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Onscreen, Sophia Bush and Austin Nichols navigate the dramatic town of Tree Hill, North Carolina on the CW's One Tree Hill--but off-screen, the couple has focused their energy on supporting the Gulf Coast since the oil spill. The pair traveled to Louisiana for an in-person look at the clean-up efforts, and keeps fans and friends updated through their Twitter feeds -- follow Sophia here and Austin here -- and when they aren't campaigning for clean energy and Gulf Coast relief, they're composting, recycling, and trying to get their co-stars to do the same. Planet Green chatted with both Sophia and Austin about their recent trip to the Gulf, what they saw, and how it's changed their professional and personal lives.
[UPDATE: Read Part 2 of the couple's interview to see how they're going green after their trip.]
Planet Green: A few weeks ago, you traveled to the Gulf Coast to see the oil spill firsthand. What was that like?
Sophia Bush: It was a really powerful experience. We've both worked with Global Green, and we were speaking to Matt Peterson, who is the head, about wanting to do something, so he put the trip together for us--we went down to New Orleans and then drove out to Grand Isle, Louisiana, and spent time out there with local fisherman, and local businesses. We tried to get on the beach to do cleanup, and that was a very shocking experience for us.
Austin Nichols: As soon as we tried to get across the orange booms, the police on four-wheelers came running over to us and told us to turn our cameras off. We had a lawyer with us that said, "Why? We don't have to," and they immediately shut up, but they told us we would be arrested if we crossed the booms. They said it was a crime scene, and we basically learned that the criminal is policing their own crime scene. When you're actually there and you see our own policemen and our own military taking orders from a big oil corporation, it's really unnerving and awful.
SB: One of the things that was really bothersome about it is, it looks like a police state, it looks like some freakish film set from something like Outbreak. It's absolutely insane. And when the sheriff comes up and threatens to arrest you if you enter the hot zone--we said, "What are you talking about?" and he said, "The beach--you can't go out there. That's the hot zone, and if you go out there we have to have the hazmat crew come over and decontaminate you before we take you to jail."
We're standing there as he's telling us this looking at all these guys that they've hired for these cleanup crews who are not wearing any protective gear. All they have on is plastic gloves and rainboots. They're not wearing respirators, they're not wearing hazmat suits, but we're being told that we would be so toxic that we would need to be treated by gentlemen in hazmat suits.
When they left we went over and tried to talk to some of the contracted workers who immediately started turning their backs on us. A foreman came over and yelled at us to get away from his crew, and a couple of the guys who were not vacating immediately stood around and we started asking them questions and they kept saying, "We can't tell you that, we can't answer that, we can't tell you who hired us, we can't tell you how we've been trained." We asked them, "Why aren't you wearing a respirator?" And they said, "Well, we'll get fired." We asked them, "You've been told that if you are wearing a respirator on this beach while you clean up you'll get fired?" And they said yes.
So the image of a crew in respirators and hazmat suits would be so disturbing to see on the news that they've been told by their bosses, who have been contracted by BP, that all these people will be fired and lose their jobs if they take measures to protect their health. It's so scary. These men and women are being made sick in order to preserve the image of a company.
AN: When you actually take a peek behind the curtain and put yourselves in these places, like Haiti or the Gulf or anything, you learn more in 15 minutes than you could ever learn from watching the news. I started asking myself why, and the only thing that i can come up with is that everybody is sort of involved with this, with corporations and with oil, and everybody's owned by somebody bigger. They can't do this, and they can't report on that, because their boss will fire them--it feels like there's this big connected thing hanging over all of us that we can't see or touch but that is controlling everything. We went down there for a day and we saw things that are not reported on the news--why aren't they saying these things? They must be fearing for their jobs.
PG: Did you get to talk to any of the local fishermen?
AN: This one fellow, Christian, took us out on his boat; we rented his boat for the day and he took us to the bird sanctuary which is surrounded by two layers of boom--which didn't do anything, the rocks were all covered with oil, the boom didn't really stop any oil--but we learned a lot from him.
