rembrandts and the cezannes and it was medical cony and it was dreamed up of the romantics. it was not dreamed up of the romantics but by those giorgio in the 16th century who describes michelangelo's painting and their melancholy disposition was of their black bile. and that art really is kind of -- it's a sort of positive relationship and i think this is true between a patron, an artist and the way the artist perceives the competition he has before him. and the competition he really wants to beat in some way which

artists are very susceptible. enough have that. i felt it had gone too far that way. it's historically obively a fortification of the way artists conceived of their own activity at not all the time but at some moments of crisis. and it's not it's only a romantic melodramatic way of writing for artists to have. they really do have them, you know, there are no great artist who did not have a incredible difficult moment of composition and there's some artist who lived their life of imperfemome and cezanne had a life of cruelty and violence which is

ironic. i wanted to really reinstate the notion of a kind of heroic narratives of the artist. .. >> the painting that rembrandt did for the town hall which was rejected which he had to literally scissor up himself in an attempt to sell it as a smaller work of art. picasso deciding at this particular point in his rife in

1937 -- life in 1937 and so on. so i thought you could make a kind of drama on creativity on television around backtracking forensically from that one moment of critical difficulty for an artist. without, without being, you in . so everything, it's interesting, everything we did, everything that was said by the actors -- we didn't have actors in all of them, but many of them -- were absolutely rock solid documents with one exception, and the directer, normally -- it was only because i was actually busy in the cutting room cutting a different film that i missed the fact that this naughty director in the first film, there's no need to make anything up about care very owe. [laughter] as we all know. so you don't need him. we know he dies, you know, he stumbles and collapses on the beach, may have died there, may not, may have been in the hospital. there's no need suddenly to have care advantage owe, you know,

move on the side then go, no! [laughter] i mean, that's so annoying because it did belie all the careful credentials we had set for ourselves. but the response to the series, and it goes on being shown by schools, and it's been wonderful. and technically, technically i think probably in terms of lighting and photographing, i'll probably never make a better film than the bernini film which is what we won the emmy for. thank you. yeah, thank you very much. [applause] thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> this event was hosted by the

free library of philadelphia. for more information visit freelibrary.org. >> sundays on booktv's "in depth," author, activist and writer and resident linda hogan. her books include "the woman who watches over the world," dwellings: a spiritual chris ri of the human world, and her latest, rounding the human corners. join our three-hour conversation for pulitzer prize finalist linda hogan sunday, july 3rd at noon eastern on c-span2. >> and now on booktv, antonia juhasz talks about the deepwater horizon oil rig explosion which killed 12 men. this is about an hour and a half. [applause] >> thank you all for coming and thank you for digging for

change, the global exchange the center for -- [inaudible] and greenpeace for all being here helping me celebrate the launch of my book, "black tide," which released on monday in time for the one-year anniversary of the explosion of the deepwater horizon. and i wanted to hold this event on earth day. i can think of a better place to do it than busboys and poets which has always made such a wonderful home for me for my books. i think this is my third book in a row that i've launched right here which is incredibly wonderful. busboys and poets supports our community, supports our art, supports our learning and supports our being able to come together in rooms like this and talk about critical events at a critical time. and, please, support busboys and poets not only tonight, but

every night. and future events. and i also wanted to pull together an event for earth day that brought together the people and the groups whom i thought had really done the most heroic and ongoing and important work not only in the wake of the explosion of the deepwater horizon, but preceding it. there aren't that many organizations, people, commitments who have been -- communities who have been focused on the ongoing dangers of offshore drilling, the ongoing dangers to people, to our environments, to our ecology and to our development. and the groups who have really two, of the groups who have really been at a forefront of that work are greenpeace and the center for biological diversity. and they have been at the forefront of this disaster not just in the wake of the explosion, but in a yearlong effort which involved 210 million gallons of oil being

released into the gulf of mexico on an ongoing ecological crisis, an ongoing human crisis, an ongoing environmental crisis. and these groups have continued to be there. and i wanted to make sure we presented the best discussion we could, and i couldn't ask for two better people to join me than john hocevar who's the oceans campaign director at greenpeace and peter galvin who is the conservation director at the center for biological diversity. so they are each going to speak, um, and speak to you, then i'm going to speak as well, and then we'll have a discussion with some questions, and then i will sign your books. so thank you all very much for being here tonight. [applause] >> can you all hear me okay? great. so i, again, thanks for coming and echo antonia and say that it's always nice to have an opportunity to come to busboys

and poets. um, greenpeace's response b to the deepwater horizon blowout began pretty much immediately. we could see, as could many others, that this was going to be one of the biggest disasters we'd faced on our continent. so one of the things that we had to do in the beginning was figure out what the appropriate response to something on this scale looks like, and that's not an easy question. it pretty quickly became apparent that one thing that was needed was a second opinion, really, some ground truthing. we were hearing from be very early on what was pretty clearly spin from not just bp, but often our own government. and so we felt that it was necessary to be there on the ground to, um, provide images, to be able to share firsthand accounts and, ultimately, to be able to collect data on what the true scope and impacts of this

disaster were on the ecosystem of the gulf of mexico. so it started with a small team that was, basically, there just as the oil was starting to reach shore, and we were working in the coastal areas of louisiana primarily, but also alabama, mississippi and a bit in florida as well. um, looking as the oil came ashore what was happening to it, was it washing into the wetlands, were the miles and miles and miles and miles of boom doing their job and actually keeping it out of sensitive habitats? what was the clean-up response looking like, were there huge numbers of wildlife being killed or not? these were all big questions early on. how much oil was coming out wasn't something we were going to be able to answer very easily, but at least we could talk about where we were seeing the oil, what the impacts looked like on the ground. over time and, well, so backing

up a little bit, so part of that we spent a lot of time in the bays and bayous and coastal waterways of the gulf of mexico. when i was there in louisiana, um, unfortunately, we saw things that are going to stick with me probably for the rest of my life. you know, nobody wants to see dolphins surfacing through oil or, you know, dead fish or dead birds or, any of that. it's pretty awful. i think as a marine biologist some of the worst of it was actually thinking about the habitat that was going to be lost, seeing oil that had covered the entire expansion of some small islands that were absolutely critical habitat for birds. these are bird rook ris that were just completely packed. you know, bird high-rises

really. and knowing that the oil was likely going to kill off the vegetation, the grasses and the other vegetation that holds these islands together. and so the islands are fairly quickly likely to wash away. there isn't a whole lot of alternate habitat of any similar type, so thinking about the long-term effects that that could have on many be of the sea birds including the brown pelican which had just come off the endangered species list. it was also disturbing to look at things like hermit crabs, you know? you don't read a lot in the newspapers or on cnn you're not seeing anybody talk about hermit crabs. noaa isn't keeping a running count and using dead hermit crabs as evidence for the lawsuits. but in one area certainly not bigger than the size of this room i saw what i estimated to be 10,000 dead hermit crabs. and sitting there, you know, kind of counting those at the

