Writer Joselyn Takacs Discusses How the BP Oil Spill and Louisiana Oyster Farmers Served as the Inspiration for her Debut Novel
/By Joselyn Takacs
On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, taking the lives of eleven workers. The deep-sea well was blown open where the drilling pipe met the sea floor. For three months, BP—the oil company responsible for the spill—was unable to cap the open well. This was the largest accidental oil spill in history, and the second-largest by volume.
Joselyn Takacs
The site of the well was 135 miles from New Orleans, Louisiana, where I was living at the time. I couldn't walk past a television without seeing the underwater gusher—a black plume erupting with the power of six fire hoses. Prominent scientists and engineers made several unsuccessful attempts to close the well. It was said that doing so would be harder than landing a spaceship on Mars.
It was an inconceivable environmental disaster, and it was unfolding right in my backyard. The question of why this occurred and what would come next rankled me, but I had no inkling then that I would eventually write a novel about the oil spill’s effects on the Louisiana oyster industry.
I was twenty-two at the time and an aspiring, though unproductive, writer. I took part in some ineffectual protests to stop BP from using the chemical Corexit to disperse the oil in the water column. For one protest, I zipped myself into a HazMat suit given to me by my then-boyfriend who’d been hired to transport oiled birds in Florida.
Corexit was banned in the U.K. at the time for its toxicity. In the spill’s aftermath, the dispersant, combined with oil, was found to be 52 times more toxic to plankton than oil alone. But the rationale for the dispersant’s use was to save the coastline from a black tide. By dispersing the oil, the company hoped that it would prove easier for oil-eating microbes, endemic to the Gulf, to break down the oil. Locals were displeased with the decision to spray the dispersant at such unprecedented quantities.
Louisiana’s oyster farmers were particularly outraged.
The Louisiana oyster enjoys a certain prominence in Louisianan cuisine because of its abundance. The estuaries of the Bayou State have long supported a robust industry. Louisiana regularly leads the nation in oyster production. From 2000-2019, a third of all oysters consumed in the U.S. were landed in Louisiana.
During the spill, New Orleans restaurants stopped selling Gulf seafood. Tourism to the coast took a nosedive. Ten days after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, the state decided to deter the oil slick approaching the coast by flushing the estuaries with freshwater from the Mississippi River. Oysters require a specific salinity range to survive and thrive. The freshwater diversions wrought havoc on the state’s oyster populations, causing a massive die-off.
During the spill, I read an interview with an oyster farmer. The farmer interviewed was furious about the freshwater diversions. In the weeks after the diversion openings, many of his oyster crops drowned in freshwater. Thus, his crop was ruined before the oil even reached the interior marshes.
Prior to reading that interview, I didn’t know that oysters were “farmed.” In Louisiana, families essentially lease the water bottom from the state. On these leases, farmers cultivate and harvest from their oyster reefs. These reefs are often passed down from generation to generation. Some leases have been in families for as much as a century.
In the proceeding years, I followed news of the spill’s fallout in the Gulf. The oyster, as a filter feeder, is a keystone species, which means its health indicates the health of the overall ecosystem. Oysters filter pollutants from estuary waters, cleaning the water for other marine life. They provide critical habitat and protection for hundreds of species. They protect vulnerable coastline from erosion and Gulf storms.
Needless to say, the spill had a deleterious effect on the oyster catch. Just as troubling, for years, the new generations of oysters, called spat, were not taking to the reefs in many areas. Some experts blamed the freshwater diversions and resulting salinity changes, but the oyster farmers I spoke with maintained that the poor spatfall continued in areas where the salinity had improved.
In either case, an oyster takes three to five years to reach market size in Louisiana. Oyster farmers often stagger the age of their reefs as an insurance for future harvests, so when an oyster farmer loses multiple reefs, he’s not only weathering one season’s loss, but many years of lost income. I first learned this in the interview I read in 2010, and I kept it in mind when I left Louisiana to attend graduate school.
I continued to wonder how oyster farmers had fared. It wasn’t a story I’d read in the news. By 2015, the spill had largely faded from the headlines, so I applied for a grant to record the oral histories of oyster farmers in the wake of the disaster. I spent the summer interviewing oyster farmers and their families in three parishes of Louisiana. The more you study one organism, the clearer its connection to all life in an ecosystem becomes, and I realized that oysters were perhaps the most interconnected of all.
Mitch Jurisich, an oyster farmer in Plaquemines Parish and Chairman of the Louisiana Oyster Taskforce, captured this sentiment in his oral history. “[Oyster farmers] grow reefs and create reefs. Yes, we’ve had some setbacks here recently with the spill, and we're fighting the uphill battle again. But we are at least trying to maintain an ecosystem. It's something an oysterman does that no one does. And people take it for granted—what we actually do on a day-to-day basis. [It’s] very important to the ecosystem, not just to our pocketbooks.”
I told the men and women I interviewed that I wanted to write a novel about the oil spill. I don’t know what they made of this idea. I was a graduate student then with only a few short stories on my resume. And yet they spent hours with me, sharing their stories, teaching me about the industry, the Gulf, and how not to eat an oyster. They invited me to eat with their families. Some even took me out on their boats and let me watch them work. It was a generosity I hadn’t expected and won’t soon forget.
The oral histories did become the foundation of a novel, though it took years to finish. The novel, PEARCE OYSTERS, comes out in summer 2024. It follows a family of oyster farmers whose business, family, and livelihood are on the brink of collapse during that long summer of the BP Oil Spill. My hope is that the novel provides some small benefit to the oyster farmers building reefs and the oysters themselves, the backbone of so much life.
Billion Oyster Project is excited to be partnering with Zibby Magazine and Joselyn Takacs in 2023 to share her new novel with oyster enthusiasts across the country. Stay tuned for more!