The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is violent wound inflicted the Earth itself. In this special report the Gulf coast, leading author activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart capitalism
Everyone gathered town hall meeting had been repeatedly instructed show civility gentlemen from BP and federal government. These fine folks had made time their busy schedules come a high school gymnasium a Tuesday night Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, one many coastal communities where brown poison was slithering through marshes, part what has come described as largest environmental disaster US history.
“Speak others the way you would want be spoken to,” the chair the meeting pleaded one last time before opening the floor questions.
And for while the crowd, mostly made up of fishing families, showed remarkable restraint. They listened patiently to Larry Thomas, genial BP public relations flack, as he told them that he was committed to “doing better” to process their claims for lost revenue – then passed all the details off to markedly less friendly subcontractor. They heard out the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency as he informed them that, contrary to what they have read about the lack of testing the product being banned Britain, the chemical dispersant being sprayed the oil massive quantities was really perfectly safe.
But patience started running out third time Ed Stanton, a coast guard captain, took podium reassure them that “the coast guard intends make sure that BP cleans it up”.
“Put it in writing!” someone shouted out. By now air conditioning had shut itself off and coolers of Budweiser were running low. A shrimper named Matt O’Brien approached mic. “We don′t need hear this anymore,” he declared, hands on hips. It didn′t matter what assurances they were offered because, he explained, “we just don′t trust you guys!” And that, such loud cheer rose up from floor you′d have thought Oilers (the unfortunately named school football team) had scored touchdown.
The showdown was cathartic, nothing else. For weeks residents had been subjected barrage pep talks extravagant promises coming Washington, Houston London. Every time they turned their TVs, there was the BP boss, Tony Hayward, offering his solemn word that he would “make it right”. Or else it was President Barack Obama expressing his absolute confidence that his administration would “leave the Gulf coast better shape than it was before″, that he was “making sure″ it “comes back even stronger than it was before this crisis”.
It all sounded great. But for people whose livelihoods put them intimate contact delicate chemistry of wetlands, it also sounded completely ridiculous, painfully so. Once oil coats base of marsh grass, as it had already done just few miles from here, no miracle machine or chemical concoction could safely get it out. You can skim oil off surface of open water, you can rake it off sandy beach, but an oiled marsh just sits there, slowly dying. The larvae of countless species for which marsh spawning ground – shrimp, crab, oysters fin fish – will be poisoned.
It was already happening. Earlier that day, travelled through nearby marshes shallow water boat. Fish were jumping waters encircled by white boom, strips thick cotton mesh BP is using soak up oil. The circle fouled material seemed be tightening around fish like noose. Nearby, red-winged blackbird perched atop 2 metre (7ft) blade oil-contaminated marsh grass. Death was creeping up cane; small bird may as well have been standing lit stick dynamite.
And then there the grass itself, or the Roseau cane, as the tall sharp blades are called. If oil seeps deeply enough into the marsh, it will not only kill the grass above ground also the roots. Those roots are what hold the marsh together, keeping bright green land from collapsing into the Mississippi River delta the Gulf Mexico. So not only do places like Plaquemines Parish stand lose their fisheries, also much the physical barrier that lessens the intensity fierce storms like hurricane Katrina. Which could mean losing everything.
How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged “restored made whole” as Obama’s interior secretary has pledged do? It’s not at all clear that such thing is remotely possible, at least not time frame we can easily wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet fully recover from 1989 Exxon Valdez spill some species of fish never returned. Government scientists now estimate that as much as Valdez-worth of oil may entering Gulf coastal waters every four days. An even worse prognosis emerges from 1991 Gulf war spill, when an estimated 11m barrels of oil were dumped into Persian Gulf – largest spill ever. That oil entered marshland stayed there, burrowing deeper deeper thanks holes dug crabs. It’s not perfect comparison, since so little clean-up was done, according study conducted 12 years after disaster, nearly 90% of impacted muddy salt marshes mangroves were still profoundly damaged.
