Where the Alligators Roam

"Abita Springs is nestled in the piney woods of St. Tammany Parish, just east of Covington and north of Mandeville. The town has a well-earned reputation for clean are and sparkling clean artesian well water. St. Tammany has a reputation for being one of the most conservative parishes in Louisiana, yet in Abita Springs the Republican mayor and town aldermen have committed to move their town to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030.

The town is one of just over 100 U.S. municipalities who have signed onto the Sierra Club’s “Ready for 100” pledge to pursue full renewable energy for their communities. The group made a splash at the recent U.S. Conference of Mayors’ meeting in Miami, where tidal flooding has become a reality even while some political leaders profess to be climate change skeptics.

LeAnn Magee, founder of Abita Committee for Energy Sustainability, attended the Mayors’ Miami meeting with a small delegation of her co-horts. Abita Springs Mayor Greg Lemons is, it turns out, a long-time Sierra Club member and, MaGee says in the interview, enthusiastically embraced the idea of the town making the commitment to sustainable energy.

Some of the town aldermen were skeptical but were won over when they learned that one of elements of the program was conducting an audit of public building energy usage. Helping the town reduce its cost of operating by reducing what it spends on energy had great appeal and the town was off and running.

Magee comes by her environmentalism honestly (she’s originally from Oregon but has been a St. Tammany resident for all of this century). Others came to the cause as a result of the anti-fracking fight in St. Tammany that flared over a three-year period when Helis Oil sought to frack in the parish.

As a result of that long fight (no fracking occurred after a test well was drilled), some in the St. Tammany anti-fracking movement were looking for something positive to get behind. They found it in the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 movement. Abita Springs is the first Louisiana municipality to sign up for the program.

For the naysayers out there, it’s worth noting that having a goal does not mean you’ve accomplished it, but having a goal is essential to accomplishing it. Abita has aimed high, setting a standard that other Louisiana municipalities in this climate change threatened state would do well to emulate.

We talk about Abita’s commitment and the thrill of environmentalists advocating for positive change."

"Louisiana lost a great friend just before the Fourth of July when Ezra Boyd died.

Ezra helped as many people and organizations as he had talents. He was a scientist with a political science degree included in the mix. He brought a heightened social awareness to the issues that he worked ranging from disaster preparation to response to recovery. He worked with public agencies, environmental groups, communities and individual citizens.

His DisasterMap.Net provides real-time data that anyone caught in a disaster or who knows people who are caught in disasters can use to provide critical information. In the floods of August 2016, Ezra helped scores of people across south Louisiana find their way to safety or help guide them back home in those tortuous days after the rains stopped but flood waters remained.

He brought static information to life combining his grasp of data and his skills as a cartographer and programmer.

His passing leaves a void in our community that will be difficult to fill. He had so many skills which he used so well.

This interview initially ran in April of this year. Ezra drove to Lafayette to be in the studio to record it. We knew each other for a few years. I had helped him with press releases about some of his projects. We considered each other friends. It was my honor to be considered his."

"Tropical Storm Cindy was a tiny storm that had an outsized impact on south Louisiana. Coastal flooding cut off LA 1 and extended westward to Cameron Parish. Again, this was only a tropical storm. Not a hurricane.

Cindy revealed our extreme vulnerability. Flooding in south Iberia Parish has revived calls for a levee to keep some storm surge out of some communities in that parish. A similar proposal was defeated four years ago.

There is more of this to come in our future — all across south Louisiana. It's because of climate change. The atmosphere is continuing to warm up, driven primarily by the the burning of fossil fuels which create the greenhouse gases that drive the process. The floods of August 2016 had all the earmarks of being powered by climate change.

The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) has just implemented its third Coastal Master Plan. Like its 2012 predecessor, the 2017 plan is an amalgam of projects and approaches to restore wetlands, protect people and property. Like the 2012 plan, it carries a $50 Billion price tag. We know that this is a low-ball estimate. And, oh, by the way, we don't have the money to cover even half of the low-ball estimate.

One path to getting some of that money leads to the federal government. Good luck with that. The Trump administration (like the Obama administration before it) has proposed cutting off Louisiana's access to GOMESA money which is a new stream of offshore oil and gas royalty money that CPRA leaders include in the $19 Billion in revenue they thought they could count on as part of the minimum $50 Billion needed to implement some significant portion of the Master Plan.

That leaves the oil and gas industry. The industry is responsible for some significant portion of the wetlands loss Louisiana has experienced over the past 70 years. Studies in which the industry participated have found that industry activities — particularly the dredging of access canals for drilling locations and trenching through wetlands for pipelines — contributed between 30 and 70 percent of wetlands loss in particular areas, depending on the amount of oil and gas activity and the topography of the area.

