are you watching r t the main headlines for you. right now former head of the international monetary fund he's granted bail and placed under house arrest on charges of attempted rape but there are fears you're a good survivor downton. regime replacement obama says he wants an immediate transition of power in syria was he being in that speech outlining his policies that exist. and outrage and going to lose

a case of an opposition jailed for eventually inciting on rest on an election day supporters say it was a sense of country's seeming imminent president. well you're on the phone the worst oil spill in american history is it's the coastline that was worst hit we discover how the fates of the local environment since determining how local communities would cover. thirty five years ago wilma helped identify the toxic debts and suffocating the marine life in the gulf of mexico the dead cell is all encompassing it's along the mississippi river it's in the gulf the dead zone has a huge impact along the coastal areas where you have the fisheries researchers. we know that it's being caused by runoff in the midwest. the midwest has been

growing more clark and more corn requires a heavy a fertile household. every you nine hundred thousand tons of agricultural fertilizer washes into the mississippi river from thirty one states outside the museum. as the river moves through louisiana it brings all those nutrients down with it because algae blooms which use up the oxygen and cause what's called the dead zone and slow are no oxygen. makes sense from the mouth of the mississippi all the way into texas. and no fish no crabs all the type of aquatic organisms that they normally catch so it's having an impact on the whole united states but it's only quote impacting the economic base along the coastal areas.

occasionally field of food and music i think a lot of the richest places in the world but now natural resources are something that folks who have been in power have abused and neglected. two hundred petrochemical plants line eighty five miles of the mississippi river

between baton rouge and new orleans. they produce over twenty five percent of the petrochemicals made in the united states. it's known as cancer alley. the but when i brought my son michael holmes from hospital they told me he might be blind deaf or brain damaged but certainly more yet more susceptible cerebral palsy and more susceptible to respiratory infections and monia etc. and then i realized that the air was not attainment here meaning that it was unhealthy to breathe seventeen times that year the year that i brought him home i felt really like our basic civil rights are being violated that i was a certain when i opened up my window that i was getting clean air i wasn't certain that the the earth was clean i wasn't certain that the water that i was drinking

was all right and i was terrified for my children. having gone. so i think there's nothing like a mother's instinct as much misery something about that we already have too much or in our air quality is bad and then i realize the basic civics lesson that. i am that somebody. that's when i got involved i said i do this for six months and now is twenty something years ago. lean is louisiana my mental action network and we've been working on public health and opportunity natural resources for twenty three years. running our way to exxon

mobil to the largest petrochemical facility in the united states. petrochemical companies in the easy on him. killing more than one hundred thousand people. there's a lot of folks who are good neighbors but there is this percentage of folks that are really bad neighbors and it really ruins people's lives literally because they aren't obey him along. with. a chemical worker told me when he would come home with his clothes would smell he tells children that was a small money. yes it is jobs but we care about the workers to need to have a safe job. it is hard when people are worried you know where is my next paycheck and a column from my paycheck is coming from that company we are very

a tune and try to help people who want to do something but they can only do so much and that and there's no judgment there i mean this is supposed to be about helping people and not not harming anybody. this is going to harm my job is going to harm my husband or wife struck or you know will my people in the community look at me differently or they think i'm a crazy environmentalist for a while people may have a lot of attacks what you really know is they're not really talking about the substance of what you're saying they're just trying to take attention off of the facts of what's really happening here trying to stereotype you and there's no stereotypical environmentalist anymore used to be a yogurt backpack and prachi kind of people which i love which you obviously see i'm not now it's everybody's moms and dads grandmas and people become more aware about the environment. the more people that have lost in my life in this

work the woman who started this work with me ramona was like my partner in this work she was another mother actually her husband was a worker at one of the chemical facilities she just wanted to live to be forty and she died at thirty nine of cancer. when someone asks me when they're dying that i'm not forget the day they were here and they were important and so. at least our can do is try to help. you have to bring yourself back to why are you doing this and for me it's helping people and believe in net service is the rand i pay for the space i take up on

earth i believe that i owe something back and if the songs i can talk and walk on i want to help the minutes of life it's just about getting through life. i'm not pessimistic because if i got pessimistic i would quit doing more and doing just give up and i don't think that we can do that and. these things are just

