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The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents.

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the BP oil disaster, one of the worst environmental catastrophes in US history. Gulf Coast resident Cherri Foytlin marked the anniversary by walking 1,243 miles from New Orleans to Washington DC to remind the country that even though the Obama administration and BP claim that everything is back to normal, facts on the ground prove otherwise. People are experiencing everything from kidney damage to skin lesions, wildlife are dying, the economic devastation continues, and the ecosystem has forever been damaged.

Foytlin arrived in DC on Thursday after 34 days of walking. Despite rainstorms, heat exhaustion, tornadoes, and countless blisters, she says it was an incredible experience.

Along the way, fisherman showed her crabs and shrimps with burn holes. She saw fish with no eyes. One man told her, ‘I don’t understand. Why would you care about us?’ At that point, she knew that this was about the people. She said, “I’ve been carrying them with me the whole time and sharing their stories.”

A mother of six whose husband lost his oil rig job, Foytlin made international headlines in July 2010 after her emotional plea to President Obama aired live on CNN. She said: “I am asking you, sir, as a patriot and as an honorable person, to come and hear our stories and hear the pain that we are in. We are crying out to you. Louisiana is crying out to you. We need your help.”

The people are still crying, but Foytlin says politicians and the national media aren’t listening. Over the past month, she’s been interviewed by several local and international reporters, but has yet to do one interview with a national reporter.

When she arrived in DC, she told me that the Walk to Washington and the continuing disaster in the Gulf gets more attention from the BBC and Al Jazeera English than the national media.

Foytlin and others took part in a number of rallies and meetings with politicians to demand health care resources for the people of the Gulf, clean energy, and green jobs.

She also connected with the 10,000 youth who converged on Washington for Power Shift, a four-day conference that gives young environmentalists the toolsthey need to become community organizers.

On April 15, the first day of the conference, nine young climate activists were removed from the House gallery and arrested after singing a revised version of the “Star Spangled Banner” during the budget debate.

Over the past four days, they marched to the offices of the Koch Brothers, they rallied in Lafayette Park, and shut down a BP gas station.

The media are constantly telling us that youth are disenchanted. 10,000 young people from across the country got together to demand real change on the environment and most of the media failed to even mention it. Several young people drove 20 hours from the Gulf to be there. You can watch videos and see photos of the various actions at powershift2011.org.

Tomorrow, Power Shift is organizing flash mobs at BP stations nationwide. The plan is to creatively, nonviolently disrupt business as usual at BP locations on the anniversary of the start of the worst oil disaster in US history. You can find an action in your area at the Power Shift website.