We do know this. Far from being “made whole,” Gulf coast, more than likely, will diminished. Its rich waters and crowded skies will less alive than they are today. The physical space many communities occupy map will also shrink, thanks erosion. And coast’s legendary culture will contract and wither. The fishing families up and down coast do not just gather food, after all. They hold up an intricate network that includes family tradition, cuisine, music, art and endangered languages – much like roots of grass holding up land marsh. Without fishing, these unique cultures lose their root system, very ground which they stand. (BP, for its part, is well aware of limits of recovery. The company′s Gulf of Mexico regional oil spill response plan specifically instructs officials not make “promises that property, ecology, or anything else will restored normal”. Which is no doubt why its officials consistently favour folksy terms like “make it right”.)
If Katrina pulled back the curtain the reality racism America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species survive, or brown pelicans not go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). No amount money – not BP’s recently pledged $20bn (£13.5bn), not $100bn – can replace culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians corporate leaders have yet come terms these humbling truths, the people whose air, water livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.
“Everything is dying,” a woman said as town hall meeting was finally coming a close. “How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one you up here has a hint as what is going happen our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don′t know.”
This Gulf coast crisis many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it’s this: our culture’s excruciatingly dangerous claim have such complete understanding command over nature that we can radically manipulate re-engineer it with minimal risk the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical geological models imagine. During Thursday’s congressional testimony, Hayward said: “The best minds the deepest expertise are being brought bear” the crisis, that, “with the possible exception the space programme the 1960s, it difficult imagine the gathering a larger, more technically proficient team one place peacetime.” And yet, the face what the geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as “Pandora’s well”, they are like the men at the front that gymnasium: they act like they know, they don’t know.
BP’s mission statement
In arc human history, notion that nature a machine us re-engineer at will a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 1980 book The Death Nature, environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until 1600s, Earth was alive, usually taking form a mother. Europeans – like indigenous people world over – believed planet a living organism, full life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate “the mother”, including mining.
The metaphor changed unlocking of some (but by no means all) of nature’s mysteries during scientific revolution of 1600s. With nature now cast as machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could dammed, extracted and remade impunity. Nature still sometimes appeared as woman, one easily dominated and subdued. Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated new ethos when he wrote 1623 De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum that nature is “put constraint, moulded, made as it were new art hand man”.
Those words may as well have been BP’s corporate mission statement. Boldly inhabiting what the company called “the energy frontier”, it dabbled synthesising methane-producing microbes announced that “a new area investigation” would be geoengineering. And course it bragged that, at its Tiber prospect the Gulf Mexico, it now had “the deepest well ever drilled by the oil gas industry” – as deep under the ocean floor as jets fly overhead.
Imagining and preparing what would happen these experiments altering the building blocks life and geology went wrong occupied precious little space the corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded 20 April, the company had no systems place to effectively respond to this scenario. Explaining why it did not have even the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome waiting to activated shore, a BP spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said: “I don’t think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we’re faced with now.” Apparently, it “seemed inconceivable” that the blowout preventer would ever fail – so why prepare?
This refusal contemplate failure clearly came straight from top. A year ago, Hayward told a group graduate students at Stanford University that he has a plaque his desk that reads: “If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?” Far from being a benign inspirational slogan, this was actually an accurate description how BP and its competitors behaved real world. In recent hearings Capitol Hill, congressman Ed Markey Massachusetts grilled representatives from top oil and gas companies revealing ways which they had allocated resources. Over three years, they had spent “$39bn explore new oil and gas. Yet, average investment research and development safety, accident prevention and spill response was a paltry $20m a year.”
These priorities go a long way towards explaining why initial exploration plan that BP submitted federal government ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well reads like a Greek tragedy about human hubris. The phrase “little risk” appears five times. Even there a spill, BP confidently predicts that, thanks “proven equipment and technology”, adverse affects will minimal. Presenting nature as a predictable and agreeable junior partner (or perhaps subcontractor), report cheerfully explains that should a spill occur, “Currents and microbial degradation would remove oil water column or dilute constituents background levels”. The effects fish, meanwhile, “would likely sublethal″ because “the capability adult fish and shellfish avoid a spill [and] metabolise hydrocarbons”. (In BP’s telling, rather than a dire threat, a spill emerges as an all-you-can-eat buffet aquatic life.)