same time that these wading birds are walking around eating these oil-soaked hermit crowds knowing that those birds are likely not going to make it. so that whole beach habitat, at least in that area at that time, was no longer really capable of sustaining life. so then we moved farther offshore. we brought one of our ships, the arctic sunrise, to the region. and we put together a three-month-long research expedition working with scientists from over a dozen institutions, mostly gulf universities, to, again, really try to get a second opinion, to begin collecting more data on what the true scope and impacts of this spill were on the ecosystem in the gulf. we looked at the plankton, primarily we focused on blue crab lahr i have with scientists from tulane university. and one of the challenges for us throughout this was, you know,

we have a 24-hour news cycle where people wanted some answers, but science is slow. the data that we collected with this just one small project to examine one very small piece of the impact. even collecting the data took months. but to analyze that will probably take them two years. so when the one-year anniversary we had a lot of people asking us, so, you know, it's been plenty of time, what happened? was this as bad as everyone said? was it not so bad like bp and really noaa and the government were saying? the answer, i think, is that it's going to be decades, really, before we can look back and feel like we have a true sense of what the damage was. but we did see that the scientists from tulane found these mysterious orange globs in their sample that they're fairly sure were caused by dispersant. and so this is the oil and the dispersant entering the food

chain in the gulf of mexico through these larval baby blue crabs. we also worked with a consortium of scientists from a number of universities using, basically, these buoys that sit out there and listen for noise. primarily, what they were recording was vocalizations from sperm whales and other beaked whales. and this was important because it's pretty difficult to actually understand what's happening with whales just by counting them. mostly they're underwater. so they had a data set stretching back several years, so they're able to compare what the whale population used to look like in that area of the gulf with what happened after the disaster. and, again, it's too early to really say what the detailed results were, but they did find in the site closest to the deepwater horizon there are far

fewer sperm whales after the accident than there were before. and this is significant because government scientists estimate that losing as few as three adult sperm whales would be enough to potentially wipe out the population. and this, again, is whales are very slow to mature, they have low numbers of offspring, and they're very vulnerable. we worked with scientists from texas a&m, not exactly who you'd think would be the most eager to partner with greenpeace, but this is interesting because despite all the money that we heard was out there for research, many of the scientists that we talked to found it very difficult to get access to funding to do research that might not be popular. so if bp was giving out the money, they felt that they had some say in directing the type of research. and, obviously, that wasn't okay. so it was part of why we wanted to be out there. so these texas a&m scientists

came out with us, and they were looking at oil in the water column, and also we were doing a lot of work to see how much oil we were finding on the bottom. around this time is when noaa was putting out a statement -- it wasn't just noaa, it was the u.s. government with noaa's name on it -- that said that three-quarters of the oil was gone. this is their big mission accomplished moment. you may remember it. but, actually, if you looked at the numbers and not how they talked about the numbers, really the reverse was true. more like three-quarters of the oil was still there in the gulf of mexico. a little bit had evaporated, an even smaller amount had been recovered, but most of it was either still in the water, washed up on the shore or down there on the bottom. and that fit with what we found. about a mile deep, well away from the deepwater horizon -- i think it was 15 miles away -- we were finding oil on the bottom that, you know, we brought up these samples, and it just reeked of oilment we also --

oil. we also found signature of the oil, so not like a big, thick, dense cloud but signature of the oil 300 miles to the west of the deepwater horizon site, and this is far away from and in a very different direction than people had really been priestly looking. -- previously looking. later on we actually took a two-person submarine down in the gulf. i had the very nice opportunity to be the pilot of the sub, and we brought scientists from university of north carolina and marine conservation biology institute down to look at the impact of the spill on deep sea corals in the gulf of mexico. and part of it was really just helping people understand how complex the gulf ecosystem really is. you know, you think of the gulf of mexico, and people have very different ideas. maybe you just think, well, you know, a bunch of oil rigs, and it's nothing special. but, actually, it's really one of the more biologically rich

places i've ever been. you see dolphins and birds in numbers that you don't see in many other places. and so at the bottom of the gulf in many areas you have these incredible communities, even reefs of deep sea corals, and these live far below sunlight. so they're not the same kind of corals that you're used to if you've been scuba diving or snorkeling in the droppic. -- tropics. but still a similar role as far as providing has habitat for commercially-important fish sometimes, also high areas of biodiversity. we were happy to see the area that we visited that there was no visible impacts of the oil. but, again, really this is about something that we're going to be still analyzing years from now. so a lot of it was whether there are sublethal impacts, whether it's affecting their growth rate, their reproductive rate, whether they're more susceptible

to disease, that kind of thing. but unfortunately, at the same time, a little bit closer to the deepwater horizon site with a different type of submersible that was able to go deeper, another group of scientists was finding oil that had carpeted the bottom and killed huge numbers of coral. um, and i guess the one thing that i forgot to mention that i'll just touch on, we started this expedition, actually, far from the impact of the site out in the dry to have tiew georgias. and if you remember when the accident began in the very early days people were quite sure that the oil was going to be pulled into the loop current and be sucked through the florida keys and, potentially, into the, all the way up the east coast of the united states through the gulf stream. the good news is that that didn't happen, at least not in large amounts. so we were there looking at sponges which are important bioindicators because they pump huge amounts of water through

them each day. and so they're a good place to look to see if there are sublethal impacts of even low quantities of oil. and, again, it'll be quite a while before they finish that analysis, but it's just a good reminder that science is slow. our policymakers seem to have been too quick to assume that they knew what the impacts of this were and far too quick to forget that this could happen again. so really a lot of -- thrust of our work kind of took two directions. one was this providing a second opinion and getting the facts about what was really happening, and the other was reminding our policymakers that we can't allow this to happen again. a lot of our work has been moving forward making sure that we learn from this and do not allow drilling in the arctic, that we do not allow new drilling anywhere and, ultimately, that we phase out offshore drilling and move away

from that to clean renewable energy. and i'll stop there. i think i'm probably out of time. [applause] >> thank you. and introduce yourself for the camera when you start. >> all right. sorry. >> no, i got it. t right in front of you. >> all right. hopefully this is the right length. good evening. my name is peter galvin, i'm the conservation director of the center for biological diversity. thanks so much for coming tonight. i want to thank, also, busboys and poets, greenpeace and antonia for the great service she's done in writing this book. it's not a happy topic, but an important one for us to know as much as we can about. in the early days of the deepwater horizon disaster, the media was portraying the event as if this was a natural disaster, a terrible natural disaster due to a technological

