Recovering from disaster: Holding industry accountable for restoration

Abstract

As the largest non-profit education and conservation organization in the United States, the mission of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) is 'uniting all Americans to ensure wildlife thrive in a rapidly changing world'. To do this, NWF educates and advocates for science-based policy to protect and restore wildlife populations and habitat. In the Gulf of Mexico region, NWF is engaged in several projects to restore the Mississippi River Delta, the Gulf, and the Everglades as well as Texas rivers and streams. That ongoing work took a dramatic turn in 2010 when the largest marine oil spill in history occurred in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite regulations requiring oil companies to operate safely with legal penalties for pollution, federal law and policy alone were ill equipped to mitigate a disaster of this magnitude. As this chapter relates, in addition to its disastrous impact on the Gulf Coast ecosystem, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill also presented a challenge to national environmental protection and habitat preservation organizations and partners in the Gulf region. Their collective task was to make sure that the federal government vigorously enforced all regulations and applied all available remedies towards significant, permanent restoration of damaged ecosystems. NWF met this crisis with a combination of political advocacy and scientific fieldwork to ensure that those responsible would pay to mitigate the damage, and that funds collected would be allocated where they would do the most good.