FUSsa-talk Mailing List: Fwd: Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world | The Guardian

[Robert Tapp (tappx001]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Robert Tapp <tappx001 [at] umn.edu>
> Date: June 20, 2010 5:33:20 PM CDT
> To: Humanist Institute Discussion Group Discussion Group <hidisc [at] 
> humanistinstitute.org>
> 
> 
> Naomi Klein insists, correctly, that the BP disaster must force us to rethink 
> our metaphors regarding <Nature>. As research-focused journalist, she knows 
> when to be tough and how to be accurate. 
> 
> Bob
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/jun/19/naomi-klein-gulf-oil-spill
> 
> Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world
> 
> The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is a 
> violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the 
> Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris 
> at the heart of capitalism
> 
>  (11)
> 
>  (2811)
> Tweet this (650)
> ‘Obama cannot order pelicans not to die (no matter whose ass he kicks). And 
> no amount of money – not BP’s $20bn, not $100bn – can replace a culture 
> that’s lost its roots.’ Photograph: Lee Celano/Reuters
> Everyone gathered for the town hall meeting had been repeatedly instructed to 
> show civility to the gentlemen from BP and the federal government. These fine 
> folks had made time in their busy schedules to come to a high school 
> gymnasium on a Tuesday night in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, one of many 
> coastal communities where brown poison was slithering through the marshes, 
> part of what has come to be described as the largest environmental disaster 
> in US history.
> 
> "Speak to others the way you would want to be spoken to," the chair of the 
> meeting pleaded one last time before opening the floor for questions.
> 
> And for a while the crowd, mostly made up of fishing families, showed 
> remarkable restraint. They listened patiently to Larry Thomas, a 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 a 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 and the product 
> being banned in Britain, the chemical dispersant being sprayed on the oil in 
> massive quantities was really perfectly safe.
> 
> But patience started running out by the third time Ed Stanton, a coast guard 
> captain, took to the podium to reassure them that "the coast guard intends to 
> make sure that BP cleans it up".
> 
> "Put it in writing!" someone shouted out. By now the air conditioning had 
> shut itself off and the coolers of Budweiser were running low. A shrimper 
> named Matt O'Brien approached the mic. "We don't need to 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 with that, 
> such a loud cheer rose up from the floor you'd have thought the Oilers (the 
> unfortunately named school football team) had scored a touchdown.
> 
> The showdown was cathartic, if nothing else. For weeks residents had been 
> subjected to a barrage of pep talks and extravagant promises coming from 
> Washington, Houston and London. Every time they turned on 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 in 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 in intimate 
> contact with the delicate chemistry of the wetlands, it also sounded 
> completely ridiculous, painfully so. Once the oil coats the base of the marsh 
> grass, as it had already done just a few miles from here, no miracle machine 
> or chemical concoction could safely get it out. You can skim oil off the 
> surface of open water, and you can rake it off a sandy beach, but an oiled 
> marsh just sits there, slowly dying. The larvae of countless species for 
> which the marsh is a spawning ground – shrimp, crab, oysters and fin fish – 
> will be poisoned.
> 
> It was already happening. Earlier that day, I travelled through nearby 
> marshes in a shallow water boat. Fish were jumping in waters encircled by 
> white boom, the strips of thick cotton and mesh BP is using to soak up the 
> oil. The circle of fouled material seemed to be tightening around the fish 
> like a noose. Nearby, a red-winged blackbird perched atop a 2 metre (7ft) 
> blade of oil-contaminated marsh grass. Death was creeping up the cane; the 
> small bird may as well have been standing on a lit stick of dynamite.
> 
> And then there is 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 but also the roots. Those roots are what 
> hold the marsh together, keeping bright green land from collapsing into the 
> Mississippi River delta and the Gulf of Mexico. So not only do places like 
> Plaquemines Parish stand to lose their fisheries, but also much of the 
> physical barrier that lessens the intensity of fierce storms like hurricane 
> Katrina. Which could mean losing everything.
> 
> How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be "restored and made 
> whole" as Obama's interior secretary has pledged to do? It's not at all clear 
> that such a thing is remotely possible, at least not in a time frame we can 
> easily wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover 
> from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and some species of fish never returned. 