glitch that was beyond the control of, of humans. and early on and even in the first night as we spoke, it was clear to us that this was not a natural disaster, this is a policy disaster. this is a disaster caused specifically by policies implemented by the u.s. government. and as we began to look through the minerals management service, now bo -- the new agency, we taliban to realize that -- began to realize that thousands of these drilling plans had been issued with categorical exclusions. the lowest level of environmental analysis done. and interestingly, the minerals management service which is no stalwart of environmental protection would not allow these same exclusions in arctic drilling. so, basically, and we have known some of this for quite some

time, but the reality was it all became very apparent that the gulf of mexico was, basically, a national sacrifice area. and the policies of the government were intended to make it a national disaster area. national sacrifice area. a year has gone by, and what have we learned? and the sad reality is, not much. um, we've learned a lot about the impacts of the spill but not a lot, we haven't made a lot of policy changes that are going to prevent us from this disaster recurring next time. we recently released a report that's available on our web site at biologicaldiversity.org. and in the report we calculate mortality numbers for a variety of different species based on the best available evidence that was available; government reports, scientific reports.

and one of the big problems with oil spills, and you see this in the press where they start to mention numbers of recovered animals, only a small number of the animals that die are ever recovered. the ocean is a big place, and humans just don't run across all of the mortalities. for example, we conclude that 6,000, approximately 6,000 sea turtles were killed in the event. 26,000 dolphins and whales. 26,000. dolphins, whales and other marine mammals. and 82,000 birds. so this, the staggering, the toll is staggering. and it probably will rate it the largest environmental disaster ever to have occurred in the united states. and, hopefully, there'll never be a larger one. um, since the spill we've launched nine, nine lawsuits and three endangered species listing petitions. the nine lawsuits range in a

variety of areas, the most significant one is probably a clean water act lawsuit against bp. the government has filed a duplicate case about eight months later. the fines that we're seeking and those fines we seek to redirect to the gulf area for environmental restoration and land acquisition, we're seeking $19 billion in penalties against pb. and this is the maximum amount allowed under the clean water act on a calculation of negligence which triples the damages and a certain penalty per gallon of oiled. and we're not even sure that the amount isn't more than 200 million gallons, but that's the best estimate anybody can come up with. so we're trying to make bp cough up 19 billion, and everybody's pointing the finger at everybody else. just a few hours ago the coast guard released a report that puts a lot of the blame on transocean.

so we're also suing transocean under the clean water act. of course, bp has recently sued transocean asserting that they should pay and not bp. and, of course, this is going to be going on for a long, long time. one of the reasons we felt it was very important to file our lawsuit was to make sure that the government doesn't try the offer some kind of sweetheart settlement. and, certainly, you know, we know that would happen under the bush administration, no question about it. and we're even concerned that that could happen under the obama administration. and, you know, just, of course, weeks before the disaster obama stood on, the president stood on, gave a press conference and said oil rigs don't usually blow up. well, and nuclear power is safe, and, you know, we can see that there's a massive disconnect, just a huge disconnect between the reality and the policy procrastinations or whatever that word is. >> prognostications. >> thank you.

that's why you're a writer. [laughter] and it's really just amazing to see that gap, that -- and it's staggering. some of the other litigation that we've filed is other dispersants. we've filed, we've launched a lawsuit over the use of these dispersants that we heard so much about during the spill. the reality is the epa approved the use of these dispersants, but they don't actually test what will the dispersants themselves do to various endangered spee ice? what are the impacts of dumping millions of gallons? if any of you listened to our executive director the other day, amy goodman pointed out -- it was interesting that she noticed that the main dispersant used in the spill is actually banned in the u.k. can't be used in the u.k. so bp has a stockpile of millions of gallons of this stuff that can't be used in the

u.k. or anywhere in europe. so what do they do with this stuff? let's ship it over to the u.s. and use it. we've got to get rid of it. and it's, you know, these kind of -- we see how so many decisions, these policy decisions are made, basically, with a gun to the head because you've got lisa jackson, the head of the epa, desperately trying to figure out is there anything i can do, is there anything we can do. and the government's under criticism for inaction. well, we're going to dump millions of gallons of this stuff because we have to show people we're doing everything we possibly can, and we'll deal with the impacts later because we're on a -- our decisions are being made on a 24/7 news cycle. and that is the scary, scary reality that we live in where our policy decisions are being made in very, very short windows. it used to be, you know, people have said the best way to make decisions is to look forward seven generations. well, we've gone from seven generations to 24 hours.

and that's no way to make decisions. so we've got the dispersant lawsuit is going, the bp clean water lawsuit, bp, transocean etal, we're in the middle of a giant litigation morass. there have been, we just found out today, 100,000 lawsuits now filed over the bp oil spill. 100,000. and that doesn't include ken feinberg's payoff, payment scheme. that's a separate deal. and a lot of these are, you know, big, toxic tort cases, people who have lost their livelihoods and didn't take the compensation route from bp. .. acquisitions and to make

people whole. we have filed endangered species listing petitions for the dwarf sea horse. it's the smallest sea horse in the u.s. the third or fourth smallest in the world. and is living in sea grass beds and i think we've all seen sea horses in aquariums, they're beautiful, beautiful little things and very sensitive. very sensitive to changes of sea life and what happened with the

dispersants the oil doesn't go away it just breaks into smaller particles and sinks into the bottom and they get in the sea grass beds and the real problems for the sea horses and other creatures down there. we're currently as john mentioned the brown pelican was a rare success story under the endangered species where it had come back to tens of thousands in the last 20 years. a real happy story but the spill has really put the recovery in jeopardy. and now we're looking in talking to a variety of scientists about whether it's going to be necessary to put the brown pelican back on the endangered species list. we if an endangered spesays list to get the atlantic blue fin tuna to get added to the endangered list. it's a very highly prized fish that is becoming rarer and rarer. it's one of the fish that has

high end sushi restaurants. if you see a very, very expensive piece of sushi let's say over 10 or $15 good chance it's blue fin tuna. earlier this year a blue fin tuna was auctioned off in tokyo for $400,000 for one fish. $400,000. so you can imagine that there's an enormous economic pressure to keep this species off the endangered list. the blue fin tuna spawning area into the gulf of mexico and much of it was inundated by the oil spill. it was like a direct hit and scientists estimate 20 to 30% of the young were lost. and that's just the beginning. we don't know what the longer term implications are and a lot of these things -- you know, it's a combination of factors. it's not just the oil spill. it's overfishing and a huge amount of habitat degradation that has been occurring and now you add this impact and it's

kind of like, you know, how many stars or cards can you pull out before the house of cards just collapses? we filed a lawsuit over the policy that allows these categorical exclusions. and one of the things we found right after the spill was that bp had actually written a letter to the epa just months before the spill demanding more categorical exclusions be given because they were taking too long and they had all the answers because they have been drilling door years. we have that going on. we have a lawsuit -- actually, i say it's one lawsuit. it's actually several different lawsuits because the fifth circuit court of appeals is somewhat byzantine in this process. we're challenging over 40 individual drilling plants in the gulf right now.