happening here moving so morales that's not how it works it's everywhere. because of. this mentality of better living with chemistry that we have in some of it's everywhere it's pervasive ten thousand mile web of oil and gas pipelines crisscrosses louisiana's weapons. today many of those pipelines and their infrastructure just abandoned. my father it was military. when you grow up i think in a household and that environment you learn that you have

a responsibility to do the right thing for other people not just you know their companies. they're not even people they're corporations they're legal entities and i don't think you can let somebody intimidate you. much of the abandoned oil and gas infrastructure was initially built on land. but due to the rows and storms or misguided attempts to control the mississippi river much of it is now surrounded by water. not only others canals like they built to access the on the first place to straw ng the wetlands there are constantly or spills something or leaks out here and when they get done with it it's just there and it's all on the bottom they have old pipes on the

bottom whatever they aren't using they throw overboard the only people that ever see that is are fishermen who work the bottom are shrimpers the skimmer boats because they run into it and skimming or in their nets or shreds the nets almost. every bit of the sting says that are in that water and it does have competition like fish crab and fin fish and shrimp out here there's less of it for them to catch. the habitat destruction that is occurring if you took every fisherman out of the water and you don't do something about that water quality and the habitat protecting the habitat that the fisheries needs it's going to collapse. i and the people who work live off of these natural resources it's hard work but it's all also peachy connective is real family oriented you take your kids along

when they're young when you're working you keep i'm with you on the boat and they go to. to do any trade in they can take care of a family or hand and need to move past. the now so it's real tight now. and all the money that they earn stays within the community and the money goes to the docks in the boats for the notice for the nets to poke builders you know and it sustains the community as a whole. this is a national treasure and it really is people need to wake up in this conference and realize what they're losing when they lose this masters is the vehicle to leave. when we lose assess to larry the gulf of mexico fisheries are going to collapse

because. this is where those pieces grow. and i started i had the optimism of the young and i thought that if you point out a problem things will change rather than work the way you've got to really work at it to make things change. million is oil and gas industry generates more than seventy billion dollars per year and includes three hundred twenty thousand people if you look around resound you say well i had all this oil and gas obviously everybody here must be well off and incomes must be high and the road system must be great none of that is true

with their road system schools are in trouble all the time there's no money for your public services the state's always been a fiscal problem. and yet billions of dollars of oil and gas were removed from the state and our per capita income is among the lowest in the country are poverty rates highest next to mississippi thank god for mississippi so we don't have to be last in everything and so we don't have much to show for it except the waste that they left and to me that's the real crime here is that you had all this wonderful all these wonderful resources and the people got very little of it. every day six thousand workers shuttle by helicopter from soda to boil rakes in the gulf of mexico.

they used to provide by forty percent of the tax base now they provide maybe fifteen ten or fifteen percent so it's much less so the benefits coming in and gone down over the year and the impacts have gone up so some point those lines cross in louisiana is a net loser because of having oil and gas development they still provide some jobs but the oil industry is about three percent of our jobs just not that big a part of our job base and. pride became a problem say in one nine hundred twenty s. one nine hundred thirty s. people began to notice that the waste from the oil industry which is where they drilled the well and wheezy and they probably drilled a hundred thousand of them they were also. just a hole in the ground and then these pits they would put these waste water is where i guess all these things they use in the oil and gas industry it's got hydrocarbons in it like oil it's got heavy metals we find arsenic around these wells a lot and it's got it was called produced water it comes up with the oil three four

times the salinity of seawater dumped on the ground it kills everything it touches so we kill off all these little valleys and creek beds and streams and so when they left the least it would just push the little paid in a little dirt over but the landowners left with this massive waste which then seeps down the groundwater and there's a hundred thousand of these out there and many of them still leaking landowners are just finally learning about them so it's another one of those legacies in. they knew that these pits were going to leak i've seen reports from the thirty's it's a. if you put salt water in these online pits is going to leak down the groundwater and they continue doing louisiana until the late eighty's. finally now they're supposed to line their pits but we will last a nation to do it and it's really too late many cases. two decades ago paul helped to right some of louisiana's strongest environmental

