A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [48]
In brown and orange globs, in sheets thick as latex paint, oil begins coating the reedy edges of Louisiana’s wetlands. As crude oozes in the entrances, hope flees out the back door.
The worst fears of environmental disaster are, it seems, being realized. “Twenty-four miles of Plaquemines Parish is destroyed,” rages a despairing Billy Nungesser, head of the parish. “Everything in it is dead. There is no life in that marsh. It’s destroying our marsh, inch by inch.” And because this is not a spill but an ongoing eruption, his prognosis: more of the same, coming ashore for weeks and months. Louisiana’s governor says, “This is not sheen, this is heavy oil.” He also fears that “this is just the beginning.” He wields the statistics at stake: 60,000 jobs in Louisiana’s $3 billion fishing industry; that Louisiana produces 70 percent of the Gulf’s seafood, nearly one-third of the continental United States’ seafood. In addition, throughout the Gulf of Mexico region in a typical year, commercial fishermen usually catch more than 1 billion pounds of fish and shellfish, and nearly 6 million recreational fishermen make 25 million fishing trips. (One cannot help wondering whether the sea creatures would rather face our oil or our nets and hooks.)
The EPA tells BP: you have a twenty-four-hour deadline to choose a less toxic chemical dispersant. Dispersants have gotten our attention, but plenty of other chemicals—many of them similar—drain from America’s Heartland to America’s Wetland and beyond. Soaps, dishwashing liquids, and industrial solvents are all oil dispersants. Down the drain they go. Household cleaners, ingredients used to make plastics, and pesticides. Medical residue that goes from body to potty to Gulf. Livestock waste and traces of the drugs they’ve been given. Enough estrogen from birth control pills to bend genders and mess the sex of fish. Caffeine. Herbicides toxic to aquatic animals, by the thousands of tons. And good old (actually new, synthetic) fertilizers that cause algae populations to skyrocket, leading to an explosion of the bacteria that decompose them, which depletes the deeper water’s oxygen, killing everything. That’s the “dead zone” that happens every year in the Gulf (and now in hundreds of other coastal places around the world and is coming soon to a river mouth near you). The Gulf dead zone holds the distinction of first and worst, and this year it’s set to break a record: it’s about 8,000 square miles, the size of New Jersey. Or Massachusetts. (Some of us remember when it was a cute little dead zone no bigger than Delaware.) There’s actually a federal goal of shrinking it to less than 1,900 square miles by 2015. Agencies planned to accomplish that by getting midwestern farmers to put less fertilizer into the river system. But good luck. “It’s getting bigger over the years, and it’s extending more into Texas,” says Nancy Rabalais, director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. So one more thing is killing the Gulf, and it’s a big one: agriculture. Modern, industrialized, artificialized, corporatized, heavily lobbied agriculture. When the oil is gone, the water of the mighty Mississippi will remain all too fertile for the Gulf’s good.
For vigilance, we the people pay taxes that support our government’s defense of our interests. Among the vigilant defenders is that government agency called the Minerals Management Service, a branch of the Interior Department. Its mission, if it decides to accept it: make sure extraction of oil and other nonliving resources is done well, done safely, and done to certain specified standards. And yet in at least one region—though there’s no evidence that this was an issue in the Gulf—the MMS got a little too informal when it mattered. In 2008, it came to light that eight MMS employees had accepted lavish gifts and had partied with—and in some cases had sex with—employees from the energy companies they regulated. A formal investigation found the agency’s Denver office rife with “a