votes has changed. ken salazar, the guy -- he'll go down in history as he wants to keep the boot -- his boot on the heel of -- on the neck of bp. and so the boot is -- when you think at the history of the boot it turns out that secretary salazar -- there was virtually no greater champion of expanding drilling in the gulf than ken salazar and, you know, an interesting look at how someone's station in life, their political station might change things. you know, when president obama was a senator, he had an excellent record on offshore oil drilling. he opposed it fervently. as did joe biden, as did rahm emanuel. they voted against expanding offshore oil drilling in the gulf and then a few years later the situation is different. now they've got some different calculations to make and they come out on the other side and

so, you know, it's very disappointing in that lar and so i'm going to wrap it up but i want to let folks know that we fully continue to track this issue and do everything we can to try to make sure than never, ever again. please take a look at our website to see our policy recommendations on a report that we've just released, a companion report at biologicaldiversity.org and thanks again so much. [applause] >> i'm going to keep a tight as leash on me as the gentleman. the first thing i'd like to do is ask if we can start passing the sign-in sheet around and people don't have to get up. just hand it around to tables and folks can sign it as it comes around to you. thank you. so thank you all so much and

thank you to john and peter. thank you for being here tonight. i met tony and i wrote "black tide: the devastating impact on the gulf oil spill." my first book was george bush agenda, invading the world one country at a time. it was a natural corollary which was a tyranny of oil the world's most powerful industry and what we must do to stop and that looked at the power of this industry, the policy relationship of this industry to our government and our policymakers. and it's somewhat ironically at this point that book actually took its title from a speech that then candidate obama made

when he became the first african-american to win the iowa caulkas and he announced in that speech that he would be the president who once and for all ended the near tyranny in oil and in the same breath and ending the war in iraq and one sentence that was incredibly powerful and i used it for the title of the book. when the deepwater horizon exploded on april 20th, 2010, 50 miles off the coast of louisiana, i was in houston with a group of oil activists -- or actually activists is a wrong wrong. a group of people who lived in oil impacted communities around the world. nigeria, angola, kazakhstan, alaska, california, texas, mississippi, who had all come together in houston for chevron's annual shareholder meeting and they came to explain to the shareholders what it means to live in a chevron-impacted community, a place where chevron operates.

and while we were there, it had been a couple of weeks during the course of our time there after the explosion happened, after the loss of life of 11 men, after the oil started flowing when we realized that this not only was an enormous loss of life and not only an enormous disaster but a really crushing reality to people like myself who had spent a significant amount of time setting the oil industry and spent a significant amount of time being in place where is oil operations took place. somethingdoned on all of us, the oil industry had absolutely no idea, whatsoever, what to do about a deep water blowout, none, at all. they said they knew what to do. they said they planned to know what to do. the reality was that when they knew how to do is somewhat deal with the blowout at 400 feet and

for most of the time, since the 1970s, most deep water drilling meant drilling at 400 feet below the ocean surface. this well is drilling at 5,000 feet below the ocean surface and that's just the oceans here. it's 5,000 feet below. the well -- this well was another 13,500 feet below that. it isn't anymore. a well is slightly farther out. it's not the deepest well anymore. another well that is as far down as mount everest is up and what we found out was that even though they had guaranteed to us they knew what they were doing, they were trying to apply technology developed in the 1970s for 400-foot wells to a 5,000-foot well and they didn't know what they were doing and they weren't able to stop the gusher. and not only that, but they had

guaranteed us that were there to be a blowout and everybody knows that there can be a blowout because that's what you plan for, the gulf of mexico is one of the most difficult places to drill in the world. one of the reasons why is it's very gas eous. everybody knows this and every plan that's written for drilling in the gulf we can handle kicks. we can handle blowouts. well, pillowouts have been increasing in the gulf. it's happening more and more frequently. the people on the rig knew this rig was having a difficult time. in fact, this was the second rig to try and drill this well. a previous rig, the mariannas had been kicked to hard that it was kicked right off the well and had to go home. the deepwater horizon was a replacement. the deepwater horizon was $100 million over budget. it was many, many, many days offschedule and the people on the rig knew that they were in

trouble. and they knew there could be a blowout. and the industry had promised that it could handle an oil spill were the worst to happen of 300,000 barrels of oil per day. what we found out is that likely at its worse this spill was 80,000 barrels a day and yet they had no capacity, whatsoever, to deal with it. they did not have ships toward contain the oil. they didn't have underwater vehicles ready to address the blowout. they didn't have boom to protect the shore. they didn't have skimmers to skim it up. they hadn't prepared. and not only that, even though after the 1989 valdez disaster, they had been committed to, responsible for, legally obligated to invest in research on what to do if they have an oil spill and prepare for it. they hadn't. none of them. we're using this exact same technology that utterly after

the valdez where only 14% of the oil was cleaned up. to put this in scale, what happened because they didn't know what to do and they spent three months walking around -- well, that's not fair. they were trying very hard. they sat around a table. they were trying very, very, very hard. there were scientists very hard at work. there were engineers very hard at work. they wanted to stop this gusher but they couldn't for three long months. and what happened in the course of that three long months -- and that's just the time in which the gusher was flowing, right. they finally did figure out how to put a cap on it, thank goodness, but they actually didn't know and actually really felt secure that that well was closed until five months later when something else happened and that was the drilling of the relief well because what the oil industry does know how to do very well is drill. but what that means is that basically what they know how to do is drill so that if we have another blowout there's no reason to assume that a cap will be just be able to applied because the only thing we're

sure that worked was the relief well. so that means if there is another blowout what we should anticipate is five more months worth of oil. and what we know about the deep water -- and remember, this is new. going out this far, there's only 148 of these operations in the world. they've basically been going only 20 years at this depth and they are pushing out this far because there's a lot of oil out there. so what we know about the deep water is that when you have an accident, it's a long way to go get to it and there's a lot of oil. and to put the amount of oil into context, we've all been hampered from being able to explain and really grasp, put into words the significance of the size of the spill. and that's because we can't say the words that would make it that much more dramatic which is the largest oil spill in world history. but there's only one reason why we can't say that. and that's because saddam hussein intentionally in the