Six parishes have filed Coastal Zone law suits against oil and gas companies under the powers given them by the Coastal Zone Management Act. There are 20 parishes included in Louisiana's Coastal Zone. Governor John Bel Edwards wants all of them to join the state in suits against the industry as part of a strategy of bringing them to the negotiating table.

The industry has a legal, ethical and moral responsibility to help pay for the damage their activities have caused to our wetlands. The profits they have extracted from Louisiana have made them rich but their activities are setting us up for disaster.

Climate change — rising seas, sinking land, higher humidity, stronger storms — threatens the future of everyone living in south Louisiana. The core business of the oil and gas industry is fueling climate change. Climate science indicates that relative sea level rise in Louisiana (the combination of rising seas and sinking land) could be as much as six feet within the next half century.

Sea level rise of that magnitude will force many of us to abandon our homes, businesses, and communities. For people like us —  people who are deeply attached and connected to place — this will be a traumatic event. We might be able to avoid it, but only if we are willing to confront climate change — the existential threat to south Louisiana."

"Calling Louisiana’s finances over the past decade a train wreck is an insult to trains and the calamities that sometimes engulf them.

Bobby Jindal inherited a $1 billion surplus from Kathleen Blanco when he took office, plus a flood of federal and private sector disaster relief and recovery money, and — with the help of a pliant/intimidated/indifferent legislature, burned through all that and an additional $2 billion dollars before he shuffled off the podium at the Capitol in January 2016 to the great relief of just about everyone.

John Bel Edwards succeeded Jindal and has spent the first two years of his term trying to dig the state out of the hole Jindal left in his wake — despite the best efforts of the House Republican majority to keep us there by refusing to vote for the taxes needed to enable the state to deliver essential services needed by our citizens.

Jan Moller has been observing this entire process for the past decade from front row seats. First, he was a Capitol beat reporter for the Times-Picayune back in the days when they were a daily newspaper. For the past five years, he’s been the leader of the Louisiana Budget Project, an organization whose focus is to provide analysis of state budget and spending policies for the good people of our state who would like to be informed.

With the state’s long-standing ‘good guv’munt’ organizations reliant on conservative funders for their existence, the Louisiana Budget Project (which is part of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities) has brought a unique perspective (as in not dominated by corporate interests) to Louisiana’s budget discussions.

In the podcast, Moller and I discuss the budget that just emerged from the regular and special sessions of the Louisiana Legislature, the role of Medicaid expansion in helping economic development in Louisiana, the prospective impact of the first Trump budget on Louisiana as well as what may or may not be the impact of the American Health Care Act which has had more false starts than are allowed in track meets.

It’s a wide-ranging conversation that I think you’ll find worth you while. Jan knows his number!"

"Accountants took down the gangster Al Capone. If the corporate education reform movement in this country is brought down it will likely be by a statistician like Mercedes Schneider.

The Slidell English teacher got engaged in the public education debate after one of the early leaders of the reform movement Diane Ravitch broke with the reformers. The former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education renounced her earlier support for high-stakes testing. Schneider started blogging her own opinions on public education not much later and has been steadily at it ever since. She also writes at Huffington Post.

Schneider's authored three books on aspects of the education reform movement, in addition to the blogging and her teaching, which she has not stopped.

As a practitioner and a statistician, Schneider brings unique tools to the table when she's discussing what works or doesn't work in education. And, she's been particularly adept at busting the manipulation of student performance data in Louisiana by Superintendent John White.

Schneider pulls no punches. She's plainspoken, authoritative, patient and relentless.

In this podcast, Schneider talks about the reformers in Louisiana and across the country, John White's record of data manipulation, and the impact that high stakes testing has in the classroom and how testing came to be a central element in the reform movement."

"Ganey Arsement is a Calcasieu Parish educator who became an education advocate thanks to two men — Bobby Jindal and John White. Jindal began his second term in 2012 with a ferocious attack against public education, public school teachers and local school boards. White arrived in Louisiana from New York in May, 2011 to become head of the Recovery School District. He was immediately touted by Jindal shortly after his arrival as a person the governor would like to see named superintendent of Education for the entire state, not just the RSD.

In the 2011 BESE election, millions of dollars in out-of-state money poured in to the coffers of some candidates and White was hired by BESE to be the state's new Superintendent of Education in January 2012. That was the last time BESE voted on a contract for White.

Arsement has filed suit to force BESE to vote on whether to renew White's contract or not. White has served as a month-to-month employee since January 2016 when the current BESE members took office following the 2015 state elections. Even though pro-charter, pro-White candidates were elected in seven of the eight seats filled by election. But, each governor gets to appoint three members to the 11-member board and Governor John Bel Edwards appointed three people to the slots who back his position that the state needs a new superintendent.

