Big Oil Makes War on the Earth
The Gulf Coast Joins an Oil-Soiled Planet
By Ellen Cantarow
Tomgram: July 18, 2010
If you live on the Gulf Coast, welcome to the real world of oil -- and
just know that you're not alone. In the Niger Delta and the Ecuadorian
Amazon, among other places, your emerging hell has been the living hell of
local populations for decades.
Even as I was visiting those distant and exotic spill locales via book,
article, and YouTube, you were going through your very public nightmare.
Three federal appeals court judges with financial and other ties to big oil
were rejecting the Obama administration's proposed drilling moratorium in
the Gulf of Mexico. Pollution from the BP spill there was seeping into Lake
Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans. Clean-up crews were discovering that a
once-over of beaches isn't nearly enough: somehow, the oil just keeps
reappearing. Endangered sea turtles and other creatures were being burnt
alive in swaths of ocean ("burn fields") ignited by BP to "contain" its
catastrophe. The lives and livelihoods of fishermen and oyster-shuckers
were being destroyed. Disease warnings were being issued to Gulf residents
and alarming toxin levels were beginning to be found in clean-up workers.
None of this would surprise inhabitants of either the Niger Delta or the
Amazon rain forest. Despite the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 and the
Exxon Valdez in 1989, Americans are only now starting to wake up to the fate
that, for half a century, has befallen the Delta and the Amazon, both
ecosystems at least as rich and varied as the Gulf of Mexico.
The Niger Delta region, which faces the Atlantic in southern Nigeria, is
the world's third largest wetland. As with shrimp and oysters in the Gulf,
so its mangrove forests, described as "rain forests by the sea," shelter all
sorts of crustaceans. The Amazon rain forest, the Earth's greatest nurturer
of biodiversity, covers more than two billion square miles and provides this
planet with about 20% of its oxygen. We are, in other words, talking about
the despolation-by-oil not of bleak backlands, but of some of this planet's
greatest natural treasures.
Flaming Mangroves
Consider Goi, a village in the Niger Delta. It is located on the banks of
a river whose tides used to bring in daily offerings of lobsters and fish.
Goi's fishermen would cast their nets into the water and simply let them
swell with the harvest. Unfortunately, the village was located close to one
of the Delta's many pipelines. Six years ago, there was a major spill into
the river; the oil caught fire and spread.
Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth, International,
visited soon after. "What I saw" he reported in a recent radio interview,
"was just a sea of crude, burnt out mangroves, and burnt out fishponds
beside the river. All the houses close to the river were burnt... It was
like a place that had been set on fire in a situation of battle, of war. The
people were completely devastated."
Nigeria's biggest oil producer, Royal Dutch Shell, insisted that it
cleaned up the village, but Bassey just laughs. "One thing about oil
incidents: you cannot hide them. The evidence is there for anybody to see.
This was in 2004; I've been there two times this year. The devastation is
still virtually as fresh as it was then. You can still see the oil sheen on
the river. You can see the mangroves that were burnt, they've not
recovered. You can see the fish ponds that were destroyed. You can see the
fishing nets and boats that were burnt. They're all there. There's no signs
of any clean-up."
Though the local inhabitants are still there, struggling for survival,
notes Bassey, they can't depend on fishing anymore. "The last time I went
there, there was a little boy who came with a plastic container. [He and his
father had gone] to look for shrimps all night. And what they came back with
was a paltry quantity of crayfish that could barely cover the bottom of the
plastic container.The container was covered with crude and the crayfish
itself was covered in crude oil. So I was wondering what they were going to
do with it, and he said they were going to wash the crayfish, and then they
would feed on it."
Now people in Goi have to buy fish from traders. The fish are not very
fresh, and often smoked. More important, buying fish is a luxury, given that
70% of Nigerians subsist on less than a dollar a day.
Fifty years ago, Shell sank its first 17 wells in the Delta. The rest is
history written as nightmare: unparalleled government corruption, ecocide,
impoverishment. One estimate puts spills in the Delta over the past half
century at 546 million gallons -- nearly 11 million gallons a year. If it's
hard to wrap your mind around those figures, maybe this is easier to grasp:
more oil is spilled from the Delta's pipeline maze each year than has been
lost so far in the Gulf of Mexico.
Through photographs, you can glimpse life in the Delta under the shadow of
big oil. Derelict shacks slouch on river banks amid an extravagance of
garbage and waste. Children bathe in lifeless ponds. People live and work in
the heat and amid toxins released by flames roaring from flare stacks.