most blatant way possible used oil as a weapon in 1991. and intentionally opened up oil pipes and tankers to attack american and british troops with oil in kuwait. and that pans down the largest oil spill in history because he did it intentionally. had that not happened, this would be hands down the largest oil spill in world history, 210 million of gallons were released. now, one thing we know for sure, and when i started -- when this happened and we learned it was going to be bigger than we thought and that the 11 men who died -- the story was, i'm going to end with them and i was going to end with their families and it was going to spread and it was going to spread to all the people across the five states who live around this, the ninth largest body of water and it was going to affect the sea life and it was going to affect everything that lives in the ocean. but the thing to know about the gulf coast is everything that lives in the ocean is part and

parcel to everything that lives on the land. it's part and parcel to all the people and their levee hoods and their being and their understanding of their community. and the effect on the sea is the effect on the people and the livelihoods and the communities of those people. and what i learned in going down in just the first couple of weeks and the first couple days that i was there was, one, this was a huge story. two, transparency was so difficult. getting information was so difficult from that first time i went down private security guards, police officers, sheriffs were keeping us off the beaches. you couldn't go look. you couldn't take pictures. you couldn't record the event. and one of the things that happened was controlling the story became very important, of course, to everyone involved. and one tool that bp utilized -- it was very powerful. if you saw the pictures i hope you saw them in the beginning that john was showing. greenpeace took such important photographs of this event, not

just the work that greenpeace did but the photographs that capture it and they are used throughout my book to try and make tangible or imagery the story of this event. but capturing those photographs became more and more difficult because if you'll remember in the valdez, it was those photographs of the oil soaked fyords that captured people's sole and people organized aggressively in response to valdez. they shut down exxon stations they proposed and they demanded policy and they got out of the bush, sr., administration a critical piece of information, the oil pollution act. similarly, in 1969, off the coast of santa barbara, when an oil well blew. people organized. they were galvanized. they were imagery that captured their hearts and souls and a

year later got the earth day, the environmental protection agency and 11 long years and they got an moratorium on offshore in some places. what happened here was that those photographs, particularly of the brown pel kins soaked in oil, the state bird of louisiana, captured people. captured our hearts and our minds. but those pictures started to go away and i think what most people assumed those pictures were going away because what? the oil birds were going away, right. less oil birds, less images. that's not what happened. what i was able to track in the book is, in fact, as the number of oil birds were increasing the photographs were decreasing and the reason was because we started being threatened to be thrown in jail if we went within 40 miles -- no, 40 feet of boom. if we went onto beaches on oil. i tried to go on boats and take pictures and talk people and to go on water with boom and when

the person found out i was a book author they wouldn't take me because i'll get a $40,000 fine and you'll get thrown in jail. i went on to beaches even though it meant risking being thrown in jail and i did what i could to try to tell this story. and we all did our best to do it. but the story became very difficult to tell. and i knew that was going to happen and that's when i decided very early on that this was going to require more than an article. more than a few days. it was going to require a full book of investigation and it was going to require spending as much time as possible in those communities most affected and i basically spent my time and i also realized my previous books for those of you who have read them are really policy books. my background is public policy. i worked for two united states members of congress. my master's is in public policy from georgetown. that this was going to need to be a very difficult book and it's really a book that is the

human story of the human impacts and the people who are impacted on all sides. i talked to people employed in the oil industry, oil executives, fishers, environmentalists, policymakers. i spent a deal of time in washington, d.c., talking to people here, policymakers here and down there. and the story that is told -- and just to say i was just overwhelmed by the graciousness of people at the hardest points in their lives taking me in. i stayed in people's homes. i played with their children. i went to their churches. i went to their beaches. i went to work with them when there wasn't any work to be done. and was really brought in and continued to be brought in and some of the most impactful stories were the ones that i then tried to tell one year later so the story began at a chevron shareholder meeting. it doesn't conclude but the next sort of step in this tale a week

ago when i was in london at bp's annual shareholder meeting and i went there with five gulf coast residents and people who were deeply impacted by this disaster who were there representing their communities. and the gulf coast fund, an amazing organization that was found after katrina to link about 200 small community-based organizations across the gulf so that they could organize together really stepped up in response to this disaster to do the same thing in response to the oil disaster because what we heard time and time again -- what i heard time and time again as i traveled through the gulf coast was people who had just recovered from katrina, from gustav, from rita, from ike. who had worked so hard to get themselves back on their feet financially, emotionally, spiritually and then the oil struck.

and you could feel just this sense of sorrow and, you know, how can we get a break sort of, you know, we worked so hard and now the oil is here. and the gulf coast funded organized in response to katrina and now in response to the oil disaster and they helped bring these five community members to london and this was byron emclay who's the president of the louisiana oyster men's association and tracy coons of the louisiana shrimper association, her husband, mike, five incredibly powerful speakers and we had come to the bp shareholder meeting because bp had said in its documents leading up to the meeting that it had learned its lessons from the disaster. it was going to go deeper into the deep water and push more into deep water drilling. but it had weighed the risks and it was ready to go.

and so they had come to speak to the chairman of the board and bob dudley and the shareholders what it means to be people from the gulf coast experiencing this ongoing disaster and we did a bunch of press the bbc loved us and bp would not give niven gulf coast to the meeting. even they they held legal proxies nothing else they couldn't get in. i got in because i purchased shares. i didn't know they didn't get in and i got into the meeting. i purchased shares and i was a shareholder but i had a special card that said i couldn't speak inside the meeting during the time when shareholders get to speak. but i went in anyway. and when i found out that they weren't there i spoke anyway. and i said that bp had not lived up to its financial, its legal or its moral obligations in the gulf. that it was arguing tooth and nail about the amount of oil

spilled. so when peter cited that figure of $20 billion that bp owes for the oil that it spilled, what bp is trying to argue that instead of a per barrel rate, it wants to pay a day rate and that day rate equates to not $20 billion but $3 million with an m. bp is arguing that half as many oil has been spilled all the presidential commission and scientists have found. and saying they are half as much that it spilled and they are arguing they cleaned it all up. how can that be? and that bp is fighting every single step of the way to pay the claims process. so one of the results of the oil pollution act was that an -- the company that spills the oil has to set up a claims process and pay claims. well, fortunately this has gotten a lot of press this week. bp made that process so

