Jul 19, 2026
Storytellers: Suraida Nañez-James, Gwendolyn Jones, Celine Rendon, and Ryan Campos
Audio Producer: Ryan Campos
Written by: Haleemah Atobiloye
Holiday time with parents on the water. Fishing for snook off Boca Grande. Wearing dark clothes to watch sea turtle hatchlings find their way to the surf. "Crawfish is yummy." Seafood markets. Weeks Bayou in Ocean Springs. East Beach. Grand Isle, Louisiana's only inhabited barrier island. Birding. Knowing you live on the longest barrier island in the world. Island hopping. Snorkeling the grass flats for scallops.
These are the answers a room of ocean and coastal scientists, resource managers, policy professionals, and energy company representatives gave when asked to name their favorite Gulf place or activity. We opened our session at GulfCon 2026 this way to honor our coalition's practice of Connection before Content: we meet first through what we share before we name what may divide us.
From May 4 to 7, 2026, the Gulf of America Alliance (formerly the Gulf of Mexico Alliance) held its biennial GulfCon at the Mobile Convention Center in Mobile, Alabama. GulfCon is a science conference that grew out of the research that followed the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed eleven workers and leaked oil into the Gulf for 87 days. The people who gather there study what that oil did to deep sea corals, fish, and marshes, and what restoration should look like. It is a powerful convening, and not one that usually centers the people who live downstream of that research and of the industry it studies.
As we established at the start of our session, everyone loves and needs water. So, this year, for the first time, the America the Beautiful for All Coalition organized a session to change what that room hears. We are a coalition of 300+ organizations comprising nurses and land trusts, faith groups and environmental lawyers, scientists and neighborhood organizers, parents and immigrants, all collaborating to ensure that nature, justice, and health stay inseparable. Our four delegates came to share what it is like to live with the consequences of what ecosystem scientists study, and how Gulf communities tell that story themselves.
They want all of us, especially the people who study Gulf towns, drive through them, build refineries in them, and collect samples from their backyards, to see and hear the people and the wildlife who call the Gulf Coast home. These communities love water too, and they want to be able to enjoy everything the Gulf has to offer, safely and in good health.
Suraida Nañez-James
is the co-lead of our coalition's Ocean for All workgroup and CEO of the Gulf Reach Institute. She opens by making a profound claim about what stories are for. "In the Gulf," she tells us, "stories are not just communication. They are survival, memory, and advocacy."
Listen to her opening address at GulfCon: In the Gulf, Stories Are Survival, Memory, and Advocacy
Gwendolyn Jones
Fondly called Ms. Gwen, she is the founding director of Climate Conversations of Brazoria County. Four generations of her family have lived in Freeport, Texas, where refineries sit beside churches and children grow up between fishing piers and petrochemical plants. Not one of those generations was asked where the plants should go. Her community still does not know the names of what is in their air, their water, and their soil, but they know it is not safe. They have watched what it does to their bodies. Ms. Gwen shares this story to make plain what her family and her neighbors are asking for. They want to take ownership of their wellbeing. They want protocols, monitoring, accepted methods, air and water and soil data.
Listen to Ms. Gwen's testimony on resilience, ecological harm, racial injustice, and health inequities: We Came to Freeport, Texas as Knowledge-Bearers, Not as Labor to Be Polluted
Celine Rendon
is a climate resilience planner with the Land Justice Community School in Austin, Texas. "One of the biggest social justice issues is narrative," she tells us, and then she shows what she has built so communities can produce their own stories, in their own formats, on their own terms: podcasts co-hosted by high school fellows, story maps, rally videos, neighborhood gatherings where people speak for themselves.
Listen: One of the Biggest Social Justice Issues Is Narrative
Ryan Campos
is an Audio and Communications Specialist with the Inner Space Center at the University of Rhode Island. Ryan addresses the production question: how do we turn the information in these stories into meaning that resonates across the many lines that divide us? Through case studies with coastal communities across the U.S. and abroad, Ryan shows how data tells us what happened and a story tells us why it matters.
Listen: Creativity and Connection: Turning Ocean Research Into Collective Meaning
Communicating Work, Place, and Purpose
From South Padre Island to Key West and anywhere in between, for the communities of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, the Gulf is a large body of salt water, partially enclosed by land, that holds their homes. It is also where the same water that feeds a community carries the residue of what has been done to it.
Whatever federal maps name it, the people who live along its coasts will always fondly call it the Gulf. There is no boundary where the Gulf ends and the people begin. Nature, justice, health run through the exact same bloodstream.
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Stories from the Gulf is a storytelling series from the America the Beautiful for All Coalition, placing frontline and fenceline community voices at the center of how we protect people, land, water, wildlife, and health across the Gulf Coast.
We hold the stories shared here with the utmost care and respect. We invite you to listen, to read, and to sit with what these storytellers share. The Gulf is not a monolith. It is vast, diverse, and full of stories we all need to hear.
Does any of this resonate? Do you have a story to share about what happened to your land, your community's water, or your air? Do you know who decided to let that happen, and what happened to people's bodies as a result? We want to hear from you. Please reach out to our Backbone Communications Lead, Haleemah Atobiloye, at haleemaha@cehn.org
