When a picture is worth millions of barrels of oil

When you hear the estimates from the Deepwater Horizon's oil spill on the news, five to nineteen thousand barrels of oil coming from the broken equipment at the seafloor each day, it's an incomprehensible quantity. This unimaginably large spill has been captured by photographer Yuki Kokubo in coordination with the Environmental Defense Fund in a photoessay illustrating the breadth of destruction to not only the ecosystems but also the economies of the Gulf Coast. Yuki's images focus attention on the tangible immediacy of environmental impacts the oil is having on an already vulnerable coastline. Oil has seeped into the coastal marshes despite absorbent lines and booms, it has impacted thousands of fisherman and coated coastlines along Louisiana.
I see Yuki's work as a strong example of the incredible contribution that can be made through citizen-science, a term used to describe individuals with no specific scientific training performing research-related tasks such as observation. Yuki has documented the oil spill and its impacts, contributing to the discourse on this complex issue and the challenges that we face moving forward. Her photography brings to light the deterioration of the Gulf Coast shorelines, a result of the engineering projects to change the flow of the Mississippi River (some for cutting canals for oil and gas development), with images of failing efforts to prevent landfall as oil makes its way through the porous landscape. As ecosystems and communities are impacted many people are working to document and share the reality that they are seeing on a local level. Citizen-science is playing an important part in this disaster; fisherman watching and working to save the marine habitats they depend on, community members documenting the intrusion of oil into their favorite hiking spot and many more volunteers laying booms to protect the places they care about. This is how citizen-scientists are making an impact on an environmental issue that is much larger than anyone can comprehend. You can follow Yuki's work by visiting her website www.yukikokubo.com as well as her work with EDF at www.edf.org.