing up on the beach, dying. That is telling me there is still something in the water that is killing the marine life."

Now that oil prices are skyrocketing and legislators are calling for more drilling, this makes "Gulf Coast Blues - Oil In Our Veins" more relevant than ever. Filmmaker Marc Gauthier will host a free screening of his film with a discussion following on Thursday night at 7pm at Whitworth University's Weyerhaeuser Hall, 300 W. Hawthorne Road.

 

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(Warning — foul/coarse/mature language at 4:05, 5:50 and 8:10)

Also, a timely subject since we're getting closer to the one year anniversary of the spill. Paul Haeder has a piece on the long-term effects of the spill - and how Gauthier's film will be used as a wake-up call to young folks about the dangers of oil additiction and our schizoid consumption rate. (1.3 trillion gallons worldwide each year and - growing.)

Whitworth hosts a free screening and Q and A session of Marc’s film March 10, and he and those attending will wrap their arms around the immediate impact of the spill and efforts to clean it up and deal with the fouling of sea’s surface and entire water column; the ocean floor; and marshes and beaches. Plus the fears of residents who already were feeling the miasma of illness and spill mismanagement saturating their lives.

It’s going to take years before the studies are completed to understand the full impact of this disaster on the ecosystem.

Marc’s film is a peek into the Gulf coastal communities during the implosion of oil, BP mishandling and local and federal government bungling – a day that began with 11 oil workers losing their lives. Earth Day 2010, the 40th anniversary of that global event, is when the oil began to bleed into one of the richest marine ecologies in the world.

I've seen this film several times and it truly is an amazing work by a Spokane native. After the jump, check my review of Gulf Coast Blues and I hope many of you can attend this great event on Thursday.


 

If you attended the premier at the Magic Lantern, you were either sad, angry, proud of Gauthier, inspired to look for solutions or if you’re like me, it was a combination of all these feelings. This truly is a great film with raw footage of the damaged eco-systems previously unseen, apathetic clean-up personnel and more that is hard to get out of your mind.

Out of work in Spokane after the close of Natural Start Bakery and not content to helplessly sit on the sidelines, Gauthier traveled to Grand Isle, Louisiana when the news broke of the Deepwater Horizon Spill to find the real story. With no connections and on a shoestring budget, he hit the road, driving through middle America as the magnitude of the spill had yet to sink in. Along the way, he talked to a fresh-faced good ol’ boy with no qualms about the spill since God plans, well, everything and shots of wind turbines showing a clean, bright energy future. America is on display. He arrives in Grand Isle with his kayak and paddles to restricted areas the Coast Guard does not want us to see. Each day, it gets worse until things fall apart. First, an oil sheen. Closed beach. Posturing politicians and Coast Guard employees more concerned with finishing their beer. He tries to help but is turned away. He speaks at a press conference about the pelicans, a turtle, and a dolphin coated in oil, washed up dead on the shore where sands bubble with goop under the Louisiana sun. The community is devastated. Searching for answers, Gauthier became so nauseous from the toxic fumes, he proceeded to vomit, his urine turning orange. “I can’t put that stuff out of my head. I feel like a war veteran, as if I served a tour of duty. All these emotions of leaving friends behind, the dead fauna, the idea that those estuaries are dying, all of it is in my head, ” he told Paul Haeder in the story “Battle Fatigue” from Dispatches From Disaster. (Check his excellent review HERE.)

He begins the film with a definition of addiction which is the narrative thread here. “We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even been called the ‘end’ of history, in both a temporal and teleological sense,” wrote Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress.” “Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half the planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there won’t be another like it…”  It’s no easy task to get people to believe the truth. We live in a time when the truth does not win out on its own; it must have champions. Gauthier is one of those champions.
 

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