cumbersome and the cfo for the state of florida is suing bp right now saying they intentionally made it cumbersome that only one-third of the claims have been paid out. only 40% have even been processed. so that means that most people in the gulf haven't gotten -- they've been out of work for a year. they haven't gotten any money. this is a subsistence area and they can't eat their fish either. but the other thing i came to do there was to deliver a message from keith jones and keith jones is someone whom i spent a tremendous amount of time over the course of writing this book. and his son, gordon, was 28 years old. he works for a contractor miswatko and he was a deep water mixer on the deepwater horizon and he died the night the rig exploded and he and all the 11 men died, died fighting to save the rig and they could have all been somewhere else when the rigs blew and they could have survived but they all stayed

where they were to try and save it and they all died. and what keith sent me there to say and gordon died one week prior to the birth of his second son maxwell gordon. he died shortly after the birthday of his elder son sanford. he died because he had said to his coworker who was tired and was supposed to take over. don't worry, go to sleep. i'll keep working. and keith sent me with a statement because he couldn't come and the statement said that bp and transocean and haliburton and cameron had cut corners. they had taken this incredibly complicated offshore drilling and they had turned it into something that was just about making money, of course, and that they were greedy and that they had rolled the dice with gordon's life and that they had lost. and that what keith wanted to

make sure that this doesn't happen again. and what every single presidential commission and study and investigation and scientific study has concluded is that this is a problem -- the problem that led to this disaster is in no way isolated to bp and one of the things i go over also extensively in the book is looking at the spin of the oil industry. so looking at how -- what did the oil industry do in responses to this oil disaster? not only what did environmentalists do or fishers do and what only did scientists do? but what did the oil industry do? and what they did, i think, qualifies as one of the most successful lobbying efforts on behalf of the oil industry to date and that's saying a lot. their strategy was isolate bp. make this a bp problem. but even within that -- because bp is the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the

united states. so if you're going to save the bp problem you're going to take a gamble you're saying half of the oil and natural gas produced in the united states is dangerous. so they said it's a bp problem. but it was a fluke. and that spin worked. and one of the reasons why it was able to work was, unfortunately, because the obama administration, on which i had named my last book -- while this administration is not an oil administration, it certainly isn't the way the last administration was, it doesn't get its money from the oil industry. it certainly gets its money from industry but it's the finance industry not the oil industry. even this government is not immune from the incredible weight and financial lobbying and pressure of the oil industry.

and even this government sucame to that pressure and the key moment that peter mentioned and john mentioned when basically public attention was completely swayed and altered and we really lost the -- lost the momentum, not lost the entire race was on august the semith. so let me just back up a little bit. there was enormous public pressure in the same way there was after 1969 in the same way there was in 1989, enormous public attention on this disaster. people were gripped, they were watching that and there was a huge push for legislation. there was a great number of bills that were moving through the congress. there was a great amount of momentum to see them passed and two things happened. the first is the well was capped, which is fantastic. we all wanted the well to be capped. but that didn't end people's attention. they still cared very much about

the outcome of this disaster. the more important thing that happened was on august 16th the climate czar carol brown went on every morning television back to back and back and i quote the vast majority of the oil is gone. that was like ensign moment and it was utterly not true. the same documents that she was looking at, the same scientists who worked on that document said as john said it's exact the opposite. the majority of the oil is there. only a portion of it is gone. but what the obama administration wanted to do is just get this problem out of the way. and this is not to say that there weren't thousands of government employees that worked very hard to address this disaster, because there were. the problem, the overarching problem that the obama station faced with this disaster was basically the more that

president obama's name was linked to it, the lower his poll numbers fell and he had a lot of other things to do. he was trying to pass health care. he had two wars that he was fighting. he had a long list of stuff. he had a recalcitrant congress. and he wanted to get it out of the way. and they did that with 2 million gallons of dispersant and they did that with a long history of limitingle actual real numbers for the numbers coming out of the well and they did it by telling us the oil was gone before it was. the combination of the obama administration following that track and the oil industry working very hard to make us believe that this was a fluke incident that only involved one company and, oh, isn't it even more convenient that it's a british company, made it so that that push for policy stopped, the attention on the gulf coast

and the impacts of people's livelihoods and lives and the ecosystem stopped. and the push for a change in policy to deal with this industry stopped and what we know for certain is that this was not just a pm problem. for one let's just look at the incident itself bp is the managers, they are responsible for every final decision and they made every final decision but transocean is the owner and operator. and transocean operated that rig in just an inconsciousable way. hundreds of maintenance that went unattended. a blowout preventer that was out of batteries and leaking hydraulic fluid. alarm systems that were intentionally inhibited so i have to say this every time i

talk -- the woman who i think is the heroine of the day, a 22-year-old young woman who was on the bridge at the time of the deepwater horizon when six women on the rig had been painted as bp and transocean as the wrongdoer on the rig and if anyone has read the "new york times" article that covers this, it's been picked up to be the movie for this, they paint andrea as at fault when she was the heroine of the day and how she was the heroine of the day was that the alarms of that rig had been inhibited. when the natural gas on that rig lights should have turned out and it should have been sealed everybody was out there was safe even if we had to die. none of that happened. the alarms were turned off so that they could record information so that we knew what happened so that the alarms could go on and she was sitting on the bridge and she said oh,

my god the alarms didn't go off and she pushed the button that made the alarms go and what transocean and bp is saying why didn't she push the alarms minutes earlier? it's her fault. no. it's their fault that they had those alarms inhibited and what we learned that is true -- it was true across the way. they know the largest owner operators of offshore in the world. everything that happened to be on the rig is a reason to be concerned about every rig. haliburton the largest services in the world, camera the builder of the b.o.p. horribly failed in these operations. every single oil company who didn't know what to do in response to this disaster who hadn't planned who hadn't prepared guilty in this disaster. and what the bottom line is that all these companies are to blame and all of them need to be held to account and pay off, bp, transocean, camera, haliburton.

we shouldn't be having these operations and that's what we learned after 1969 and it's what we should be learning today. and the obama administration knows this. as peter said. all of them were good on this issue. even when obama was running for office at first he was opposed to offshore drilling and then he was for offshore drilling in the middle of the campaign and the same thing happened to john mccain. the oil industry wants offshore drilling. they want it because they're running out of places to operate and they're willing as i said in the beginning to make that risk and spin those dice and risk the lives of the people in the wild places of the gulf. but we can't let them do that. so one of the amazing ends of this story is that when i started writing this book in the gulf, you couldn't get an environmentalist in the gulf coast to say anything bad about the oil industry. these oil industries -- oil and fish and oil in the gulf is part and parcel to being there. and one of the stories i tell in

the book is of the fish and petroleum -- the shrimp and petroleum festival in morgan city, louisiana and the king and queen are in my book sitting on their throne and they have these crystal crowns and made in crystal is a green oil derrick coming out of the crown and a pink shrimp coming out of it and that pretty much describes fish and petroleum in the gulf but one of the things we learned is that while the gulf thinks of itself as a petrostate it really is, you know, i work in oil and angola is a petrostate. 86% of the gdp is from oil. iraq is a petrostate, 90% of the gdp is from hollywood louisiana isn't a petrostate. it really isn't and what people working in the industry told me in the end, you know what? we could do without this work. it's not safe. we don't like to. it's dangerous.

