Breaking the Cycle

In our eighth episode of Breaking the Cycle, we explore how polluting industries perpetuate disinformation about their projects and products. To help explain greenwashing and how it relates to carbon capture and storage, we talked with Bekah Hinojosa with Sierra Club and Jade Woods of the Center on International Environmental Law.

Land loss is an issue for all coastal communities from the Gulf and beyond and has an enormous impact on the broader global ecological balance. To help paint a coherent and detailed picture, we interviewed Naomi Yoder, a staff scientist at the environmental justice organization, Healthy Gulf.

Cyrus Reed, the conservation director for the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, talks about the efforts to properly regulate venting and flaring and well closure, as well as federal support for closing the wells. Miguel Escoto with Earthworks walks us through the realities on the ground.

Hurricane recovery is an incredibly complex issue and a largely inequitable process. To draw the connection between recovery to fossil fuels, we spoke with General Russell Honoré, a retired veteran, leader of the Green Army, who is known for his leadership and aid in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. We also spoke with Alice Liu and Andrew Barley from West Street Recovery, a community-based disaster preparedness and recovery organization out of Houston.

In our fourth installment, we talk with our good friend, John Beard, resident and activist of Port Arthur, Texas, who illuminates the reality of living in a fenceline community, and how pollution has impacted the health of the people in his life. Later, Dr. Susan Steingraber and Dr. Larysa Dyrszka of Concerned Health Professionals of New York discuss the frack cycle’s critical and immediate harm to public health and the environment.

In this episode of Breaking the Cycle, we compare and contrast the environmental and economic realities between New Mexico and southwest Louisiana. New Mexico state Representative Angelica Rubio envisions a multigenerational plan for the people of the Permian Basin. James Hiatt of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade talks about his previous connections to the fossil fuel industry as well as the shortcomings of Louisiana’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program.

In our second episode of Breaking the Cycle, we take you from the Karankawa Kadla lands of the Coastal Bend in Texas to the United Nation of Houma in southern Louisiana. Your host, Courtney Naquin, discusses the efforts of two Indigenous women activists, Chiara Sunshine Beaumont and Jessi Parfait, to protect and reclaim culture, history, and land from polluting industry in the Gulf Coast.

What would you do if industry was right in your backyard? In the premiere episode of Breaking the Cycle, your host Courtney Naquin talks with four grassroots environmental activists from the Permian Basin to the Gulf Coast who are organizing in their communities and saying no to the fossil fuel industry. Kayley Shoup, a community organizer with Citizens Caring for the Future in Carlsbad, New Mexico, works towards a future where the Permian isn’t dependent on oil and gas. Emma Guevara, a local organizer with Sierra Club, defends the Rio Grande Valley against exploitative industries. Elida Castillo, activist and Program Director with Chispa Texas, explains how the fossil fuel industry has radically transformed her home in the Coastal Bend. Roishetta Ozane, founder of the Vessel Project and organizer at Healthy Gulf, works diligently to expand local conversations about oil and gas in southwest Louisiana while meeting the needs of her community through mutual aid in the wake of multiple natural disasters.