Beaches uninhabitable, the sand soaked with grunge. Plants, including those that hold the marshlands together by preventing erosion, smothered. Crabs, shrimp, oysters, fish and birds facing death either because of the oil itself or because of the killoff of their nutrients.
What we’re seeing in Louisiana and along the Gulf coast is the face of environmental disaster.
The oil companies that are household words to us have caused damage like that in other places—notably Shell in Nigeria and Chevron in Ecuador—and we’ve often been content to accept, uncritically, reports that the people who rebelled there, demonstrating, sabotaging pipelines or attacking oil company employees, were “terrorists,” or at least hooligans.
Now we get it: this kind of ecological destruction can’t be tolerated anywhere, and it’s enough to make people fighting mad, especially those whose livings depend on an intact ecology. “I think we should boycott BP. I really do,” a Louisiana oysterman told Slate magazine. “That’d be our way of saying thanks for ruining our lives.”
Watching footage of giant plumes of brown and ocher oil spreading into the Gulf of Mexico and the Louisiana marshes, seeing pelicans and other wild life covered with oil, we understand something more: BP has done something neither the company itself nor anyone else, including the government, can undo. Last week in this column a few figures were put forward to offer a partial sketch of the role of money in this type of disaster. But a more important truth is that an event so awful simply transcends the oil-for-money, money-for-remediation equation.
No amount of money can fix what’s happened in the Gulf and along its coast for 150 miles, and no technology that will fix it exists.
As we watch that footage, questions we had already begun to grapple with take on new depth. How important is oil in comparison with food, water, and fragile but rich and indispensable ecologies?
When BP CEO Tony Hayward said that the spill was “tiny” compared to the “very big ocean” that is the Gulf of Mexico, apart from talking like an ass, he expressed a kind of thinking that’s extremely dangerous but common in corporate board rooms. The insistent question is whether Americans will demand an economy and an energy policy that are not at odds with nature.
