I’ve spent a fair amount of time in southern Louisiana during the past two years making a documentary film about the relationship between man and the sea. Everywhere you look there’s water: creeks, rivers, bayous, swamps, the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.
During the course of filming, I’ve spent several days on fishing boats, usually listening to family fishermen complain about a variety of ills affecting their industry. The price of gasoline is too high. Foreign imports are undercutting prices. Canals cut by the oil and gas industry—and the abandoned infrastructure left behind by their exploratory operations—are hazards. Coastal erosion—a football field of Louisiana coast is lost every half hour—constantly changes the boundaries of the fishery. A growing dead zone off the mouth of the Mississippi River, thanks to nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilizer washed-in from 31 states to the north, means they have to motor farther out to sea to drop their nets.
As pessimistic as they may be, none of those fishermen, many of them third and fourth generation, could have predicted that it would be an unstoppable gushing oil well located a mile below the Gulf’s surface that would bring their livelihood to a grinding halt.
Earlier this week, NOAA closed all fishing in federal waters off Louisiana, both commercial and recreational, for at least 10 days. The timing couldn’t be worse: shrimp, oyster and blue-crab are all spawning right now, meaning normally this would be prime-time fishing.
Just how big an industry is being impacted? In 2008, the Gulf produced 1 billion pounds of finfish and shellfish, and shrimpers took 188 million shrimp, creating a $130 million industry.
On the recreational side, in 2008 an estimated 3.2 million fishermen ventured into Gulf waters on 24 million individual trips. What’s unknown at this juncture is how the marine life will be affected by all that oil in the water.
The impact will not be felt only by Gulf Coast fishermen: Between 10 and 20 percent of the seafood in the U.S. comes from the Gulf; the shutdown will invariably affect all Americans who eat fish (on average, 16 pounds a year).
People will question the safety of consuming the Gulf of Mexico fish for a long time into the future.
Ironically, while many of the fishermen now being shut down were forced to rebuild docks and homes after hurricanes in recent years, those big winds and waves were not particularly hard on the fisheries. This manmade disaster is turning into a different animal altogether.
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