Hello and welcome back, everyone! Thanks for dropping in, and I hope life’s been treating you well this last week. Sit, and be at home—you’re just in time for tea. Or perhaps you want something a wee bit stronger—there’s plum wine, and I’ve even got a jug of Old Man Chu’s mao tai hiding around here somewhere if you’re feeling adventurous! I’ve not cracked into it myself yet, but I’m told it’s kind of like drinking barbed wire. You may need it by the end of the day, I’m afraid, because we have something very sad to talk about. I know that the last time you were all here, I made a lot out of the necessity of staying positive, and I stand by that. But what I want to go over this week just doesn’t have many uplifting elements any way you look at it.
Ah, perfect! Listen—the rain’s started outside. Can you hear it? It does that almost every day this time of year, and I’ve always loved to listen to it from indoors. Seriously, take a moment to think about it: how it sounds, what it would feel like on your skin if we were outside, where it came from. That last one’s important, and the answer isn’t just “from the sky”: what about before then? Now, take a moment to savor your drink, and ask yourself the same thing about it. See where I’m going with this yet? Hold on a second—the prawns are done. There. The first one to take a guess gets first pickings, because they’re tied into all this too.
I cannot adequately describe how I felt on April 23rd, 2010, when I heard the awful news from the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a sensation I’ve been blessed to have only experienced very seldom in my life so far. The closest parallel I can come up with is the morning of September 11, 2001, or perhaps the month the first footage of U.S. explosives rocking Baghdad started making national T.V. news—one of those events that, one way or another, is going to turn the world as you’ve known it upside down for the foreseeable future. It’s an initial shock, followed by both despair and, paradoxically, a horrific kind of excitement. The difference this time was that my fellow Americans—or at least the ones who were getting any air time—didn’t seem to share in the full extent of my feelings, and if the media can be taken as an accurate representation of public opinion they seem to have largely forgotten the disaster altogether.
Just in case anyone somehow managed to go through last year and miss all this, here’s a plain-damn-facts recap of summer 2010 in the Gulf region: a BP (British Petroleum)-owned offshore oil drilling rig called the Deepwater Horizon exploded on the evening of April 20th in the Gulf of Mexico, when a methane gas bubble shot up the drill column, apparently bypassing every built-in security measure, and ignited. The final death toll was 11 workers, with another 17 injured. An oil gusher on the ocean floor, which was to continue spewing its deadly contents for the next four months, followed the explosion. Although now successfully capped, the total leakage amounts to about 4.9 million barrel’s worth of crude at the most conservative estimate. The exact extent of the damage this has caused and will likely cause is still being worked out, but the general verdict from researchers who aren’t being paid by BP (and those of us with an ounce of common sense to spare) is that it’s going to be somewhere between “massive” and “really freaking massive.” It is at any rate unprecedented: this is the largest oil spill in U.S. history, and may quite possibly also turn out to be the single biggest environmental disaster of any kind in that country. Given that it is now officially an international phenomenon (more on that later), it may even become a contender for the top five global environmental disasters, right up there with climate change, depending on how things go.
Hence, my major concern with American media’s recent lack of attention to the whole problem. If any of you are from the States yourselves, you’ll probably remember what it was like in those early months, up until stage one of the capping in mid-July: front page news, the main story almost every hour on the hour, big-name environmentalists, scientists, engineers and BP officials interviewed regularly. Then, more or less abruptly, it seemed to just peter off into a kind of nonchalance. It felt to me as though the whole country was aching to breath a collective sigh of relief over having finally “solved the problem,” as if things were firmly under control from that point onwards. I can understand the temptation to believe that—I badly wanted to myself, by that point—but not even what news there continued to be, let alone common sense, suggested as much.
Yet despite the repeatedly-explained fact that the cap was only the beginning of a solution, and could very easily make the problem worse if not handled delicately, the news kept getting sparser and sparser, again as though things were well in hand and constant attention was no longer required. Now, four months after the final touches were put on the well (thankfully without incident that I am aware of), the story is almost non-existent as far as American journalists are concerned. What news does continue to pop up occasionally (see this recent MSNBC story, for example: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41020738/ns/us_news-environment) talks about the disaster in firmly past-tense language, as though it were over and done with and all that remains to consider is policy change and legal settlement.