give us something else to do. we can't do -- we can't organize for a year in the gulf. it's hard to argue for the alternatives here. we can work on it but we need your help so you folks who work with greenpeace and you folks who work for centers of biodiversity and you folks live in california, vermont and dc you guys have to fight so that we can have alternative energy jobs, wind, solar, the hardest cut oil workers started saying this to me by this time. they're ready but they need our help and the one year anniversary is the time. it is the opportunity. this is the time when the world is focusing on this issue again, when public attention is gripped again and when we can actually organize to see change put into place. so thank you very much for listening. obviously, there's a great deal more about this written in the book. we're eager to answer your questions and have discussion and thank you very much for

being with us tonight. [applause] >> for discussion -- right here -- we'll take one more question in the back trying to get more of the room covered. okay? thank you. >> thank you for keeping everybody's attention on this. >> two questions, what is the money or is the money coming for the scientific research we need for the next year or more? 10 years, whatever you need? and the court cases, who's sponsoring those? where is that money coming from? the other question has to do

with today's post lisa murkowski had an op-ed we know where the oil it is. we ought to go get it. does that put to bed the -- [inaudible] >> well, the money for our litigation is coming from you. thank goodness. our members -- we have 42,000 paying members and 300,000 email activists and people are responding. they're sending in the money we need to keep in court. and we have an incredible team of 22 lawyers. we're working with a host of other lawyers who have volunteered their time. and with the help of our members and our supporters, we will continue the litigation fight of -- for as long as it takes so that's the good news. i think the other part of the

question was -- oh -- >> as far as -- as far as where the money for the science is coming from, a lot of it is held up. bp is not really making that available antonia said they made the process very complicated the scientists we talked to, they have done incredible jobs on collecting data on their very difficult situations but now they can't get money to actually analyze it. it's kind of a mess. there is some government funding but a lot of it is tied up in the court process. so even data that is being analyzed is not being shared with the public because they're treating it as evidence. but that doesn't mean the public doesn't have a right to know. you know, i would also give a

plug for a friend at cbd they're doing really great work. and like cbd, greenpeace doesn't get corporate funding or money from the government. so thank you for making it possible for us. >> really quickly, one of the problems is that the bp has put up $500 million for research, as they should. they should put up $500 million for research but they're in control of the funds. so they're requiring scientists to sign 3-year confidentiality agreements if they take the money and all the great scientists are torn. as john says there isn't other money. there's bp money and then there's nothing. and the -- there are scientists, obviously, who are saying, no, and they're trying to find support where they can. but, you know, they're getting it from groups like greenpeace and they're getting it from groups like the center for biodiversity. and they're getting it from universities and, therefore,

they all need our support. we basically have to counter bp's control of the funds with alternative -- with alternative funding sources so people like dr. samantha joy who i spent -- who is an amazing woman who i spent a great deal of time in the book, she's gone to the bottom of the ocean once a month. every month since this has happened. she's mapped the oil on the bottom of the ocean 2 inches thick 80 miles out from the site of the blowout, a layer of dispersant on top of it. she was on the team who found the plumes. she's fighting noaa every day in and day out. these scientists need our suppor support. >> something we had long suspected and it caught out -- i think it may have been greenpeace's freedom of information act. a lot of documents, thousands of documents emerged in the last few weeks that bp has been doing everything possible to very specifically direct how the money goes. and the emails like, gee, i

really don't like the way the study is going. let's pull the plug on this and let's give the money to these people because they have a good background in the oil industry and let's spend some of the money on here so as you can imagine their very much trying to direct their $500 million to studies that benefit them and ultimately things that they'll use in their defense in court. and get a tax deduction for donating the $500 million for their defense in court. >> i have an opportunity to work together and bring the money home and bring the national guard home. [inaudible] >> and we're anxious to work with you and help on this and work together. just a real tough question how does the navy -- [inaudible] >> we had to absolutely report every drop of oil we spilled to the coast guard and we

absolutely could not use any detergents on the oil. it was absolutely forbidden. you could not do that. why don't they have the same rules today on parts of it? >> yeah, they still -- they still have to record every release of oil. and there's millions of gallons of oil released into the ocean by oil rigs, accidents. workers die all the time. one of the workers i interviewed -- i was sitting with his wife and his newborn baby and he was trying to make her feel better by saying, oh, honey, you know, these explosions happen all the time. don't worry about it. you know, it's not something to worry about. and she didn't know that he had broken his arm and broken his leg and it all came out during the interview and the use of dispersants is used constantly. this wasn't the largest use of

correx after it wasle oil spill in 1979 but nobody done any research. the oil industry didn't do any research. they don't care. they didn't test it. they didn't study it. and they know used it again this time, what was different this time is that they used it at the source of the gusher under water and we've seen dr. smith joy had seen footage of that. the dispersant she said about 2% made it into the oil. 90% just went into the ocean. did you want to add to that? >> it was reported a while ago that the $20 billion that bp was supposed to put into the fund was directly connected to the gulf production money. is that still the case? it was reported but i haven't heard that again. in other words, they didn't --

the obama administration apparently allowed them to only tie that to gulf oil production so that bp could then hold the obama administration hostage because if they didn't allow more drilling in the gulf then the $20 billion was gone. has anything been done about that? >> well, i don't think that's exactly accurate but the reality is this was a company that was about to go down the tubes. their share price was dropping hugely every day. the market capitalization of this company was cut in half in a matter of days. had some agreement not been reached i think the government's fear was this company will go away. one of the largest companies on earth will die in front of us and then who will pay? and we won't have the british punching bag available the house so i think ultimately a calculation -- again, a calculation on a very short-term basis, a 24/7 news cycle calculation was made that we have to have something, that, a,

gives us some certainty that there's going to be some funds available for these people but, b, and possibly more important, that at that point the obama administration made a determination that it's not in their best interests politically or even in the governance of the country to allow this company to die at that time. i think that's what the $20 billion represented more than anything else. >> one thing i would just add, the very first -- the moratorium the obama administration put in place wasn't on drilling in the gulf. it was just on exploration of the gulf. drilling continued. we're actually producing more oil right now at this time than we were at this time last year. production didn't suffer at all. of course, to make the point for people who are listening out there that drill, baby, drill is the answer we're producing more oil now than we were at this time last year and, of course, the price of oil and the price

of capacity are significantly higher so they're not connected. the very first new lease for exploration was granted to bp. and exploration, you know, grants are going out left and right now and all the companies are getting new grants. >> also, that 20 billion has been put forward that it's just for the claims to think that the claims are really well-taken care of. that $20 billion which is just a promise, only 3.5 actually has been delivered is for everything. it's for every potential charge against bp. it's not as large as it sounds and it actually hasn't been paid yet. >> i just want to note very quickly the clean water lawsuit that we have filed seeks $19 billion. that's entirely separate from the other $20 billion fund.

