Summer Burkes never considered herself an activist before Earth Day, 2010. She *still* doesn't really consider herself an activist -- just a fledgling New Orleans homeowner and Lower Ninth Ward community member who tried to help protect her new home and stanch the flow when the Powers That Be poked a hole in the Earth they still can't fix. Working closely with Matter of Trust and Burners Without Borders in the days after the Oilpocalypse began, she and her colleagues ("war buddies") encountered dramatic resistance from armed thugs working on behalf of the very people taxpayers finance to help. Things are weird in the world right now.

How terrible is the Gulf Oil Crisis? "Efforts" to stem the oil and "clean up the mess" have been censored. How toxic are those chemicals that are still being sprayed? Do people know the extent of the damage or long term health effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and how the courts favored the corporation that was legally/morally responsible for what happened and denied peoples' claims, and how there is a pattern between what happened then, and what is happening now. Listen to Summer Burkes' firsthand account of her experience and her efforts to help those whose health, lives, land, hopes have been endangered by one of the worst man-made disasters ever.

After the fourth or fifth time coming back to the Ninth Ward from the Gulf Coast with chemical poisoning so severe she couldn't open her eyes or get off the couch for days -- oh, the slimy heart-attack feeling of Toxicant Induced Loss of Tolerance -- she used her savings to high-tail it out of there, and is STILL couch-surfing in her old Bay Area stomping grounds, waiting for them to stop spraying Corexit (which they haven't). Once the lead A&E columnist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and now an unpaid blogger and aspiring novelist, Summer B. makes it her mission in life to help sustain those who willingly stay behind, under the Corexit planes, in the poisoned waters the Cajuns will always call home, no matter how much the Corporatocracy carpet-bombs them with oil-industry slurry and synthetic genomics. Help her help them, won't you?

PS- Carol and Summer are organizing a benefit screening of Black Wave with Dr. Riki Ott and others, February 10th, 2011 7 pm at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland. Please Come! (Give a holler, if you can help, we have cards, flyers and posters to be put up, passed out and distributed- cbrouillet(at)igc.org, 650-857-0927)

This show is archived here

Summer Burkes website - http://summerburkes.wordpress.com/
Project Gulf Impact - http://www.projectgulfimpact.org/
Coastal Heritage Society of Louisiana - http://www.chslouisiana.org/
Climate Change Relocation Center of Seattle - http://www.ccrcseattle.org/
Matter of Trust - http://matteroftrust.org/
Burners Without Borders - http://www.burnerswithoutborders.com/
Connecting People Wanting To Leave The Gulf With People Who Can Help - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=114661128579934
Phoenix Rising from the Gulf http://phoenixrisingfromthegulf.wordpress.com/
New Orleans, LA Gulf Oil Spill News - http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/

Photo of Summer Burkes in her New Orleans home by by Wick Sakit