Indeed, it’s easy to see where one might get that impression if one only followed mainstream news. In those stories, you tend to get the impression that the spilled oil has mostly if not entirely dispersed by now, that Gulf seafood is more or less safe to eat, that it just might be okay to vacation there if you don’t go swimming. The first of these is especially controversial and troubling: BP, as well as the EPA and NOAA, have made a lot out of the supposed effectiveness of a chemical dispersant known as Corexit which was widely used throughout the clean-up efforts. I remember the early descriptions well: they made it sound as though the stuff would make floating oil magically disappear, breaking it up into a composition said to resemble “salad dressing” in what I can only imagine was an attempt to make it sound appetizing on some subtle psychological level. The idea seemed to be that this would just kind of float away harmlessly, somehow, as though it were any less of a carcinogenic, mildly radioactive, bio-accumulating chemical for being broken into cute little globules.
You may have gathered from my tone that I’ve always been a wee bit skeptical of this notion, and I am not the only one, not even among Gulf researchers. Among those who have dared to question this pretty picture—and have not gotten as much press as scientists expressing interpretations of the data more favorable to BP—is Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, whose diving expeditions have revealed to be what look like massive amounts of settled oil on the sea floor of the Gulf (http://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-submarine-dive-finds-oil-dead-sea-life/story?id=12305709). In other words, it’s not necessarily gone nor harmless to sea life, just out of sight. Or Stuart Smith, a Louisiana environmental plaintiff attorney currently very busy in representing fishermen whose lives and health have been affected by the spill, who also runs a blog serving on-the-ground coverage of local spill-related news (you can read it here at http://oilspillaction.com/blog). Apparently, the beaches aren’t so clean either. Smith is not the only Gulf resident who tells a differing story of oily realities on as well as beneath the surface. And here, we get to a part of the story that has been virtually absent from mainstream news: the truly local perspective, that of the ordinary men and women who are suffering as a result of this tragedy. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that direct human experience should count for just as much if not more than higher-level research, particularly if it seems to contradict said research (which is being conducted and/or collaborated upon by a known and repeated conspirator). The highest profile champion of this perspective that I am aware of is Louisiana fishwife-turned-activist Kindra Arnesen (http://www.facebook.com/people/Kindra-Arnesen/100001120710752; also search for her videos on YouTube). The picture she shows us is a grim one: Corexit and the dispersed oil, if we are to believe those who actually live next to it, is not only much more dangerous than the EPA has told us, but apparently is affecting the coastal air in some way that is proving devastating to the health of Gulf residents (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkYJDI8pK9Y&feature=player_embedded). This is completely outrageous. It’s bad enough that BP tried to dodge its social and environmental responsibilities by “prettying up” the Gulf instead of actually helping clean it, but to use a chemical that it must surely have known to some extent was this dangerous?
Which brings me back around again to the beginning. Where does all that water come from, guys? The water out there, and in your bodies, and in anything you drink? Where does the bulk of the world’s animal protein from meat come from to this day? The sea, ladies and gentlemen, the sea—from it and back to it again. Whatever we put there will eventually come back around to us—all of us, sooner or later. Chemicals degrade eventually, but they don’t just magically disappear, and they tend to travel along with the water. I learned about the water cycle from The Magic School Bus when I was six years old, for crying out loud, and it scares me to think that our corporations have so little regard for it that they would so callously poison it on such a massive scale just to cover their tracks. Water is a global issue. Here, more even than in most things, everything’s interconnected. We need to keep it clean.
What do we do now? That’s the question I want to open up for this week. Obviously, the spill is over and done with to some extent, in that it’s pretty much too late for cleanup. The damage is done. About the only upside that I see to this particular situation is that—provided we have the courage to see, and then speak up about, and then act upon, what is actually going on down there, and not the picture BP is trying to feed us—this disaster represents a golden opportunity to mobilize public consciousness in favor of alternative energy sources to oil and gas—to anything that requires the kind of invasive, toxic, potentially life-threatening and inherently risky operations that drilling for oil in deep water does. We need to realize that by all that’s right, the oil age has been over for a while, sustained only by the iron lung of corporate-government alliance. In this spirit, really try to keep in mind where the energy you use comes from, if you don’t already. Don’t use more than you need. Treat driving as a privilege, and try to cut back on it altogether if that is even remotely possible for you. Remember what you are supporting, for the time being, every time you step on the pedal—it will only get worse as remaining sources of oil get to be in more and more remote corners of this planet.
As always, please, PLEASE do not take my word for anything I’ve said today—go out and do your own homework, check out the sources I’ve outlined here or whatever else you think might be a valuable contribution. In addition to the resources I mentioned in the article above, you may wish to look at these others, not just for Gulf news but for environmental news in general:
And as always, I want to end my little tirade on a note of hope. This may be a particularly bad bit of business, but we can make something positive out of it—we can! Let’s get it done, people! I’m eager to hear everyone’s thoughts, and particularly interested in discussing the economic facet of this problem, which I realize I have somewhat neglected.
Love, peace, and a better world,
-Ran-Zhen Rui
