Five years ago, Cherri Foytlin’s family moved from Oklahoma to Louisiana, staking out a new life in her husband’s hometown of Rayne. A 38-year-old mother of six, the wife of a deepwater oil worker, and a reporter at the local paper, Foytlin was just finalizing the purchase of a new home when her husband’s rig was idled for the offshore drilling moratorium. They had just signed off on the house when her husband lost his job on the rig, a devastating blow.

Not long after the spill, she took a trip out on the water with a local fisherman. They came upon a pelican in the water completely covered in oil. ‘We pulled it up into the boat and we were going to try and get it back to Fort Jackson, the cleanup area, but it started having convulsions and it died-right there between us,’ says Foytlin. ‘I felt really guilty for not just this pelican, but the ecosystem. And not because my husband is an oil worker, but mainly because of what I know we waste in this country and what we take for granted.’

Since then, she’s spent much of her time organizing the group she founded, Gulf Change, and […]