Lily Stagg spent the late spring and most of the summer of 2016 riding with a group of cyclists from South Carolina to Santa Cruz, California, helping to build low-income housing along the way. The ride covered 4,200 miles in 81 days — including 18 days of working on houses.

There were 30 other riders in her group, including four team leaders. Most of the riders had never met each other until they gathered in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina (across the bay from Charleston) for a couple of days of preparation before they set out.

Adjusting to all those personalities during a period of extreme physical and mental exertion proved to be the biggest challenge of the adventure, Lily says in the interview.

The experience was intense and transformative. Lily was already a dedicated cyclist before her Bike and Build summer, having ridden as a member of the University of Louisiana Ragin Cajun Cycling team in the spring semester prior to the cross country ride. She had just recovered from a serious cycling accident prior to her collegiate team experience which provided the perfect training regime to at least get her ready to ride across the United States.

This interview was recorded in September, 2016, just over a month after Lily returned to Lafayette from California after completing the SC2SC Route and joining her by then best friends in dipping their wheels in the Pacific.

Since this interview, Lily has ridden another spring season with the UL team and branched out into cyclo-cross during the fall.

In this interview, Lily talks about how cycling evolved from a nice means of transportation into a passion that has her seeking out opportunities to race across the Gulf South.

Michelle Erenberg is co-founder of Lift Louisiana — a non-profit based in New Orleans that advocates for the freedom of women to exercise their reproductive rights. Erenberg is a wife and mother who has been a public policy analyst and advocate for the past 15 years.

In our conversation, Erenberg explains that she started Lift Louisiana to help raise women above the barrage of laws that the Louisiana legislature passes on a regular basis that invariably seek to limit the choices available to Louisiana women when it comes to reproductive rights.

It is clear from the actions of working majorities in the Louisiana legislature that women are viewed as second-class citizens. Many of those same law makers parroted lies about opposing the Affordable Care Act because (they maintained) they opposed allowing the government to come between patients and their doctors. Yet, the anti-abortion laws and regulations enacted and promulgated have had that exact effect — inserting the State of Louisiana into what should be private discussions between women and their doctors.

It’s moved beyond irony into blatant hypocrisy.

Earlier this year, Lift Louisiana launched a statewide media campaign calling for Louisiana lawmakers to pass laws based on facts, not laws based on lies. Erenberg says that is precisely what many of the state’s restrictive abortion laws and rules are — based on lies about science and medicine.

In addition to public advocacy (Erenberg is not an attorney), Lift Louisiana also helps train lawyers in the process of how to represent minors who seek abortions in the state-mandated judicial bypass hearings. They do that as part of the Louisiana Judicial Bypass Project.

While Lift Louisiana has just gotten started, Erenberg says the group will continue to publicly advocate for women’s reproductive freedom as well as full healthcare equality. Judging by their early work, Erenberg and Lift Louisiana are off to a solid start.

Scott Eustis has had a busy mid-2017.

As the Gulf Restoration Network‘s wetlands specialist, he’s been part of flyovers finding chemical and petroleum product releases in the flood waters following Hurricane Harvey’s strike and the flooding that inundated southeast Texas in the wake of the storm. He’s been involved in flyovers in the Gulf of Mexico where pipeline ruptures remain part of the regular cost of business there. And, he’s been flying above the Atchafalaya Basin watching pipeline operators wreck “water quality projects” that had repaired Basin water flow that had been disrupted by earlier pipeline work at a cost of millions of dollars to taxpayers.

Like a number of environmental organizations in Louisiana, GRN and Eustis are fighting the proposed Bayou Bridge Pipeline proposed by Energy Transfer Partners. It’s one leg of the network that begins with the Dakota Access Pipeline in the Bakken fields of North Dakota and zig-zags across and down the country into Nederland, TX. Bayou Bridge aims to connect the Nederland operation and a Phillips 66 refinery in Lake Charles to a storage facility in St. James Parish on the Mississippi River.

There are thousands of pipelines in Louisiana. The challenge is making the case that Bayou Bridge is somehow more dangerous than those others.

Eustis talks about the need for an environmental impact study of the Bayou Bridge project in the context of the already significant damage inflicted on the Basin by those other pipelines. The cumulative effect of hundreds (if not thousands) of disruptions of water flow in the Basin threatens its viability as a swamp and estuary.

Eustis and GRN work in five northern Gulf of Mexico states — Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. It’s a broad, culturally, geologically and environmentally diverse. The indifference of the Trump administration to the environment and threats to it has made the work of GRN all the more important. The broad range of outrages that flow from the Trump White House and threaten things from civil rights to climate protections has sparked resistance but also a raft of new organizations, all of which seem to be competing for a fixed piece of the financial real of progressives.

Established organizations have been squeezed as new ones emerge with the resistance strategy of the moment.

The climate and environmental challenges confronting the country grow daily and groups like Gulf Restoration Network have been stretching to respond.

Scott Eustis is on the frontlines watching the problems unfold, documenting the damage done, and chronicling the reckoning that is coming if we don’t find effective responses quickly.