Disaster on the Half Shell.

• Position: Viewpoint essay

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Pete Vujnovich remembers exactly where he was when he first heard about the Deepwater Horizon blowout--or, more accurately, when he didn't hear much about it. On April 21, Vujnovich, a fifty-year-old oysterman from Port Sulphur, Louisiana, was driving up to the town of Alexandria in his 2006 white CheW 4x4 pickup to watch his son, Cullen, play first base in an LSU baseball game. The news on the radio was all about a freak storm that had just flooded Nashville. The explosion and sinking of the offshore drilling platform that had occurred the day before--and the death of eleven workers--got only a quick mention in the headlines.

"I didn't think nothing of it--it's 130 miles from my [oyster] bedding grounds," he told me when I visited him at his dock on a steamy Monday afternoon in June. "I thought: 'What a tragedy that those guys lost their lives.' I assumed [BP] had the capability and the technology to deal with this."

A month later, Vujnovich learned in a personal way that the oil giant BP did not, in fact, have the capacity to shut down the undersea gusher. "Overnight they closed me down, and 100 percent of the area I used to harvest is closed to me," he says.

Normally, Vujnovich would be out on the water in June, but because of the fisheries closure he was spending the day making repairs ("a ten-year refurbishing," he called it) on one of his two boats.

"May 22 was the last day I shipped oysters, and on May 23 I was all shut down," he says. "This is my only source of income--since I was eight or ten years old, my weekends and summers were spent on the boat. What's weighing on me right now, it's also shut down my son's and nephew's college money for the year."

T he closure of a third of Gulf fisheries has put shrimpers and other fishermen out of work or else forced them to take oil cleanup jobs. Native American communities in southern Louisiana that rely on fishing to keep food on the table are threatened with hunger. And then there's the damage to the region's unique ecosystems. The BP blowout has sent waves of oil into the fragile saltwater marshes of the Mississippi Delta which account for 40 percent of the United States' wetlands. Hundreds of birds and scores of dolphins have died. Vast plumes of oil in the ocean's water column, along with the toxics in the chemical dispersants used to remediate the spill, could turn much of the sea into a dead zone. One marine biologist compared the possible effect to detonating...