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
By Naomi Klein
The Guardian(UK): 19 June, 2010
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.
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
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