A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [35]
President Obama called the decision “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”
This “Joke of the Week” arrives in my in-box: “The economy is so bad, Exxon-Mobil just laid off 25 congressmen.”
I hop onto a small boat that’s already pulling away from the dock in Shell Beach, Louisiana. The captain, Casey Kieff, was a fishing guide until the oil blowout caused an indefinite fishing closure. Now he’s taking some photographers out to have a look at Breton Sound. On board is a reporter from Reuters, a crew from Russian state television, a photographer working for Getty Images, and several others. The captain names a fair price and I jump on, too, wondering if this is his last week of work—and what price could really be fair to him. For decades he’s been guiding people who want to sport-fish for speckled sea trout and redfish. No matter how bad the oil gets, the media attention will wane. Guiding reporters won’t be a new career. So he’s got a lot on his mind.
We go to Hopedale to pick up a couple of other people. The cops have the road into here closed, but by the grace of boats we have free range of the place. The waterfront is bustling with trucks carrying miles and miles of boom, all kinds of boats getting into the act for a day’s uneasy pay. The National Guard, wildlife enforcement people—all kinds of busyness intent on oil-containment plans that are at worst futile and at best high-risk. There seems both a lot of organization and a lot of confusion.
In Kieff’s overpowered outboard, we blast through a sliver of the astonishingly vast and intricate wetlands of Louisiana.
The first thing that really impresses me is the immensity of Louisiana’s marshes and coast. Marshes as far as you can see, to all points of the compass. Bewildering mazes of channels.
How could this whole coast be protected? And if oil comes, it could never be cleaned by people. It’s a wet, grassy sponge from horizon to horizon.
The skeletons of oak forests stand starkly on marsh islands now subsiding, too low and too inundated to sustain trees. They’re dying back, and the marshes themselves are eroding away.
But still, there are miles and miles of marshes before one gets to the open waters of Breton Sound. As we head toward the Gulf, I notice a few bottlenose dolphins rolling as they snatch air in the mud-murked channels.
When we reach open water, the horizon is dotted with gas rigs and a few boats that have piled their decks with booms.
After a long, pounding ride through a stiff chop, our captain steers us to one of the inner islands, Freemason, a barely emergent ridge of sand and shell about a mile long. The innermost of the Chandeleur chain, the island is maybe a mile long. (Katrina dissolved several miles of these islands.)
The island isn’t well known to people. But it is to birds. Brown pelicans, laughing gulls, herring gulls, black skimmers, and least, Sandwich, and royal terns rest by the dozens. They’re joined by a few itinerant ruddy turnstones, sanderlings, and black-bellied plovers migrating toward their Arctic nesting grounds.
In some ways, a catastrophe of this magnitude could not have happened in a worse place. Or at a worse time of year.
The Gulf is a large region, but its natural importance is even more outsized, disproportionate to its area. The Gulf is the hourglass pinch point for millions of migrating creatures that funnel in, and then fan out of it to populate an enormous area of the hemisphere’s continents and coasts. Anything that affects living