Best of all, should major spill occur, there is, apparently, “little risk of contact or impact to coastline” because of company’s projected speedy response (!) “due to distance [of rig] to shore” – about 48 miles (77km). This most astonishing claim of all. In gulf that often sees winds of more than 70km an hour, not to mention hurricanes, BP had so little respect for ocean’s capacity to ebb flow, surge heave, that it did not think oil could make paltry 77km trip. (Last week, shard of exploded Deepwater Horizon showed up on a beach Florida, 306km away.)
None this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions a political class eager believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awe-struck by industry’s four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling have reached very height controlled artificiality. “It’s better than Disneyland terms how you can take technologies and go after a resource that thousands years old and do so an environmentally sound way,” she told Senate energy committee just seven months ago.
Drilling without thinking has course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring unprecedented heights, that’s when conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled slogan “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” – an emphasis on now. The wildly popular campaign was cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich’s telling, drilling at home wherever oil and gas might – locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore – was surefire way lower price at pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In face this triple win, caring about environment was sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, “in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs pretty”. By time infamous “Drill Baby Drill” Republican national convention rolled around, party base was in such frenzy US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under convention floor someone had brought big enough drill.
Obama, eventually, gave in, as he invariably does. With cosmic bad timing, just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, the president announced he would open up previously protected parts the country offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as he had thought, he explained. “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They technologically very advanced.” That wasn’t enough Sarah Palin, however, who sneered at the Obama administration’s plans conduct more studies before drilling some areas. “My goodness, folks, these areas have been studied death,” she told the Southern Republican leadership conference New Orleans, now just 11 days before the blowout. “Let’s drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!” And there was much rejoicing.
In his congressional testimony, Hayward said: “We and the entire industry will learn this terrible event.” And one might well imagine that catastrophe this magnitude would indeed instil BP executives and the “Drill Now” crowd with new sense humility. There are, however, no signs that this the case. The response the disaster – at the corporate and governmental levels – has been rife with the precise brand arrogance and overly sunny predictions that created the disaster in the first place.
The ocean big, she can take it, we heard from Hayward early days. While spokesman John Curry insisted that hungry microbes would consume whatever oil was water system, because “nature has way of helping situation”. But nature has not been playing along. The deep-sea gusher has bust out of all BP’s top hats, containment domes, junk shots. The ocean’s winds currents have made mockery of lightweight booms BP has laid out to absorb oil. “We told them,” said Byron Encalade, president of Louisiana Oysters Association. “The oil’s gonna go over booms or underneath bottom.” Indeed it did. The marine biologist Rick Steiner, who has been following clean up closely, estimates that “70% or 80% of booms doing absolutely nothing at all”.
And then there are controversial chemical dispersants: more than 1.3m gallons dumped company’s trademark “what could go wrong?” attitude. As angry residents at Plaquemines Parish town hall rightly point out, few tests had been conducted, and there scant research about what this unprecedented amount dispersed oil will do marine life. Nor there a way clean up toxic mixture oil and chemicals below surface. Yes, fast multiplying microbes do devour underwater oil – process they also absorb water’s oxygen, creating a whole new threat marine life.
BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent unflattering images of oil-covered beaches birds from escaping the disaster zone. When was on the water TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat whose captain asked, “”Y’all work for BP?” When we said no, the response – the open ocean – was “You can’t be here then”. But of course these heavy-handed tactics, like all the others, have failed. There simply too much oil too many places. “You cannot tell God’s air where to flow go, you can’t tell water where to flow go,” was told by Debra Ramirez. It was lesson she had learned from living Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by 14 emission-spewing petrochemical plants, watching illness spread from neighbour to neighbour.
Human limitation has been the one constant this catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how much oil is flowing, nor when it will stop. The company′s claim that it will complete relief wells by the end August – repeated by Obama his Oval Office address – is seen by many scientists as a bluff. The procedure is risky and could fail, and there is a real possibility that the oil could continue leak years.
The flow denial shows no sign abating either. Louisiana politicians indignantly oppose Obama’s temporary freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing him killing one big industry left standing now that fishing and tourism in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that “no human endeavour ever without risk”, while Texas Republican congressman John Culberson described disaster as “statistical anomaly″. By far most sociopathic reaction, however, comes veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn King: rather than turning away big engineering risks, we should pause in “wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they can lift lid off underworld”.