[inaudible] >> well, it's a really good question. and we're just in a terrible -- terrible -- it has withstood attacks for decades and it's just a sad, sad irony that under a democratic administration, when we've been able to fight back in the darkest, darkest days of all branches of government controlled by hostile antienvironmentalists, that we've been able to beat back all those challenges and basically, you know, the wolf was just taken off the endangered species list from an act of congress all in a attempt to reelect jon

testers all by the bean counters at the white house. i have to say it's very depressing. i think we'll get the dwarf horse on the endangered list and if they don't make that decision we'll sue and we'll get it on the list but will they pass a bill to take it off the list, subsequently? this is the question everybody is asking now and you see it's like the domino theory they talked about in vietnam and if you can take the wolf off the endangered species list by legislation the most -- one of the most charismatic animals there is, then i understand your question by the sea horse which is a darling little creature by the way. let's not sell it short. we're in a world of hurt in that regard. we're in a world of hurt. >> one question i get asked a lot and how good a job did they

do with the cleanup effort? and it's a difficult one to answer for me it comes back to the simple truth which people don't generally want to face and that is where you have offshore drill you have spills handcuff the risk of accidents and this gets back to what antonia was saying. they're rolling the dice. and it's just a matter of time. this wasn't so much an accident as an accident waiting to happen. and so that's why really we need to be working together more than ever to make sure this doesn't happen again. we got to get rid of offshore drilling. [applause] >> i think more importantly we have to get rid of our addiction to oil. i mean, the idea that all of us here probably use oil somewhere today to be able to get here. you may have flown on a plane to get you here. i think that's why people don't get so emotional by that because they think i'm going to drive

down to the coast where i can fight the oil but wait a minute, i just drove in a car that used the oil. how do you turn that around? that's the bottom line. and as far as, you know, the business and the fines, you know, the $20 billion ridiculously low, i was just fined $200 for putting a ketchup bottle in a trash can that was not a recycle can. i'm amazed that companies like that can get away with so much crap. it's just shocking to me. >> i think it's an important place to end our own responsibility, our own culpability in dealing with oil. and there's two pieces of that. the one is, you know, hands down, the largest source of oil, you know, of oil and gasoline in the united states is

transportation. it's cars. it's planes and it's trucks. and i think the greatest solution for that is, you know, we are at a time of economic crisis incredible job loss, ongoing job loss -- if we could make the type of public commitment to public transportation like we did to public highways, we could have an amazing jobs program and we could move people in public transportation instead of move people in cars and that would be a huge shift but the whole field of advocacy for public transportation is just one that doesn't get a lot of support and a lot of energy. i think it's one of the silver bullet. there's individual actions that we can take but collectively we will be far, far, far more powerful and the way to be more powerful collectively is by demanding public policy that makes it possible for more people to make that choice away from their individual use of cars. but the other piece is the industry. and so i've made -- i've spent a

lot of my life trying to organize around the oil industry and it's one that's very difficult to organize around because it's the wealthiest industry the planet has ever known and it's not susceptible to the type of consumer boycotts that so many other large companies are. and i think all that is missing is continuing to have that type of corporate analysis that allows us to say the industry is making choices, companies are making choices and using money in a way that is making it very hard for us to make the individual decisions and the policy decisions that we want and to continue to bring that corporate analysis into the picture and to support the organizations like mine global exchange and peace and biological studies and do that work and do it and target the industry and oil companies as a whole so that we can, one, attack the negative work that they're doing and support the positive alternatives at the

same time. [applause] >> thank you all. >> our visit at this event in georgia continues. next take a tour of urban slavery sites in georgia with annette good walker co-author of civil war savannah. >> we're standing in the basement today of the second african baptist church in savannah's history tells the story of twice freedom is what i like to say. first of all, second african baptist was founded in 1802, reverend cunningham was the first pastor, reverend cunningham and second african over its history has trained more ministers in the baptist church than any other baptist church in america.

but what it's importance to our city in savannah in 1865 on february 4th, it was the site of the 40-acre speech. it was delivered here by general saxon in this room. the room is the pulpit that was here in 1865. also here in this room are the benches that the congregants would have been sitting in on that day. the benches were made by 1810 and they serve a twofold purpose. first of all, if there's the minister who is up at the pulpit, then the benches will be facing front. but for a politician, for example, who may not be able to go into the pulpit the benches face the back so we have to wonder where that pulpit was in those days in 1865 but these benches today are reversible still.

they're very similar to the railroad benches but who knows what happened to the patent in those days. in those days it rings freedom. in fact, they talked about shouting up the year of the jubilee has come the praise of the 3,000 blacks who had come here to find out what field order 15 had to say and field order no. 15 was that order written after general sherman met with 20 black merry christmases here in savannah. he asked those ministers what is it that you want? and their answer was, land. we want land. and the land that was designated for them was a 330-mile track of coast land that had been the same plantation that is a lot of these slave people now free would have worked on. the question becomes that day with 3,000 people listening where did they go? did they leave here and go to find the land? some of them actually went from, as history tells us, out in the

island and lived there for a yea year. an enslaved minister who worked in market square. he had a butcher shop there avenues pastor as i said in the third african baptist church. he was one of the 20 ministers who met with sherman. he had also been enslaved and he was able to hire out his time by his master. he would pay his master $50 a month so he could hire out his time and be a butcher. reverend housepin also after freedom and after this experience apparently of dealing with the 40 acres, taking this group out of the island he was also a state legislature. we read a lot about the africans once they were free got into politics but that didn't last very long because, of course, after reconstruction a lot of that disappeared. at any rate, we're just in a

historic structure. 1864 -- i'm sorry, 1865 to 1963 is my twice freedom story because in march of 1963, reverend martin luther king came to this edifice looking for one of those famous mass meetings and he had been driving around for two hours and he finally found a meeting and it said that dr. king practiced his ending to the famous "i have a dream" speech right here in the second african baptist church right here in savannah. >> for more information on c-span's local content vehicles and the 2011 lcv's tour visit c-span.org/localcontent. >> what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> hi, i'm jane blair and i'm the author of hesitation kills, a female marine officer's combat experience in iraq and this