Editor’s note: Fishermen are engaging resistance against the natural gas industry and its expansion of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) terminals. They aim to defend their traditional work that goes back hundreds of years, their fishing habitats, and the health of their community. Europe, especially Germany, has increased its demand for LNG since refusing to buy gas from Russia when the attack on the Ukraine started. Texan gas company Cheniere delivered 70 percent of its natural gas supply to Europe last year.
At the border coast between Lousiana and Texas there is magnificent biodiversity which is barely found anywhere else in the US, such as marshes, coastal prairies and rare species like white alligators and brown pelicans. Nearly half of US wetlands in are in Louisiana.
Their LNG terminals are polluting air, the water and the soil, which is completely legal. They need to be stopped for good. This can only happen through a decrease in both economic growth and energy addiction, the elephant in the room that politicians and business people don’t want to talk about.
We wholeheartedly support this resistance against the gas conference. At the same time, we need to distinguish between subsistence fishing and commercial fishing. Subsistence fishing is a way of life where a community fishes in order for its survival. They share an understanding that their way of life is intricately intertwined with the health of the fish community. As a result, their intent is to fish in amounts that would not harm the river or oceanic community.
Commercial fishing, on the other hand, is driven by commercial interests and is, as a result, insatiable. Since the advent of industrial fishing, more than 90 percent of large fish in the ocean are gone. This ecocide is normalised as shifting baseline syndrome. In the seventeenth century, cod (from which cod liver oil was extracted) was so plentiful in the Northwest Atlantic that there was a saying that you could walk across the ocean on their backs. As a result of commercial fishing, these cod are nearing extinction. As a biophilic organization, DGR’s primary allegiance lies with the natural communities. We are against any action that harms the natural world, including commercial fishing.
In the current context of overshoot, there is also a need to reevaluate subsistence fishing. Subsistence fishing of an abundant species does not harm the fish community. However, since commercial fishing has endangered many of those once abundant species, subsistence fishing of these now endangered species might even lead to extinction.
Frontline Fishers Force Early End to New Orleans Gas Conference
By Olivia Rosane/Common Dreams
Frontline fishers and environmental justice advocates forced the meeting of the Americas Energy Summit in New Orleans to end two hours early on Friday, as they protested what the buildout of liquefied natural gas infrastructure is doing to Gulf Coast ecosystems and livelihoods.
Fishers and shrimpers from southwest Louisiana say that new LNG export terminals are destroying habitat for marine life while the tankers make it unsafe for them to take their boats out in the areas where fishing is still possible. The destruction is taking place in the port of Cameron, which once saw the biggest catch of any fishing area in the U.S.
“We want our oystering back. We want our shrimp back. We want our dredges back. We want LNG to leave us alone,” Cameron fisherman Solomon Williams Jr. said in a statement. “With all the oil and all the stuff they’re dumping in the water, it’s just killing every oyster we can get. Makes it so we can’t sell our shrimp.”
The protest was part of the growing movement against LNG export infrastructure, which is both harming the health and environment of Gulf Coast residents and risks worsening the climate crisis: Just one of the more than 20 proposed new LNG terminals, Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass 2, would release 20 times the lifetime emissions of the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. Activists have also planned a sit-in at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., from February 6-8 to demand the agency stop approving new LNG export terminals.
The Americas Energy Summit is one of the largest international meetings of executives involved in the exporting of natural gas. More than 40 impacted fishers brought their boats to New Orleans to park them outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, where the meeting was being held. After a march from Jackson Square, the fishers revved their engines to disrupt the meeting. One attendee said the disruption forced the meeting to conclude at 11 am ET, two hours earlier than scheduled.
“Wen you’re here on the ground, seeing it with your own eyes and talking to the people… it feels like looking into the devil’s eyes.”
“They going to run us out of the channel and if they run us out of the channel then it’s over,” Phillip Dyson Sr., a fisherman who attended the protest with his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, said in a statement. “We fight for them. We fight for my grandson. Been a fighter all my life. I ain’t going to stop now. So long as I got breathe I’m going to fight for my kids. They are the future. Fishing industry been here hundreds of years and now they’re trying to stop us. I don’t think it’s right.”
The fishers were joined by other local and national climate advocates, including Sunrise New Orleans, Permian Gulf Coast Coalition, Habitat Recovery Project, the Vessel Project, For a Better Bayou, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and actress and activist Jane Fonda.
