Satirist Harry Shearer is a part-time resident of New Orleans and the director of "The Big Uneasy," a documentary on the Katrina failures. I spoke recently with Shearer, who was in Los Angeles, about the resumption and the increasing amount of drilling for oil a year after the spill.

[SHEARER] The people I do turn to, most specifically, are the members of the Deepwater Horizon Study Group, headed by Dr. Bob Bea of U.C. Berkeley. I trust him because I follow -- He's one of the three investigators and truth tellers that I followed during the documentary about the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, and right after the spill, he organized the only independent group of scientists looking into the causes of what happened to the Deepwater Horizon and the Macondo well. The early findings, the early recommendations, are that it's a high-risk business and that the industry and the government should be concentrating on alleviating the riskiest parts of it.

[ASSURAS] Isn't oil key to your area, though?

[SHEARER] Well, absolutely.

[ASSURAS] How do you reconcile the two? I mean, it's your region.

[SHEARER] Absolutely. A huge amount of the domestic oil production of the United States comes from the Gulf and a huge amount of the seafood, domestically, that the United States consumes comes from the Gulf. They have lived together for 40, 50, 60 years, so it's not impossible, but the, you know, what we find as different disasters present themselves is a failure to do appropriate risk management. That's what we saw in Wall Street, and that's what Dr. Bea is pointing out in regard to deepwater drilling in the Gulf. It's very risky. Obviously, we've been ignoring warning signs for 30 years as a society, starting with the oil shock in the '70s, that time is coming to move into the post-oil world. And now, if this isn't a signal that we're having to dig more than a mile deep into the earth to get the last few drops of oil, I don't know what is, but in the meantime, we have to keep doing this -- safely and with mindfulness of the risks.

[ASSURAS] Give me your sense of the recovery in the area. What's it like down there?

[SHEARER] Well, obviously, as the piece showed, in the actual fishing areas in south Louisiana, they've still been devastated. You have BP putting on these commercials now that are saying, "Everything's fine, everybody's back," and, in fact, we know that that's not true. You have Woods Hole coming up with findings that there are serious oil deposits at the bottom of the Gulf and a lot of dead material that is the basis of the food chain. So that's pretty disturbing.

[ASSURAS] Harry Shearer, thanks very much for joining us.

[SHEARER] My pleasure.