The result is something of a stalemate. State law says that it takes a tw0-third vote of BESE members to hire or fire a superintendent. That's eight votes. White can only muster seven. Or, so it seems since a vote has not been taken since the new board took office.

So, White has served as a month-to-month employee of BESE — although there's never been a vote taken on that either.

So, Arsement and others have filed suit in the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge (the place where all suits against the state and its departments and agencies must be filed). They are seeking to force BESE to vote on White's contract.

If a new contract for White cannot muster the required two-thirds vote need, Arsement wants to see the seat declared vacant (as the law provides) and a national search for a new superintendent launched.

Arsement discusses the lawsuit and the practices that he and other public education advocates say White has used to spin what they claim is a false narrative about the success of charter schools in Louisiana.

The suit has been assigned to Judge William Morvant, but it looks like it will be a while before the wheels of justice start rolling. The initial hearing has been set for August.

I met Ganey Arsement in 2015 while working on a min-documentary about the 2011 BESE elections. He's included in the program. Here's the link.

•••

Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment.

A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake

"

"Ganey Arsement is a Calcasieu Parish educator who became an education advocate thanks to two men — Bobby Jindal and John White. Jindal began his second term in 2012 with a ferocious attack against public education, public school teachers and local school boards. White arrived in Louisiana from New York in May, 2011 to become head of the Recovery School District. He was immediately touted by Jindal shortly after his arrival as a person the governor would like to see named superintendent of Education for the entire state, not just the RSD.

In the 2011 BESE election, millions of dollars in out-of-state money poured in to the coffers of some candidates and White was hired by BESE to be the state's new Superintendent of Education in January 2012. That was the last time BESE voted on a contract for White.

Arsement has filed suit to force BESE to vote on whether to renew White's contract or not. White has served as a month-to-month employee since January 2016 when the current BESE members took office following the 2015 state elections. Even though pro-charter, pro-White candidates were elected in seven of the eight seats filled by election. But, each governor gets to appoint three members to the 11-member board and Governor John Bel Edwards appointed three people to the slots who back his position that the state needs a new superintendent.

The result is something of a stalemate. State law says that it takes a tw0-third vote of BESE members to hire or fire a superintendent. That's eight votes. White can only muster seven. Or, so it seems since a vote has not been taken since the new board took office.

So, White has served as a month-to-month employee of BESE — although there's never been a vote taken on that either.

So, Arsement and others have filed suit in the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge (the place where all suits against the state and its departments and agencies must be filed). They are seeking to force BESE to vote on White's contract.

If a new contract for White cannot muster the required two-thirds vote need, Arsement wants to see the seat declared vacant (as the law provides) and a national search for a new superintendent launched.

Arsement discusses the lawsuit and the practices that he and other public education advocates say White has used to spin what they claim is a false narrative about the success of charter schools in Louisiana.

The suit has been assigned to Judge William Morvant, but it looks like it will be a while before the wheels of justice start rolling. The initial hearing has been set for August.

I met Ganey Arsement in 2015 while working on a min-documentary about the 2011 BESE elections. He's included in the program. Here's the link.

•••

Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment.

A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake

"

"Paul Douglas is an Evangelical Christian who lives in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area of Minnesota. He’s also a degreed meteorologist and an entrepreneur. Rounding out the list is the fact that he is a climate change believer.

I first heard about Paul Douglas through my friend Kevin Shannon who spent an eventful couple of years in Louisiana before returning to Minnesota.

Paul Douglas co-authored this book on Christians’ and climate change.

Douglas and Mitch Hescox co-authored a book, Caring For Creation, to urge their fellow Christians to begin taking climate change seriously. The overarching concept is that Christians are called upon to be good stewards of God’s creation, that it appears things have gotten out of hand, and that this creates a call for Christians to drop their skepticism and get engaged in the process of cleaning up the climate on the planet we call home.

All great spiritual traditions include among their tenets an intergenerational mandate to care for the planet so that future generations can enjoy it as they have.

Somewhere in the industrial age, this concept was lost or shoved down the hierarchy of priorities of those who have led companies, been captains of industry, investors and elected officials. Short-term thinking either obscured the long-term view that we all learned as part of our spiritual formation, or it replaced it all together. One of the most insidious notions to arise in post-World War II America was the concept of maximizing shareholder value. This Milton Friedman concept elevated profits above all other motivations and concerns for business leaders.

The concept led to a constricting of the field of corporate vision which drove companies to discount or even ignore concerns of their workers, the well-being of the communities where their plants were located, and, yes, even the impact those company operations had on the air we breath, the water we drink and the soil in which we grow our food.

