A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [108]
The manager of a BP decontamination site for cleanup workers says he gets calls “every day” about people who want to commit suicide.
I can’t help noticing it’s only the victims who want to kill themselves.
On July 19, while a tanker is offloading oil near a Chinese port, two oil pipelines explode, sending flames 60 feet into the air and an estimated 11,000 barrels of oil into the Yellow Sea. Local media reports a 70-square-mile slick, which workers try to break up with chemical dispersants and with oil-eating bacteria.
On July 21, a federal judge stops companies from developing oil and gas wells on billions of dollars’ of leases off Alaska’s northwest coast. He says the federal government sold drilling rights without following environmental law. Alaska Native groups and environmentalists insist that no one could ever clean up an oil spill in Arctic waters, especially if there’s sea ice. The Arctic is much more remote than the Gulf of Mexico. It’s far from harbors and airports. The nearest Coast Guard base lies many horizons away.
“That spill in the Gulf, it could have been our ocean,” says Daisy Sharp, mayor of Point Hope, an Inupiat Eskimo community of seven hundred people on the Chukchi Sea. “It’s sad to say, but in a way I’m glad it happened. Maybe now people will take a closer look at offshore oil drilling.”
Caroline Cannon, Native president of the village, says the decision brought tears of joy: “The world has heard us, in a sense. We’re not on the corner of the back page. We exist and we count.”
Well, Ms. Cannon, you guys exist as far as I’m concerned, but oil greases Alaska. Alaska’s governor and other politicians love oil, because the petroleum industry pumps more than 90 percent of the state’s revenue into Alaska’s budget. And that judge didn’t void the leases, but merely ruled that the federal government must analyze the environmental impact of development. For the oil companies, it’s not over.
For the people, it might be. “Our ancestors had seen the hunger for oil when the Yankee whalers came in the nineteenth century,” says village council vice president Steve Oomittuk. “They came for the whale oil and wiped out the whales.” Whole villages that had relied on whales for food disappeared, Oomittuk says. He adds, “Then six years ago we saw the hunger for oil coming back. We started to think, ‘This time we will go extinct.’ ”
But a whale might think, “Thank God for petroleum.” Without it, as Oomittuk implies, we would have destroyed the whales. And thank heaven even more for the power of the sun, the wind, the tides, the heat in the heart of the Earth, the oils in the algae that feed the whole sea, these eternal energies that drive our world and all its life. Without them, we might have overheated the planet and acidified the ocean. But I’m getting way ahead of the story; we’re not there yet. Not even close. As the whalers were stuck in their remorseless havoc, so we have stuck ourselves, with oil.
As we burn the easy oil and tap the deep oil to the limits of technology, sources that hadn’t been worth it are getting attention. Enter: “oil-sands,” “tar sands,” “shale oil,” and other relatively meager sources that are now worth money. Of Canada’s northern Alberta—a province I remember as beautiful when it was younger—I read that as the Athabasca River and several of its tributaries flow past facilities gouging at oilsands (one ugly word), heavy metal neurotoxins like lead and mercury are entering the water at levels hazardous to fish. Add to them cadmium, copper, nickel, silver, and seven other metals considered priority pollutants by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. First, workers bulldoze the trees and strip the soil. “As soon as there was over 25 percent watershed disturbance we had big increases in all of the contaminants that we measured,” one scientist tells us.