July 21, 2010
Ron Kendall was breathing in the wetland beauty of the Laguna Madre on the Texas Gulf Coast a few weeks ago when the enormity of the far-distant disaster first gripped him.
“This huge area is all at risk now,” he remembers thinking. “Millions of birds. Critical fisheries. It’s an environmental treasure on the Texas coast. That could be over by the time this thing is done.”
And yet that thing, the oil, kept billowing out of the ruptured deep-sea well until long after Kendall, a renowned wildlife toxicologist, left that beach.