Trump has brought much-needed attention to a site of great tragedy: the Gulf of Mexico

Greg Grandin
Environmental disasters have plagued the water body for decades. Now the region is thrust in the global spotlight

Mon 3 Feb 2025 11.21 EST

The enormous semi-enclosed bay, its waters flanked by the Florida and Yucatán peninsulas and partially blockaded by Cuba, has been called the Golfo de México for centuries, a name that first appeared on a world map in 1550. And for centuries the name bothered no one.

Thomas Jefferson used the name without shame, even as he, Donald Trump-like, imagined dominating nearby nations. If the US could take Cuba, Jefferson wrote in 1823, it would control the “Gulf of Mexico and the countries and isthmus bordering on it”. Country music stars, no less than founding fathers, liked the romance of the place. Tracy Lawrence dreams of a Gulf of Mexico filled with whiskey. Johnny Cash wanted to dump his blues down in the Gulf.

But Trump says it’s time for a change, that the great bay should be called the Gulf of America. He signed an executive order making it so, emphasizing the Gulf’s economic importance to the US. Trump’s right. If the intensive extraction of riches from a patch of nature bestows proprietary rights over that patch, then the Gulf belongs to the US. For more than a century, its industries have drilled, fracked and fished it to such an intense degree it’s a wonder there’s any oil, gas or seafood left to be had.

Many who work and live in Louisiana and Texas have their own name for the place. They call it the industrial coast, a region where gas flare-offs burn 24/7, where fracking blowouts blaze until the vapor runs out and where rusting pipes and tall stacks billowing black and brown smoke are organic to the landscape – present at the creation, not of the world but of our world today, dominated by petrochemical and petroleum companies.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/03/trump-gulf-of-mexico