Flaring is universally agreed to be wasteful, but is also a way of
maximizing oil production on the cheap. Much of the gas burned could be used
productively, but in places like the Niger Delta big oil just doesn't want
to spend the money necessary to reclaim it. The flames belch toxins and
methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The U.S. prohibits such flaring.
Officially, Nigeria does, too, and scheduled its first "flare-out" for 1984.
To date, however, its governments still keep eternally postponing the
deadline for stopping the practice.
The sheen, sludge, and slime of crude oil that Americans living on the
Gulf coast are just beginning to get used to have been omnipresent facts in
the Delta for so long that most people know little else. Average life
expectancy in the rural Delta, says Bassey, "has never been lower than it is
now" -- 48 years for women, 47 for men, and 41 if you escape subsistence
farming and petty trading by becoming an oil worker. In other words, years
shaved off lives are the personal sacrifice those in the region make to big
oil.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Nigeria nationalized its oil, but Shell
still ruled production. The state organized large public works projects and
long-term plans for development, only to abandon them under powerful
international financial pressures -- the "free market" doing what it does
best when truly unchecked. Nigeria's leaders have raked in $700 billion in
national oil revenues since 1960. One percent of Nigeria's population, in
other words, has pocketed over 75% of its energy wealth. In part thanks to
the unwanted sacrifices of the Nigerian majority, America's gas tanks remain
well-filled at relatively reasonable prices, since 40% of U.S. crude oil
imports come from the Delta.
Indigenous inhabitants of the Delta like the Ogoni people have suffered
disaster without even the oil-money equivalent of trickle-down economics
touching their lives. "In recovering the money that has been stolen from us
I do not want any blood spilt, not of any Ogoni man, not of any strangers
amongst us," Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigeria's legendary nonviolent activist, told an
audience of his people in 1990. "We are going to demand our rights
peacefully, nonviolently, and we shall win." The movement he launched
adopted the tactics of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, promoting
divestment from Shell and staging peaceful demonstrations.
Shell soon took notice. So did Nigeria's military government, which also
felt threatened by a movement in the Delta region dedicated to regaining
some share of pillaged local wealth. In 1995, that government hanged
Saro-Wiwa and eight other nonviolent leaders. A case brought by the Center
for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Saro-Wiwa's son and other plaintiffs
resulted in a $15.5 million out-of-court settlement by Shell, a veritable
drop in the bucket for the giant company.
Since Saro-Wiwa's execution, a rebellious spirit has spread widely in the
region, but his pacifist approach has long since been rejected. The rebel
Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has become
remarkably disruptive and powerful through sabotaging pipelines, kidnapping
foreign oil workers, and even piracy. It has, in fact, come close to
bringing the oil industry to a standstill there. Shell has shut down its
major operations in the Delta, where 36% of young people interviewed in a
2007 World Bank study showed a "willingness or propensity to take up arms
against the state."
Tropical Crudities
Oil corporations have penetrated vast parts of the Amazon rain forest in
Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. Consider just one part of that Amazonian
immensity, the Oriente region of Ecuador in the Amazon basin. Humberto
Piaguaje of the Secoya people still remembers how life there used to be.
With a staggering abundance of birds, plants, animals, and foliage, with
streams and tributaries winding through a humid lushness to the Amazon
River, the region seemed like a blessing rather than something that could be
owned by anyone.
"Own" wasn't even a notion: the endless stretches of rain forest were
literally common wealth. The oil beneath the ground, says Piaguaje, was
"the blood of our grandparents -- our ancestors." The rain forest was a
university that conferred its knowledge on those who lived there and their
shamans. Its medicinal plants made it the people's hospital; its vegetables
and animals made it their marketplace.
For Texaco, however, the jungle invited domination. Emergildo Criollo of
the Cofan people remembers how it all began. In 1967, when he was eight
years old, a helicopter suddenly appeared in the sky. He'd never seen
anything like it and thought at first it was some strange bird. Later, even
stranger sounds came from within the jungle itself as Texaco set up shop.
Within six months, the first oil spill appeared in a stream near where his
family lived. After he grew up, Criollo lost two children: an infant stopped
developing after he was six months old, and an older child who bathed one
day in the oil-polluted river, swallowed some of the water, and later began
vomiting blood. He died the next day. Criollo sums up his sorrow in 13 stark
words: "They came and spilled oil, they contaminated the river, and my
children died."