law firms. which a coil and gas companies fiercely opposed. corruption is probably biggest problem money and politics corruption is the people think of in terms also might get a payoff like that's part of it but it's goes much deeper than that once you begin to change the way an agency does its business once that happens then the whole agency begins to change and it's no longer works for the people it's what. political scientists call client capture agency becomes captured by the group it's supposed to be regulated and then the agency serves that group and it doesn't serve the public anymore good people leave because they don't want to work in that kind of environment and you're left with a sort of dead in the water agency and we have a number of those no easy out. even if you got the law in place in history has had

a big say in writing those rules they want to take first look at the regulations and then they would edit them and i was on from that program because the management program over that. drill baby drill. right here. yes we must realize that sure oh yes we need conservation alternative fuels nuclear and many other things we also need more domestic production you can come off the coast of louisiana see how we're doing with the most modern technology so today we're announcing the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration my administration will consider potential areas for development in the mid and south atlantic and the gulf of mexico.

and. everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall in draw mention effects of this will be very very modest with soaring fuel the message disruption it's caused their lives and you know we there's no one wants to see no good news and i just you know love my life but.

nice to identify louisiana create katrina and rita and post katrina and rita and now it's pretty spill and post gone like feel like life as we know it is changed forever. it's just unbelievably bad when they wanted to start burning the heavy portion of it we had don't insist that it only be burned when the winds were moving offshore. it was making an aerosol of the hydrocarbons it was moving on shore way ahead of the spill and making people very very sick given the headaches the tree branches burning eyes and just disrupting life all along the coastal areas. this is the last thing we need we've got a hurricane season approaching this is the tommy year when you know we've got a lot of birds creeping out on the baryons and in the way fans the fish will all be

another marine lawyer starting to enter the by the news three most marine olden isms when they come into an oil slick the instincts don't tell them how to react because this is not a natural phenomenon of folding. it's just going to wipe out these coastal communities as we know it because they will not be a mechanism for them to earn a living on the natural resources and the e.c.f. . we really believe that there are not failsafe measures in place on those rigs that ecological disaster of this size could happen. this is something totally different this is something that they can't control they don't know how to control it it's just heartbreaking in a fury that our legislators lacks the rules and allowed them to do this when they

didn't have the technology to take care of it is something like this happen. what they've done here is why take out these coastal communities and put us all out of business and no rain as the charter captain is the commercial fisherman and nobody can do anything nobody can go to work they're angry and they're scared. everybody is like shell shocked and nobody knows what to do. how do you recover everything that you've lost. all of the oil industry is completely drops the state committees like natural resources you know legislature headed up by exxon executives and people like that it's the oil industry ultimately choose the ruling elite who run the e.c.m.

. it's one of the costs of oil that's never figured into the price of oil which is why gasoline is so cheap because we don't put all the paulson which is bad accounts and certainly is bad environmentally. peavey's it falls ill or phones ocean because it's the equipment that failed but we americans share a fair amount of the blame. most of us saw in denial about the whole energy situation the reason they're out there getting the oil is we demanded and they can still make money on. b.p. oil on the river us is not going to go drill in one mile deep water if they are my money. but they can make money because all energy policy. then don't keep drilling and it's gonna happen again. industry learn and change the

federal agencies my tighten up some they're going to be fools not to but follow through is pretty powerful i'm sure they're up there lobbying in the halls of legislature in the halls of the agency every day every hour. we don't give up their very tenacious we love where we live and we think well we live here it's our duty to protect that environment check our communities and so i'm just so sorry that i live to see this. this should be a giant wake up call for all of us were addicted to oil. i saw some money yesterday i go into a stall driving a big huge issue we have in the big park but just today they left their car running small i went into the store there when the store probably fifteen to twenty minutes

and the reason being says they call with syria wouldn't get. well as long as we have that sort of added to we're going to have to go offshore to foreign oil and we're going to have more of these sorts of accidents. one of our former governor has built louisiana oil was being sold to she says the rest of the nation his idea was well we'll shut down the pipelines and his slogan was let them freeze in the dog. and until something like that happens swivel e.u. is has to freeze in the dark i don't see a change in our energy policy and the full no real change in the desire to go deeper into the whole world.

culture is that so much going to huge musician time the mark of a loveless marriage or a dangerous embrace take your pick but pakistani american relations probably can't get any worse barring a complete break. all

. in some petersburg oh she's available in hotels a story a little ambassador in a small school to kowtow to triple desoto.