Slow news is good news in Pensacola, Florida
Warming up and snacking between bouts of snorkeling and counting oysters in Pensacola Bay.
Just last week, my colleagues and I ate a delicious “graduation” dinner to commemorate the end of the 2009-2010 Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism at CU Boulder. It was a bittersweet night. The fellowship is a fantastic program, and I’ll miss it. But I’ve also been eager to get back to life as a freelance journalist, equipped with rich new knowledge about the environment from a year of classes, seminars and field trips. (And I’ve missed my blog!)
Just as things were wrapping up in Boulder, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was developing in the Gulf. Armed with my new freedom and rejuvenated eagerness for reporting on environmental news, I rented a car and made a beeline for the Gulf Coast–specifically the Pensacola home of my brother Jack. I had the idea that I could do some combination of volunteering and coverage of the spill. Things looked good for that at first. On Wednesday, I found a chance to go out on an oyster monitoring project, and wrote about it for one of the National Geographic News blogs.
We worked at a restoration site called Dead Man's Island (see the Nat Geo blog for the story of the name). Erosion has left twisted, silvery snags as remnants of a once larger marine oak grove.
But whereas the mood was anxious when I first arrived, people seem to have calmed down here. The weather has been fantastic for the past few days–sunny but not too hot–and the oil has stayed at bay. Many locals are saying the oil’s threat has actually made them appreciate their beach with fresh eyes. They’re spending more time there. Since there’s no help needed on the mainland yet with oiled wildlife, volunteers have been picking up trash instead. Cities have been using the delay to shore up their disaster response plans, and researchers have been beefing up census numbers for the wildlife they study. This way, they’ll have baseline data should the oil imperil the shore. And all the while, BP and a boatload of agency collaborators have been all hands on deck, working miles out into the ocean to minimize and contain the oil.
Lost? This prickly pear cactus was blooming on Dead Man's Island, near Pensacola, Florida. It was a sweet reminder of my western heart's home.
The Audubon Society has begun treating some oiled birds that have been foraging in the slick–they’re based out of Venice, Louisiana as of yesterday–but for now there aren’t horrible stories of death and destruction from this spill. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Click here for more photos of the Dead Man’s Island. The restoration project site is here.