> Government scientists now estimate that as much as a Valdez-worth of oil may 
> be entering the Gulf coastal waters every four days. An even worse prognosis 
> emerges from the 1991 Gulf war spill, when an estimated 11m barrels of oil 
> were dumped into the Persian Gulf – the largest spill ever. That oil entered 
> the marshland and stayed there, burrowing deeper and deeper thanks to holes 
> dug by crabs. It's not a perfect comparison, since so little clean-up was 
> done, but according to a study conducted 12 years after the disaster, nearly 
> 90% of the impacted muddy salt marshes and mangroves were still profoundly 
> damaged.
> 
> We do know this. Far from being "made whole," the Gulf coast, more than 
> likely, will be diminished. Its rich waters and crowded skies will be less 
> alive than they are today. The physical space many communities occupy on the 
> map will also shrink, thanks to erosion. And the coast's legendary culture 
> will contract and wither. The fishing families up and down the 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 
> the roots of grass holding up the land in the marsh. Without fishing, these 
> unique cultures lose their root system, the very ground on which they stand. 
> (BP, for its part, is well aware of the limits of recovery. The company's 
> Gulf of Mexico regional oil spill response plan specifically instructs 
> officials not to make "promises that property, ecology, or anything else will 
> be restored to normal". Which is no doubt why its officials consistently 
> favour folksy terms like "make it right".)
> 
> If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the 
> BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little 
> control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately 
> interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot 
> plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to 
> survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). 
> No amount of money – not BP's recently pledged $20bn (£13.5bn), not $100bn – 
> can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and 
> corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the 
> people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing 
> their illusions fast.
> 
> "Everything is dying," a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally 
> coming to a close. "How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient 
> and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is 
> going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act 
> like you know when you don't know."
> 
> This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the 
> addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our 
> culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding 
> and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it 
> with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP 
> disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most 
> sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During Thursday's 
> congressional testimony, Hayward said: "The best minds and the deepest 
> expertise are being brought to bear" on the crisis, and that, "with the 
> possible exception of the space programme in the 1960s, it is difficult to 
> imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one 
> place in peacetime." And yet, in the face of what the geologist Jill 
> Schneiderman has described as "Pandora's well", they are like the men at the 
> front of that gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don't know.
> 
> BP's mission statement
> 
> In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to 
> re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 
> 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant 
> reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking 
> the form of a mother. Europeans – like indigenous people the world over – 
> believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but 
> also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against 
> actions that would deform and desecrate "the mother", including mining.
> 
> The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no means all) of 
> nature's mysteries during the scientific revolution of the 1600s. With nature 
> now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts 
> could be dammed, extracted and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes 
> appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. Sir Francis Bacon 
> best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in the 1623 De dignitate et 
> augmentis scientiarum that nature is to be "put in constraint, moulded, and 
> made as it were new by art and the hand of man".
> 
> Those words may as well have been BP's corporate mission statement. Boldly 
> inhabiting what the company called "the energy frontier", it dabbled in 
> synthesising methane-producing microbes and announced that "a new area of 
> investigation" would be geoengineering. And of course it bragged that, at its 
> Tiber prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, it now had "the deepest well ever 
> drilled by the oil and gas industry" – as deep under the ocean floor as jets 
> fly overhead.
> 
> Imagining and preparing for what would happen if these experiments in 
> altering the building blocks of life and geology went wrong occupied precious 
> little space in the corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after 
> the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April, the company had no systems in 
> place to effectively respond to this scenario. Explaining why it did not have 
> even the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome waiting to be activated on 
> 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 to contemplate failure clearly came straight from the top. A 
> year ago, Hayward told a group of graduate students at Stanford University 
> that he has a plaque on 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 of how BP and its competitors behaved in the 
> real world. In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, congressman Ed Markey of 
> Massachusetts grilled representatives from the top oil and gas companies on 
> the revealing ways in which they had allocated resources. Over three years, 
> they had spent "$39bn to explore for new oil and gas. Yet, the average 
> investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention and 
> spill response was a paltry $20m a year."
> 
> These priorities go a long way towards explaining why the initial exploration 
> plan that BP submitted to the federal government for the ill-fated Deepwater 
> Horizon well reads like a Greek tragedy about human hubris. The phrase 
> "little risk" appears five times. Even if there is a spill, BP confidently 
> predicts that, thanks to "proven equipment and technology", adverse affects 
> will be minimal. Presenting nature as a predictable and agreeable junior 
> partner (or perhaps subcontractor), the report cheerfully explains that 
> should a spill occur, "Currents and microbial degradation would remove the 
> oil from the water column or dilute the constituents to background levels". 