“I thought I understood. I read the articles, I read the science, I’ve seen the photographs. But when you’re here on the ground, seeing it with your own eyes and talking to the people… it feels like looking into the devil’s eyes,” Fonda said at the protest. “I’ve talked to people who have lost what was theirs over generations and are losing their livelihoods, the fishing, the oystering, the shrimping…”
Fonda called on the Biden administration to take action: “If President [Joe] Biden declared a climate emergency he could take money from the Pentagon and he could reinstate the crude oil export [ban]. Once the export ends, the drilling will end. They’re only drilling because they can export it.”
The successful action came despite interference from police, who threatened to issue tickets and tow away the six boats the fishers had originally parked in front of the convention center. Some participants agreed to move their boats, but the group was able to park two boats in front of the center and persevere in their protest.
“We’re standing in the fire down there. And these people over here, the decisions that they make, for which our fishermen are paying the price. That’s bullshit,” Travis Dardar, who organized the fishers’ trip and founded the group Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage (FISH), said in a statement.” The police got us blocked here, they got us blocked there. But know that the fishermen are here and we’re still going to try and give them hell.”
https://x.com/labucketbrigade/status/1748376021412294825?s=20
More on The Louisiana Bucket Brigade and it’s movement against LNG
Photo by MsLightbox/Getty Images SIgnature via Canva.com
Saying commercial fishing is due to ”greed” is simplistic and ignores the real issue. There would be no profit in fishing if there was no market for fish. Somebody is eating those fish, and if they were not eating fish, they would be eating something else, almost certainly something grown on former wildlife habitat with chemical methods that are harmful to the surrounding ecosystem.
The root of the commercial fishing problem is not ”greed”; it is the sheer existence of so many customers for food, fish or something else. Until there is a sharp drop in the number of consumers there will have to be a fishing industry or some other industry producing the food they will need.
The same applies for the market for natural gas. The problem is not where it comes from, but where it goes. Production in Russia is not harmless, just less visible to us in the West. Reducing the number of people who buy it is the way to stop the damage extracting it does. Just demanding that extraction be stopped will not work as long as the huge market exists. If the protests succeed and the extraction here is halted, the market demand will ensure that someplace else will be used to fill the need. If Germany cannot buy its gas from America, they will not just stop using gas and be content to freeze. They will have to find someplace else to get it, possibly in Africa or South America.
This analysis applies to every environmental problem. Stopping one extraction project here and another one there is an uphill fight. The need is to pull the plug on the whole global civilization and bring down the population to something nearer to what the world can support, probably around 1% of what it is now. I suggest that any article on such subjests should include the suggestion that population reduction is the only long-term solution to whatever the immediate and local problem is.
I fully agree about human overpopulation. Human overpopulation and wrongful lifestyles/overconsumption are the 2 physical roots of ALL environmental and ecological problems (the real roots are mental and spiritual).
I’ve been saying what you wrote about overfishing for about 20 years: the cause of it is human overpopulation, period. Unfortunately, environmental groups, even radical ones like this one, don’t like to talk about overpopulation for various reasons, so it’s the elephant in the room that no one will discuss. It’s the biggest problem on the planet, and would even greatly reduce the wrongful lifestyles/overconsumption problem. We can’t really fix anything without greatly lowering the human population, so I really wish environmental groups would grow a pair and/or change their attitudes on this so we’d have a chance of doing something about it. The Center for Biological Diversity is the only environmental group that I know of that makes overpopulation an issue (at the urging of me and some others, BTW), but even that group takes a rather meek and milquetoast approach to it. This problem requires a long-term solution, but it can be done if people were to evolve enough mentally and spiritually so that they would no longer be willing to harm the Earth and the nonhumans on it by their gross overpopulation.
The main reason pseudoenvironmentalist groups refuse to admit there is a population problem is that population reduction is linked in their minds with Nazis herding unwanted ethnic groups into gas chambers. They think anyone advocating population reduction is motivated by racism.
They also think the only acceptable solution is to ”empower women”, one of the standard liberal goals, despite the fact that in many countries the real chance of that within the time frame it must be done is zero. So even those who accept the need to reduce population will not consider more realistic options such as tying aid to allowing birth control clinics or sending anti-religion missionaries to try to convert people to non-religion.
Or putting contraceptives in Coca Cola.