Here is an excellent and informative (damning) interview author activist Antonia Juhasz on Democracy Now! (her book = Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill).

We still have oil coating the bottom of the ocean. We still have dispersant coating the bottom of the ocean. We still have waves that roll in, and oil rolls in with it. We stick a stick in the sand, and there’s still oil there. What we don’t have at the bottom of the ocean is the light that is supposed to be there….

[P]eople have been fighting this oil now for a year, and it has made them sick, the combination of the oil and the dispersant. It has made them exhausted. It has made them frustrated, because one year later the rest of the nation seems to have forgotten this tragedy, and our policymakers, one year later—not a single piece of legislation—not one—written to respond to the disaster has become law. And the money that BP is supposed to be paying has not come to the ground. The care—the claims that are supposed to be filled, the health provisions, the environmental provisions, none of it is there right now, and the U.S. Gulf Coast is still suffering under this glut of oil and chemicals.

“Nothing has changed in terms of the technology since the disaster happened, yet the offshore drilling has begun again. And the presidential commission on the Deepwater Horizon, President Obama’s own commission, has said, you know, federal regulators don’t have the capacity, they don’t know what they’re doing in these instances. And what we also know is that the cost is so very high, because there is so much oil and the distance is so great to get to it and try and address it, that there is no reason to believe that this much oil wouldn’t be released again in the case of another blowout.”

It’s the one-year anniversary of the disaster. This is our opportunity as activists to apply massive pressure. We need fundamental policy change, and it’s only going to happen if people continue to feel the passion they did when the oil was flowing, to push now as the oil still remains. We have to have payments go out to those who have filed claims. We have to have restoration of the Gulf. We have to have BP actually pay the full amount of money it owes, not fight us to say they owe—we know they owe $20 billion just for the oil spill. BP is trying to pay just $3 million. We need the Obama administration to ensure that charges are made, that BP’s policies are forced to be changed, and that BP is held fully to account. And for the listeners out there, this is the opportunity, the one-year anniversary, to come together and really push and to show that the public is still paying deep attention and will hold BP to account and make sure the Obama administration helps us and that the Congress helps us in that.