Scientist Profiled in MoJo Ocean Articles Wins Heinz Award

Nancy Rabalais.Credit: <a href="http://www.heinzawards.net/recipients/nancy-rabalais">The Heinz Awards</a>.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


I was pleased to learn this morning that Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) in Chauvin, Louisiana, is one of eight winners of the 17th annual Heinz Awards. Twice I’ve been drawn into Nancy’s extraordinary orbit to cover stories—once in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to report on her dead zone work (The Fate of the Ocean), then again last year after ‘Hurricane BP’ to cover her work in the aftermath of a catastrophic oil spill (The BP Cover-Up).

Here’s how I described Nancy after our first meeting in 2005, just before I sailed aboard the LUMCON research vessel, Pelican:

So far her tenure [at LUMCON] has been largely spent digging out of the mud, repairing the wind damage, and casting an eye to the weather. “This used to be a beautiful place,” she says of the striking waterfront facility built on stilts. Now it’s boarded up with storm shutters and surrounded by bulldozers, piles of garbage, stacks of dismantled roofing, stripped palm trees, and muck… Rabalais is weary. It’s late. She still has a two-hour drive ahead of her to Baton Rouge, where she teaches at Louisiana State University—though I suspect she would rather board Pelican for a couple of days and leave her worries behind. Instead, she’s relying on her research associates and graduate students to conduct the scientific cruise she normally looks forward to each month. A Texan by birth and schooling, she has been diving these waters since it was a fun thing to do; nowadays, it requires a certain courage. A week earlier, while diving in zero visibility on a research station 26 miles offshore, Rabalais encountered an alligator at the surface blown out to sea by one or both of the hurricanes. Diving to the bottom, she “felt something bump against my ankle. But I figured a gator wasn’t diving 65 feet deep, so it must have been something else.” 

The Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. Credit: ©Julia Whitty. The Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. Credit: ©Julia Whitty.

Not quite five years later, I was back on Nancy’s research station listening to her first-person encounter with BP’s oil:

“We dove down in clear water but came up 30 minutes later through oil,” says Nancy Rabalais… A few weeks after the spill, during her summer research surveys 10 miles offshore, Rabalais personally encountered BP’s plumes, which will probably affect her research far into the future. “It was horrible,” she says, grimacing. “We were covered. Our gear was covered. We were breathing fumes and tasting oil.” Rabalais is worried about the species already under enormous stress from a host of other environmental problems in the Gulf: dead zones, overfishing, chronic oil pollution, seismic testing for oil and natural gas, coastal erosion. “Brown pelicans just came off the endangered species list,” she says, “and now some of their most important breeding rookeries are getting hit with oil.”

Oil near pelican breeding grounds in Louisiana marshes, May 2010. Credit: ©Julia Whitty.Oil near pelican breeding grounds in Louisiana marshes, May 2010. Credit: ©Julia Whitty.

The Heinz Awards (of Teresa Heinz and the Heinz Family Foundation) honored each of today’s recipients with an unrestricted cash prize of $100,000. They described Nancy’s work as:

… on the forefront of efforts to develop and implement large-scale restoration plans for the beleaguered Gulf Coast waters. For decades, [Nancy Rabalais] has continued to be the driving force behind identifying and characterizing the dynamics of the Gulf’s dead zone, which exhibits dangerously low oxygen levels to support vibrant marine life. By studying sediment cores extracted by her team from the Gulf, Dr. Rabalais discovered that the Gulf’s oxygen depletion worsened dramatically since 1950, almost in direct proportion to the use of nitrogen fertilizer that flowed from farming areas into the Mississippi River. This, along with other factors, have led to the Gulf’s dead zone totaling over 7,700 square miles in 2010, the largest in the United States and the second largest worldwide. Her findings were met with political opposition and skepticism from some in the scientific community. She is currently working to help the Gulf recover from the damage caused by the 2010 oil spill and testing whether bacteria that feed on the oil could be contributing to the Gulf’s low oxygen areas.

So, kudos, Nancy Rabalais! I can’t think of another researcher working so courageously in combat conditions on the environmental and scientific frontlines of the 21st century.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate