A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [97]
Officials say.
National news: “I’m Michele Norris.” “And I’m Melissa Block. Computer modeling suggests that Miami and the Florida Keys are actually more at risk from oil than much of the state’s Gulf coast. But all that depends on a fickle phenomenon known as the Loop Current—”
Click.
Really, I just need a few minutes of quiet. Let my head settle.
Pelicans remain much in evidence wherever the view embraces water. Terns. Laughing gulls. Salt marsh, rather pretty, at least for now. Occasionally a mullet jumps. I wonder whether they’ll be here in these numbers next year.
I should hear what they’re saying, so I turn on the radio again. “… They collected wind and current data from the last fifteen years, added an oil gusher, and ran it again and again to see where the oil would likely go. Oil ended up on the Atlantic coast of Florida more often than not. But the model could be wrong. The Loop Current usually pushes oil out of the Gulf and along the east coast of Florida, but it’s not doing that right now. On the other hand, it looks like this could be a record-breaking year for tropical storms in the Gulf. This week’s storm has delayed oil cleanup activities. What actually happens to the oil will depend on the weather. So keep watching those weather forecasts.…”
That’s news you can’t use. All that matters: Is the oil still gushing or stopped? Still gushing. That’s all that matters.
A sign says, “Taking Oysters Beyond This Point Prohibited.” The syntax raises the image of escorting oysters out into the bay. They need the word “from” between “oysters” and “beyond.” At any rate, a few weeks ago, oyster rakers freckled the wide water. Now there are none.
Boom in channels. Boom under bridges. A long crescent boom arcs out from the shoreline, then simply ends. Protects nothing. The inescapable visual dominance of oil rigs. And this fiasco. I’ve never before seen a coast I hated.
Cedar Point Pier is on the north side of the bridge to Dauphin Island. Last time I was here the place was open. Now there’s a hand-painted sign saying, “Closed.”
A middle-aged woman named Jo is feeding the cats. Doesn’t want “them to be victims, too.” Takes me inside the store next to the empty piers. Shelves empty. “This is what’s left.” She’s known me for two minutes, but she gives me a soft drink and a candy bar and won’t let me pay.
On June 10 at 9:30 P.M., while several dozen people were fishing from the pier, police officers came onto the property to announce that the waters were closed to fishing and the place was “closed immediately.” Not just the fishing. The whole business, bait shop, snacks and drinks, everything.
When the seventy-four-year-old proprietor came out to get an explanation, the six-foot-five officer knocked him to the ground to handcuff him, sending his face into a fence post on the way down and landing him in the hospital for two weeks. “Ambulance people could not believe the officer wouldn’t uncuff him,” Jo tells me. Word is that the officer had a prior problem controlling himself.
“When it’s all over,” she says, “it’ll be bad for everyone.”
While we wait to see when it’ll be over, we pause for this word from the United Nations: a new report says that large modern corporations are “soulless” and threaten to become “cancerous” to society. The author of those comments, Pavan Sukhdev, is on sabbatical from Deutsche Bank and is working at the United Nations on a report called “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity.” Reading between the lines, I infer that one goal of the report is to install an artificial heart in the treasure chest of multinational corporations. “We have created a soulless corporation that does not have any innate reason to be ethical about anything,” he says. “The purpose of a corporation is to be selfish. That is law. So it’s up to society and its leaders and thinkers to design the checks and balances that are needed to ensure that the corporation does not simply become cancerous.” This doesn’t come as news. But checks and balances—isn’t that liberal code for regulations and taxes? In a famous