In its first 25 years, Texaco pumped 1.5 billion barrels of oil out of the
Oriente region. According to one estimate, the company discharged 345
million gallons of pure crude oil into Ecuador's rainforest and waterways.
In 2009, Amazon Rights Watch reported that the company, by its own
estimates, had dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater directly into
the environment. Next to its hundreds of wells, Texaco dug into the forest
floor at least twice as many unlined waste pits. That it intended the filth
from the pits to flow into forest streams is clear, because it installed
drainage pipes that allowed for just such run-off. "Pits," by the way, is a
euphemism for oil-sewage swamps, as is evident both in this photograph and
this video.
Forty years of oil exploration and production have translated into the
slow poisoning of Oriente's land, its people, its animals, and its crops.
With no other water source, local tribes are forced, as in the Delta region
in Nigeria, to use contaminated water for drinking, bathing, and cooking. A
Harvard medical team and Ecuadorian health authorities have described eight
kinds of cancer that result from this sort of contamination. Birth defects
are legion in the region, as are skin diseases, which torment even newborns.
In 1993, 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorians brought a class-action lawsuit
against Texaco (which merged with Chevron in 2001 to become Chevron-Texaco,
the world's fourth-largest investor-owned oil company). "60 Minutes" called
it "the largest environmental lawsuit in history." The plaintiffs are
seeking $27 billion in compensation for their suffering and for the
restoration of their world. The lawsuit is still pending.
Last month, some Ecuadorian indigenous leaders visited the Gulf Coast to
show solidarity with another indigenous people, the Houma of Louisiana. A
joint group then took a boat tour through bayous where the Houma have fished
for generations. Mariana Jimenez, from Ecuador's Amazon, reached over the
side of the boat into gray water, grasping a handful of once-verdant marsh
grass. It drooped lifelessly in her hand, leaving dark brown blotches of
crude oil on her palm. "I see it," she said. "It's just like Ecuador. They
talk about all the technology they have, but when there's a situation like
this, where's the technology?"
"I think all of this is a terrible contamination for the Houma people,"
commented Humberto Piaguaje. "It's a cultural contamination. Their fishing
and shrimping that was their livelihood is ending now. They need to be
asking BP for compensation for the next generation."
Big Oil Blowback
Here's the simple, even crude, lesson these ambassadors offer: whether
Americans like it or not, we are all connected in new ways -- and not ways
the advocates of "globalization" once promised -- now that we've entered
what resource expert Michael Klare calls the age of extreme energy. Think
of it as a new kind of blowback.
Our addiction to oil is now blowing back on the civilization that can't do
without its gushers and can't quite bring itself to imagine a real
transition to alternative energies. Humberto Piaguaje might say that the
wound BP gashed in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico has unleashed the wrath
of the Earth's millions-of-years dead.
Put another way, corporations presume that it's their right to control
this planet and its ecosystems, while obeying one command: to maximize
profits. Everything else is an "externality," including life on Earth. "What
we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident," says Nnimo Bassey,
"is that the oil companies are out of control. In Nigeria, they have been
living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet."
Think of oil civilization in its late stages as a form of global
terrorism.
Ellen Cantarow is a journalist whose work on Israel/Palestine has been
published widely for 30 years including at TomDispatch. She is now working
on climate change and big oil, which have much to do with the Middle East,
Israel, and Palestine, as well as the rest of the planet. Recent phone
conversations with her stepdaughter Kim -- she and her husband have a
scuba-diving business in the Florida Keys -- led indirectly to this story.
To catch Cantarow discussing what led her to this piece, listen to Timothy
MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview by clicking here, or to download it
to your iPod, here.
[Note on sources: Douglas Yates of the American University of Paris let me
read part of the manuscript of his book, The Scramble for African Oil
(forthcoming next year from Pluto Press), an invaluable overview of the
political economy of big oil in the Niger Delta. An essential primer on the
Delta is the remarkable photo-essay anthology, Curse of the Black Gold: 50
Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, by Michael Watts and photographer Ed Kashi.
Joe Berlinger's award-winning documentary Crude is a must-watch with its
focus on the Ecuadorian lawsuit against Texaco, as well on the lives of the
plaintiffs. Ermegildo Criollo's story comes from that film.]
Copyright 2010 Ellen Cantarow
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