Make the bleeding stop
Thankfully, many taking very different lesson from disaster, standing not in wonder at humanity’s power reshape nature, at our powerlessness cope with fierce natural forces we unleash. There something else too. It feeling that hole at bottom of ocean more than an engineering accident or broken machine. It violent wound in living organism; that it part of us. And thanks BP’s live camera feed, we can all watch Earth’s guts gush forth, in real time, 24 hours day.
John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one the few independent observers to fly over the spill the early days the disaster. After filming the thick red streaks oil that the coast guard politely refers to as “rainbow sheen”, he observed what many had felt: “The Gulf seems to bleeding.” This imagery comes up again and again conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an “oil spill” and instead says, “we are haemorrhaging”. Others speak the need to “make the bleeding stop”. And was personally struck, flying over the stretch ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank with the US Coast Guard, that the swirling shapes the oil made the ocean waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping air, eyes staring upwards, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep.
And this surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems be waking us up the reality that the Earth never was machine. After 400 years being declared dead, and in the middle so much death, the Earth coming alive.
The experience of following the oil’s progress through the ecosystem kind of crash course deep ecology. Every day we learn more about how what seems to be terrible problem one isolated part of the world actually radiates out ways most of us could never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could reach Cuba – then Europe. Next we hear that fishermen all the way up the Atlantic Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because the Bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf coast wetlands are the equivalent of busy airport hub – everyone seems to have stopover: 110 species of migratory songbirds 75% of all migratory US waterfowl.
It’s one thing be told by an incomprehensible chaos theorist that butterfly flapping its wings Brazil can set off tornado Texas. It’s another watch chaos theory unfold before your eyes. Carolyn Merchant puts lesson like this: “The problem as BP has tragically belatedly discovered that nature as an active force cannot be so confined.” Predictable outcomes are unusual within ecological systems, while “unpredictable, chaotic events [are] usual″. And just case we still didn’t get it, few days ago, bolt of lightning struck BP ship like an exclamation mark, forcing it suspend its containment efforts. And don’t even mention what hurricane would do BP’s toxic soup.
There is, it must be stressed, something uniquely twisted about this particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans learn where foreign countries by bombing them. Now it seems we all learning about nature’s circulatory systems by poisoning them.
In late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in Andean cloud forests, U’wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans drill oil their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part ruiria, “the blood Mother Earth”. They believe that all life, including their own, flows ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn’t as much oil as it had previously thought.)
Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods spirits living the natural world – rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves practical purpose. Calling the Earth “sacred” another way of expressing humility the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.
If we absorbing this lesson at long last, the implications could be profound. Public support increased offshore drilling dropping precipitously, down 22% from the peak the “Drill Now” frenzy. The issue not dead, however. It only matter time before the Obama administration announces that, thanks to ingenious new technology tough new regulations, it now perfectly safe to drill the deep sea, even the Arctic, where an under-ice clean up would be infinitely more complex than the one underway the Gulf. But perhaps this time we won’t be so easily reassured, so quick to gamble with the few remaining protected havens.
Same goes for geoengineering. As climate change negotiations wear on, we should be ready hear more from Dr Steven Koonin, Obama’s undersecretary of energy for science. He one of the leading proponents of the idea that climate change can be combated techno tricks like releasing sulphate aluminium particles into the atmosphere – of course it’s all perfectly safe, just like Disneyland! He also happens be BP’s former chief scientist, the man who just 15 months ago was still overseeing the technology behind BP’s supposedly safe charge into deepwater drilling. Maybe this time we will opt not let the good doctor experiment the physics chemistry of the Earth, choose instead reduce our consumption shift renewable energies that have the virtue that, when they fail, they fail small. As US comedian Bill Maher put it, “You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.”
The most positive possible outcome this disaster would not only an acceleration renewable energy sources like wind, a full embrace precautionary principle science. The mirror opposite Hayward’s “If you knew you could not fail″ credo, precautionary principle holds that “when an activity raises threats harm environment or human health” we tread carefully, as failure were possible, even likely. Perhaps we can even get Hayward a new desk plaque contemplate as he signs compensation cheques. “You act like you know, you don’t know.”
Naomi Klein visited the Gulf coast with film-crew from Fault Lines, a documentary programme hosted Avi Lewis al-Jazeera English Television. She was consultant on the film
