The Gulf has always been good to me. I come from a Gulf State, and grew up eating its oysters and shrimp, its Blue Crab and Red Snapper. I fished in it, swam in it, and nearly learned how to surf in it. But I also lived in a house built by oil. Oil paid the bills at my school and filled the coffers at my church. We're Oil People who love our wildlife, and now we face the grim hazards of that contradiction.
When my mother was eight months pregnant with me, she and my father were swimming at a beach off Destin, Florida, when my mother was taken down by a wave and her plump belly struck the bottom. Hard. They were scared for their unborn son, and even blamed that wave for my premature birth a few weeks later. But I came out fine, and if that wave did me any harm, it was more than made up for by its value as an excuse for bad behavior: "Please forgive me, residual wave damage." Every year as I grew up, my parents took me back to that same beach to stay in a little rented Florida Panhandle shack we called the Sunshine House. I always used to sprint down to the water the moment we'd end the seven-hour drive to build castles out of sand as soft and white as freshly sifted flour. And at the end of my childhood, when my parents divorced, it was to that same beach that my mother took me one particular weekend when things at home got too hard for her. As the Southern Belle daughter of a Gulf State, there was no landscape more affirming than a white sand ribbon wrapped around endless blue. This was the Gulf that I loved as a child of the Pelican State, and now our Pelican is covered in heavy oil and dying in tar-soaked sand.
But as much as I am the son of a Gulf State, I am also the son of an Oil State. Over water drilling was pioneered a few miles from my hometown, on Caddo Lake, where my grandmother owns stock in a hunting and fishing camp (not to mention, stock in Big Oil). When I was growing up, every house in my neighborhood was built by oil money. In my elementary school if your father wasn't an Oil Man he was a lawyer who drafted their deals, a banker who handled their money or a doctor who delivered their babies. My father was in advertising, but whenever anyone asked him if he was in the oil business, he'd just say, "We're all in the oil business."
Our men love their "Sportsman's Paradise," but they also clamor for smaller government with no end in sight; no de-regulation is quite de-regulated enough for their taste. I get emails on a monthly basis from my uncles and cousins in the Louisiana Oil and Gas business about how our president will end the energy sector as we know it, through his government's meddling. But perhaps what's really washing up now on the coast is the proof that we can't have it both ways. Environmental responsibility and industrial safety have never been the path of least resistance for the free market. And this is what happens when we contradict ourselves--wanting Laissez-Faire policies with the oil companies and peel-and-eat shrimp and fresh oysters and pristine places to take our families in the summer time. We have to pick a side: the economy's or the planet's, because we clearly haven't yet figured out how to successfully reconcile the two.
We may be able to cap this hole in the bottom of the Gulf in a matter of weeks. And in a matter of years, we may get our beautiful shoreline back. But how many generations will it take until we shore up our contradictions?
A hole in the ground spewing thousands of barrels of oil a day can be the stuff of dreams or the stuff of nightmares. But the ground doesn't decide which one it will be; we do.
I hope that the ocean and coastal ecosystem can repair itself in a few years. I seriously doubt it. Alaska's fisheries still have not returned 20 years after the exxon spill. And what will happen to the ground water supply if the hurricanes wash all that oil and toxic and illegal dispersant ashore? Also how much of the Gulf Coast will be washed away by the erosion that will follow loss of wetlands?
Can we learn from this catastrophe? We do we let corporations drill on public land? They are making an enormous profit and I'm glad some people who work for them have made a decent living, but what did we, the American people get? Already the fish population has been dwindling for the past forty years and the Gulf Coast is full of dead zones. I doubt seriously our grandkids will have a safe source of seafood when all is said and done. How is it possible to destroy a whole ocean? God made a mistake when he gave us small brains and opposable thumbs.
I think we lack the leadership and will to make the change
The issue, Americans just don't seem to want to bring their heads out of the sand and simply wash themselves off, man-up, face the actions needed, and move forward. It's the saddest issue we face, considering all the issues in our faces, because it's the one we could truly have created huge changes to, the most readily. Is ego and blind pride so important, so powerful? Yes, it is. It shocks me to see how far behind we are compared to a few other nations' decisions about energy, nutrition, taking care of the elderly, healthcare programs, and on and on.
