Rocky Kistner's blog

Amber Bartlett had just finished reading a book in her Mayflower, AR, home when she got a call from her teenage daughter that she will never forget; police had stopped her from entering their subdivision because of a dangerous oil spill in the neighborhood. Amber looked out her window in disbelief, but there it was, a river of thick, black noxious crude oil gushing down the street near her driveway, forming little waves as it lapped over the sewer drain. [...Read more]

As Congress stumbles through an embarrassing year-end game of fiscal brinkmanship, the world continues its slow burn toward unchartered and dangerous territory. It’s a future that threatens us all with more cataclysmic storms, punishing drought, mind-boggling Arctic ice melts, and more ferocious fires and floods. [...Read more]

An oil platform explosion and fire today near the site of the nation’s greatest offshore oil spill in history—BP’s Deepwater Horizon—sent shivers up the spines of many Gulf residents as the U.S. Coast Guard reported that 11 crewmembers were flown to area hospitals and two crewmembers were still missing as of Friday evening. [...Read more]

Down in the Louisiana bayou, people have first-hand knowledge of the kind of suffering a maelstrom like Superstorm Sandy brings. After the titanic tempest slammed into northeast coastal communities, killing more than 100 and making thousands homeless, people in the Gulf could feel their pain. [...Read more]

Cajun fishing and hunting guide Ryan Lambert has weathered his share of storms over the years. He rebuilt his house and lodge deep in the Louisiana bayou seven years ago after Katrina rampaged across the area like a wild boar through roseau cane. Two years later, he struggled to rebuild his fishing business decimated by the BP oil spill—a business that today still reels from a lack of trophy-sized speckled trout famous to fishermen all over the country. [...Read more]

Across the nation’s breadbasket, many farmers are out of time waiting for cooling rains to salvage crops blistered by one of the hottest and driest summers on record. But up in the frigid arctic, another battle with nature is playing out; the race against ice. [...Read more]

In Canada's western province of Alberta, Melina Laboucan-Massimo’s community—the Lubicon Lake Nation—has endured a withering toxic tar sands oil assault, an Armageddon against nature few Americans are fully aware of. Here in the once pristine sub-Arctic, tar sands mining operations level vast swaths of boreal forests near native lands, as  [...Read more]

This week, much of the globe’s attention is focused on the United Nation’s Rio +20 Earth Summit, where thousands of international delegates and NGO representatives are gathering to hammer out solutions to an increasingly stressed out, warmed-up world. [...Read more]

Washington’s political wars rarely match reality back home. [...Read more]

The second memorial of the nation’s worst oil catastrophe has come and gone, forever linked to Earth Day and seared into the psyches of millions of Gulf residents and fishermen. In recent weeks, the media has unleashed a torrent of stories about the devastating impacts of the nation’s worst oil spill disaster;