> The effects on fish, meanwhile, "would likely be sublethal" because of "the 
> capability of adult fish and shellfish to avoid a spill [and] to metabolise 
> hydrocarbons". (In BP's telling, rather than a dire threat, a spill emerges 
> as an all-you-can-eat buffet for aquatic life.)
> 
> Best of all, should a major spill occur, there is, apparently, "little risk 
> of contact or impact to the coastline" because of the company's projected 
> speedy response (!) and "due to the distance [of the rig] to shore" – about 
> 48 miles (77km). This is the most astonishing claim of all. In a gulf that 
> often sees winds of more than 70km an hour, not to mention hurricanes, BP had 
> so little respect for the ocean's capacity to ebb and flow, surge and heave, 
> that it did not think oil could make a paltry 77km trip. (Last week, a shard 
> of the exploded Deepwater Horizon showed up on a beach in Florida, 306km 
> away.)
> 
> None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been 
> making its predictions to a political class eager to 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 the industry's 
> four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to 
> have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. "It's better than 
> Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource 
> that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way," 
> she told the Senate energy committee just seven months ago.
> 
> Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since 
> May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the 
> conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan "Drill Here, Drill Now, 
> Pay Less" – with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a 
> cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's 
> telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be – locked in Rocky 
> Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore – 
> was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab 
> ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment 
> was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, "in Alabama and 
> Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty". By the 
> time the infamous "Drill Baby Drill" Republican national convention rolled 
> around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they 
> would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a 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 of the country to 
> offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as he had thought, he 
> explained. "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are 
> technologically very advanced." That wasn't enough for Sarah Palin, however, 
> who sneered at the Obama administration's plans to conduct more studies 
> before drilling in some areas. "My goodness, folks, these areas have been 
> studied to death," she told the Southern Republican leadership conference in 
> 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 from this terrible event." And one might well imagine that a 
> catastrophe of this magnitude would indeed instil BP executives and the 
> "Drill Now" crowd with a new sense of humility. There are, however, no signs 
> that this is the case. The response to the disaster – at the corporate and 
> governmental levels – has been rife with the precise brand of arrogance and 
> overly sunny predictions that created the disaster in the first place.
> 
> The ocean is big, she can take it, we heard from Hayward in the early days. 
> While spokesman John Curry insisted that hungry microbes would consume 
> whatever oil was in the water system, because "nature has a way of helping 
> the situation". But nature has not been playing along. The deep-sea gusher 
> has bust out of all BP's top hats, containment domes, and junk shots. The 
> ocean's winds and currents have made a mockery of the lightweight booms BP 
> has laid out to absorb the oil. "We told them," said Byron Encalade, the 
> president of the Louisiana Oysters Association. "The oil's gonna go over the 
> booms or underneath the bottom." Indeed it did. The marine biologist Rick 
> Steiner, who has been following the clean up closely, estimates that "70% or 
> 80% of the booms are doing absolutely nothing at all".
> 
> And then there are the controversial chemical dispersants: more than 1.3m 
> gallons dumped with the company's trademark "what could go wrong?" attitude. 
> As the angry residents at the Plaquemines Parish town hall rightly point out, 
> few tests had been conducted, and there is scant research about what this 
> unprecedented amount of dispersed oil will do to marine life. Nor is there a 
> way to clean up the toxic mixture of oil and chemicals below the surface. 
> Yes, fast multiplying microbes do devour underwater oil – but in the process 
> they also absorb the water's oxygen, creating a whole new threat to marine 
> life.
> 
> BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent unflattering images of 
> oil-covered beaches and birds from escaping the disaster zone. When I was on 
> the water with a TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat 
> whose captain asked, ""Y'all work for BP?" When we said no, the response – in 
> the open ocean – was "You can't be here then". But of course these 
> heavy-handed tactics, like all the others, have failed. There is simply too 
> much oil in too many places. "You cannot tell God's air where to flow and go, 
> and you can't tell water where to flow and go," I was told by Debra Ramirez. 
> It was a lesson she had learned from living in Mossville, Louisiana, 
> surrounded by 14 emission-spewing petrochemical plants, and watching illness 
> spread from neighbour to neighbour.
> 
> Human limitation has been the one constant of 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 of August – 
> repeated by Obama in 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 to leak for years.