I often wonder how much more tragedy it will take to have people wake up and open their eyes and minds to the facts. It's so easy to lose hope, but this great land is truly worth keeping the faith.
Thanks for your excellent observations and sharing some of your story. Very well written!
Today we are forced to look at a similar situation. After years of the industry spending vast quantities of money to buy their way out of regulations this same mistake has landed on their front porch. Instead of doing the right thing to start with they did what they could to convince the children of those Osha hatters of decades past to hate all government regulations. We have enabled these companies to steal this thing which is such a hugh part of our culture. The bays, the marsh, the gulf coast is lost for the rest of my life, probably my children's life. Louisiana Association of Business and Industry and other organizations have sold their souls to the oil companies for a few dollars. I always thought the point was to leave the world a little better place than to die rich.
I grew up in Santa Barbara, lived there through the spill of 69. The shoreline ecology has yet to recover. Californians continue to be: Very paranoid about offshore drilling; Responsible for more than half of the solar panels sold in the USA, and; have been buying four cylinder cars at a higher rate per capita the the country on the whole.
Maybe a few folks living on the gulf won't think we're crazy anymore.
That's worse than the oil spill.
No wonder you're conflicted about being a mercenary or a patriot.
And no agency is going to say no to big money.
You don't have to believe me, but I'm one of those people who could sell snow to an Eskimo. I was all set to finish my degree in advertising until I had a serious attack of conscience back in '09. I realized I couldn't and wouldn't do anything to promote way too many companies and industries (Big Oil, Pharma, Nestle, Republican owned, etc.) and had to "readjust" my goals to match my skill set.
There ARE nice guys in advertising, but they either burn out pretty quick or just aren't that creative to begin with, and the biggest a**h*les (understatement!) get way farther ahead than you would expect.
It's a game for young mercenaries, not people with inflexible ethics.
If I believe in a product, I'm all in, but that's just not how it works.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fg%2Fa%2F2010%2F06%2F04%2Fnotes060410.DTL
Article: "Behold our dark, magnificent horror"
The caption under the photo: "Like Satan's own finger painting"
Big Oil has bought and buried every potential alternative for the last 50 years.
Don't believe me?
Good, because the inventors of Cold Fusion are still at it.
Google it.
Your article articulates that argument far more eloquently but I still wish we could get away from it. Yes, we are a society that gets its energy primarily through fossil fuels and will be until that changes. And that's my point: change it. You mention how your relatives lament that 'our president will end the energy sector as we know it'. Well, that's going to happen on its own eventually. I prefer to think of it as our President is trying to figure out how to help us deal with that eventuality while avoiding crippling dependence on hostile countries and reckless corporate incompetence that destroys our way of life (and possibly our lives since we have no certainty what burning all the remaining fossil fuels will do to our ecosystem).
I'm open to suggestions as to responses to boneheads who like to remind me that I have a carbon footprint.
Those that use the talking points of how necessary oil is need only to look to Detroit and now the Gulf.
I get the same excuses from others, and altho I don't live in a bike friendly, treehugging, bastion of liberalism, I do my best to reduce what I use. If everyone did a small part of reduction, it triggers an automatic response to do a bit more.
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. ~Bertrand Russell
WE can vote them out, but not until years after the damage is done, and only with the consent of the majority of voters. A majority who's decisions are also influenced by money from the oil industry. Either through direct involvement in the field, or advertisements professionally crafted to woo voters based not on what is best for US, but on the interests of the oil companies.
WE have a broken system. The disaster in the gulf is just a symptom of our real problems, until the system is fixed, things like this will keep news organizations busy for decades. As long as every critical environmental decision is based on money instead of rational thought, WE can only write meaningless complaints to blogs like HP.
"And we will all go together when we go" (Tom Lehrer)
Reminds me of Howard Beal's rant from Network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(film) . They co-opted us by dividing us against ourselves. But we all have a bit of Howard in us, eh?
Damn it. We must figure out how to work this passive resistance in this modern era. Ghandi cannot be the only example of its success against empire. There WILL be a solution. SOON.