A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [39]
Still others note that this isn’t so bad compared to all the other bad stuff that happens to the Gulf every day: scores of refineries and chemical plants from Mexico to Mississippi pouring pollutants into the water, pollution from all the ships, the degrading marshes, the dead zone caused by all the Midwest’s farm runoff flowing down the Mississippi River. It’s hardly a pristine Eden.
“The Gulf is tremendously resilient,” says the cool-headed director of the Texas-based conservation group. But he adds, “How long can we keep heaping these insults on the Gulf and having it bounce back? I have to say I just don’t know.”
No one knows. The not knowing thickens a gumbo of fear.
Meanwhile, BP executives admit to Congress behind closed doors that the leak could reach 60,000 barrels per day, sixty times what they’d been saying.
Now, about that Loop Current. There’re kernels of truth in both the fear that it could take oil across the Keys reefs and into the Gulf Stream and the observation that it’s “stopped.” Normally, the Loop Current flows a bit like a snaking conveyor belt; it does have the potential to take the oil and move it past the Florida Keys. But that conveyor has just pinched itself off. As sometimes happens, a meander has bent itself into an enormous eddy that’s just pinwheeling in the Gulf. This greatly blunts the likelihood of the oil getting into the Gulf Stream and up the East Coast. “This is the closest thing to an act of God that we’ve seen,” says Dr. Steve Murawski of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Well, maybe—whatever. But another way of looking at it is that the Gulf will be stuck with all the oil. And I’m about to get a pelican’s-eye impression of how much oil is currently in the Gulf.
“My name’s Dicky Toups,” says the pilot before he starts the engine of the seaplane I’m climbing into. “But they call me Captain Coon-ass.”
We overfly the emerald maze of the vast Mississippi Delta. Captain Coon-ass points, saying, “There’s a big ole gator.”
To the far points of view, America’s greatest marshes lie dissected, bisected, and trisected, diced by long, straight artificial channels and man-angled meanders, all aids to access and shipping. For the vast multimillion-acre emerald marshes, they are death by a thousand cuts.
The sign had said, “Welcome to Louisiana—America’s Wetland.” Pride and prejudice. People here depend on nature or the control of nature—or both. Keep an eye on nature; it can kill you here. But people can kill the place itself.
Since the 1930s, oil and gas companies have dug about 10,000 miles of canals through the oak and cypress forests, black mangrove swamps, and green marshes. Lined up, they could go straight through Earth with a couple thousand miles to spare. The salt water they brought killed coastal forests and subjected our greatest wetlands to steady erosion. Upstream, dams and levees hold back the sediment that could have helped heal some of that erosion. Starved on one end, eaten at the other. How to kill America’s wetlands. Long after this oil crisis is over, this chronic disease will continue doing far more damage than the oil.
All these Delta-slicing channels cause banks to dissolve, swapping wetlands for open water. Those channels also roll out red carpets for hurricanes. Incredibly, this has all cost Louisiana’s coast about 2,300 square miles of wetlands. Marshland continues to disintegrate at a rate of about 25 square miles a year. The rise in sea level due to global warming is also helping drown watery borderlands. Oil leak or no leak, these things, all ongoing, constitute the most devastating human-made disaster that’s ever hit the Gulf. Bar none.
Only slowly does the muddy Mississippi lose itself to the oceanic blue of the open Gulf, a melding of identities, a meeting of watery minds. And also the drain