He was telling us a story and he started crying, and these are the kind of interactions you don't get from a television screen. He showed me a photo of his backyard from one day when he brought in 8 or 10 fish, he said, "This is how I feed my family. I don't go to the grocery story. I bring fish out of the sea and that's what we have for dinner every night."
These people, they have a lot of their equity tied up in their fishing boats and they're not going to be able to sell their boats. They're going to have to leave, they're going to have to go other places. It was all very moving to experience that firsthand. I wish everyone could go down there for a day or two and just walk around and talk to people, because if more people could do that, then we would be able to change things much quicker.
The entire world is like this but in America more--we watch the world go by from our couches and we watch the television screen and we sit at home and we bitch about it and it's really easy to not do anything about it. That's why I'm doing this new thing called Crowdrise.com, and I started a page where people can donate small amounts of money, and I'm trying to find easy ways for people to help.
SB: You really do start to realize that problems like this--it's so active, it's so extraordinarily unquantifiable that people feel that rising to the response of this task is insurmountable. It feels too big to wrap your head around, but it isn't. It comes down to really being an active constituency again.
Austin is right in what he said, it is very easy for us, being in a country that is still considered to be the most powerful in the world, and that has the best scale of social life and human rights--people really think that everything's great here, and we don't have reasons to pay attention, or to be our own investigators or police our own government. But that's not accurate.
People are people whether they're Christian who's a fisherman in the Gulf or whether we're talking about our senators, our congressmen, or even the president--he's still just one man. Whatever your political feelings are, people really expect the government to sit back and do it for them, but social change comes when members of the nation make it clear that they believe in something, and whether that's the Million Man March or through civil rights sit-ins that happened in the '70s, we have to show the government we care.
And for us, you realize more and more as we are this massive media-based society that that comes into play when the numbers reflect something. If everybody who reads this article, if everybody who follows our show, made a pledge from now on for one year that they would not buy bottled water, that would be a change in sales that people could see. We need to show people what we care about through the things that we buy and the way that we live.
PG: You both just recently started using Twitter [Ed: Follow Sophia and Austin to stay in touch with their ongoing efforts]. How has that affected your outreach?
AN: We were scared of Twitter, but we thought, how can we get this message out? So three days before we left we started the feeds and tried to get as many of our fans following as possible. As soon as we got down to the Gulf, we got messages from Brazil, Australia, all over the place, saying, our news is not telling us about this, we know nothing about this oil spill, if it wasn't for you guys Tweeting about it we wouldn't know anything about it. I know that each country covers it's own news more but I was amazed that they weren't hearing about the oil spill all over the world. People are really affected and angry everywhere.
SB: One of the things that's really amazing is seeing people saying, thank you for finally using Twitter for something good. We're not sitting here going hey, going to lunch here and then going on a jog--that's not information that's helping anyone. And what's been so special for us is the amount of information that's come back. People saying, look at this town that's newly running on wind energy in Sweden, and in Norway we're doing this, and in South America we've come up with these kinds of alternative fuels. It's really fascinating and it is something that ends up making you hopeful. People look at this and think they can't do anything, but everybody can. It's as simple as taking bags to the grocery store with you so you don't take plastic anymore.
AN: Portland just outlawed plastic bags at the grocery store, and I think it will be like the smoking ban--hopefully other cities will start doing it too. I think that's awesome.
This is Part 1 of a two-part interview; stay tuned for more from Sophia and Austin about the reaction they got when they got back from their trip, and how their interesting in sustainability translates into their personal and professional lives.
More on the Gulf Oil Spill
Cooking, Eating, and the Gulf Oil Spill: Interviews with Chefs and Food Thinkers
Gulf Oil Spill - Amazing and Devastating Photos
Offshore Oil Drilling Explained (Video News)