> 
> The flow of denial shows no sign of abating either. Louisiana politicians 
> indignantly oppose Obama's temporary freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing 
> him of killing the one big industry left standing now that fishing and 
> tourism are in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that "no human endeavour is 
> ever without risk", while Texas Republican congressman John Culberson 
> described the disaster as a "statistical anomaly". By far the most 
> sociopathic reaction, however, comes from veteran Washington commentator 
> Llewellyn King: rather than turning away from big engineering risks, we 
> should pause in "wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they 
> can lift the lid off the underworld".
> 
> Make the bleeding stop
> 
> Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, 
> standing not in wonder at humanity's power to reshape nature, but at our 
> powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is 
> something else too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the 
> ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a 
> violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us. And thanks to BP's 
> live camera feed, we can all watch the Earth's guts gush forth, in real time, 
> 24 hours a day.
> 
> John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the 
> few independent observers to fly over the spill in the early days of the 
> disaster. After filming the thick red streaks of oil that the coast guard 
> politely refers to as "rainbow sheen", he observed what many had felt: "The 
> Gulf seems to be bleeding." This imagery comes up again and again in 
> conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer 
> in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an "oil spill" and instead says, 
> "we are haemorrhaging". Others speak of the need to "make the bleeding stop". 
> And I was personally struck, flying over the stretch of ocean where the 
> Deepwater Horizon sank with the US Coast Guard, that the swirling shapes the 
> oil made in the ocean waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery 
> lung gasping for air, eyes staring upwards, a prehistoric bird. Messages from 
> the deep.
> 
> And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be 
> waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 
> years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth 
> is coming alive.
> 
> The experience of following the oil's progress through the ecosystem is a 
> kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day we learn more about how what 
> seems to be a terrible problem in one isolated part of the world actually 
> radiates out in 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 in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because 
> the Bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away 
> in those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf 
> coast wetlands are the equivalent of a busy airport hub – everyone seems to 
> have a stopover: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75% of all migratory 
> US waterfowl.
> 
> It's one thing to be told by an incomprehensible chaos theorist that a 
> butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It's 
> another to watch chaos theory unfold before your eyes. Carolyn Merchant puts 
> the lesson like this: "The problem as BP has tragically and belatedly 
> discovered is 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 in case we still didn't 
> get it, a few days ago, a bolt of lightning struck a BP ship like an 
> exclamation mark, forcing it to suspend its containment efforts. And don't 
> even mention what a hurricane would do to 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 are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about 
> nature's circulatory systems by poisoning them.
> 
> In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world 
> headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the 
> Andean cloud forests, the U'wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum 
> carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass 
> ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is 
> part of ruiria, "the blood of Mother Earth". They believe that all life, 
> including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on 
> 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 and spirits living in 
> the natural world – in 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 a practical 
> purpose. Calling the Earth "sacred" is another way of expressing humility in 
> the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it 
> demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.
> 
> If we are absorbing this lesson at long last, the implications could be 
> profound. Public support for increased offshore drilling is dropping 
> precipitously, down 22% from the peak of the "Drill Now" frenzy. The issue is 
> not dead, however. It is only a matter of time before the Obama 
> administration announces that, thanks to ingenious new technology and tough 
> new regulations, it is now perfectly safe to drill in the deep sea, even in 
> the Arctic, where an under-ice clean up would be infinitely more complex than 
> the one underway in 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 to hear more from Dr Steven Koonin, Obama's undersecretary of 
> energy for science. He is one of the leading proponents of the idea that 
> climate change can be combated with techno tricks like releasing sulphate and 
> aluminium particles into the atmosphere – and of course it's all perfectly 
> safe, just like Disneyland! He also happens to 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 to let the good doctor experiment with the physics and 
> chemistry of the Earth, and choose instead to reduce our consumption and 
> shift to 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 of this disaster would be not only an 
> acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but a full embrace of the 
> precautionary principle in science. The mirror opposite of Hayward's "If you 
> knew you could not fail" credo, the precautionary principle holds that "when 
> an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health" we 
> tread carefully, as if failure were possible, even likely. Perhaps we can 
> even get Hayward a new desk plaque to contemplate as he signs compensation 
> cheques. "You act like you know, but you don't know."
> 
> 
> Naomi Klein visited the Gulf coast with a film-crew from Fault Lines, a 
> documentary programme hosted by Avi Lewis on al-Jazeera English Television. 
> She was a consultant on the film
> 
> 
>