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 starti