Douglas is also a former cigarette smoker. During the interview he recalls how he came to learn about the disinformation campaigns waged by tobacco companies against the science which showed a connection between cigarette smoking and lung and other cancers. Douglas believes — and a growing body of evidence suggests — that the fossil fuel industry has torn several pages from the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt playbook to feed skepticism about climate change.

Douglas believes that “things are not hopeless and we are not helpless.” This is the message he takes to his fellow Christians about climate change. And it’s a recurring theme in our interview.

•••

Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment.

A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake"

"Listening to the rhetoric of anti-abortionists in and outside of government, it sometimes takes an effort to remember that abortions have been happening for as long as there have been humans and the right to a safe abortion has been protected by the United States Constitution since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

But, this is Louisiana where even lost causes are never actually admitted to be lost. We talk in tongues, never saying in public what we mean in our hearts. Unless, of course, we slip and the bile in the form of hatred comes spewing out.

Louisiana's fetus fetish grew out of the same cultural cul-de-sac that venerates confederate leaders but ignores their barbarous acts. Anti-abortionism uses the fetus to bludgeon the rights of women. It was not until the 1970s in Louisiana that women got the right to borrow money on their own. The resentment against that has never died down.

Louisiana's restrictions on women's health options have much less to do with the alleged sacredness of life (the canard that is exposed every day in this state by a long litany of statistics ranging from high poverty rates, poor health outcomes, low levels of education, the highest rate of incarceration, etc.) than with the urgent desire of insecure men to maintain control over the lives of women.

Thus, you have the anti-regulatory legislature passing an increasingly arcane set of regulations on abortion clinics. You have legislators in a state with high teen pregnancy rates fighting to keep sex education out of schools. And you have legislators gutting funding for the Department of Children and Family Services on one day while trying to tighten abortion regulations the next.

We are a backwards state because our elected leaders consistently try to drag us back to a white male supremacy fantasy world of where everyone knew their place and Trey's son could get a job at a bank even it he couldn't count too well.

The confederate monuments fight has served two extremely useful purposes. The first is that it has forced us to examine our history. Those monuments had nothing to do with the Civil War but much more to do with trumpeting the rule of white supremacy harkened by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The second thing it has accomplished is peel back the thin veneer of politeness and exposed the ugliness that lurks just below it in the bright light of day.

Women seeking abortions have seen this ugliness every time they have approached a clinic to exercise their right to a safe medical procedure. The people who protest and try to block them from exercising their right don't care about the women and they don't care about the fetus that the women want to abort. What they care about is attempting to exercise control over those women in a desperate attempt to cling to the illusion of a past that they can't allow themselves to comprehend.

What unites opponents of removing confederate monuments with anti-abortion activists is the fear and hatred that lies at the core of their beliefs, but which erupt from time to time in ways that are so stark and pronounced as to reveal their alleged higher purpose to be a scam.

Amy Irvin and I had a great conversation. I'm proud to be included as member of the New Orleans Abortion Fund board of directors."

"Don Clausen and I have been friends for 40 years. We met at what was then USL at, appropriately enough, a protest over tuition hikes.

We fluctuated in and out of touch before reconnecting in the early years of this century here in Lafayette. By this time Don was well into his career as a social worker specializing in one form or another of addictive behaviors. Over the years we've had hundreds of conversations that have mixed social, cultural and political analysis with the insights he's gleaned through what are now the three decades of his work in the field.

He's been working on his Ph.D. in Social Work at Jackson State University in Mississippi. He's ABD — all but dissertation — at this point and the conversations have gotten richer as he's brought what he's learned from his research of the history of the field of addiction treatment to our ongoing conversations.

This is the third time Don's appeared on the podcast. This conversation covers some of the earliest days of the addiction as a disease model and, in it, Clausen discusses some of the moral and class biases that have shaped the field from its early days and which I would say distort it today.

Dr. Benjamin Rush shaped the field from its earliest days. He was the first to classify addiction as a disease. Later academicians and practitioners applied a moral judgment to the disease model and treatment programs based on that analysis have flourished for more than 150 years. What is clear is that the moral judgments were applied to the addictions (primarily alcohol) of the lower classes, while addictions of the upper classes (which included drugs) were written off as 'products of success.'

We talk about that where the moral judgments were and were not applied.

We also delve into the way society conditions us for addiction and abandons us by not providing us the tools to understand and address those itches we try to scratch or numb with substances of choice — some legal, some not.

The next time Don is on the show, he'll be a full Ph.D. and I'll have to defer to his knowledge. Until then, we'll rumble!"