A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [46]
“When I first heard about the blowout, I didn’t really think much about it. These things do happen. I figured they’d have it under control pretty quick. Their big metal thing didn’t seem to work. I have to believe they’re doing the best they can.”
There is no single Mississippi River mouth. The mighty, muddy Mississippi speaks in tongues; her song is a chorale, her delta is a polyglot of channels. We’re gonna run down via the channel called the Grand Pass, and from there through the Coast Guard Cut to East Bay, directly confronting the open Gulf of Mexico.
We pass a swimming alligator. A river otter pops its head up briefly. A peregrine falcon comes high over the distant marsh, assessing the shorebirds for any weakness.
If oil comes into any of these channels, there is no way people can clean it from the intricate intimacy of these marshes.
One area with many resting birds is boomed. But birds fly. We’re seeing pelicans, gulls, and terns diving. There’s a slick near the diving birds. It could be natural. I don’t see or smell any oil. There’s no rainbow sheen or scent. It’s very thin on the water, and at first Kennedy and I both think it’s a slick from a school of fish below.
But then he spots some floating flecks that don’t look familiar. Using a bait net, Captain Kennedy collects one, then a larger blob. The stuff’s a bit gooey, the consistency of peanut butter but stickier. It smells like petroleum. It doesn’t dissolve in water. It’s hard to get off our hands. This is our first actual contact with the actual crude oil. It’s nasty stuff. Let’s hope we don’t explode.
We pass a shack called Paradise, and another called Happy Ending. By now everything seems laden with portent; every sight and sign seems ominously like some metaphor of the all too real.
A rather gratifying amount of public and media interest arises over the fate of the magnificent bluefin tuna, which grows to over half a ton and whose numbers have been demolished by overfishing. Swimming at highway speeds, they tunnel throughout the whole Atlantic, but when spawning on our side of the ocean they migrate into the Gulf of Mexico. And this is spawning season. And though they can live for decades and grow to fifteen hundred pounds, they start out by hatching from millions of minute eggs to begin life as tiny drifting larvae. At the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, a biologist opines, “This places the young larvae, I think, in a precarious position in respect to the location and magnitude of the spill.” A tuna plankton expert here adds, “Large numbers of bluefin tuna larvae on the western edge of the Loop Current might be impacted by the oil spill as they move northward through the loop.” Finding and counting fish larvae is painstaking work. They’ll have to compare this year’s numbers to prior and subsequent years. It’ll take a while to learn more.
Understanding accrues slowly. Reactions happen at a different tempo. In the third week of May, the government suddenly closes 46,000 square miles to fishing, or about 19 percent of the Gulf of Mexico’s federal waters.
The Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board whistles in the dark that seafood from the areas not closed is still both available and safe; and more than half the state’s oyster areas remain open. But as a local seafood market owner says, “Perception is everything.”
And here’s a different perception of the whole situation. The delta’s Native Americans include the Pointe-au-Chien tribe. A century ago, Natives like them, isolated, illiterate, non-English-speaking, unable to get to New Orleans, missed the opportunity to claim land and territory after the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803—even though it had for millennia all been theirs. Much of southern Louisiana was claimed by the federal government, which auctioned a lot of it to land companies in the 1800s. Later, oil companies bought much of southern Louisiana. They swindled the Natives out of any crumbs they’d gotten.
Native Americans have in the past accused land grabbers