With the upcoming five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (August 29), the Gulf Coast is bracing for another media onslaught.
Network anchors all have their tickets (each competing for turf with Anderson Cooper along New Orleans’s Riverwalk), CNN is broadcasting a two-part special (“New Orleans Rising”) and next Monday/Tuesday HBO will air Spike Lee’s four-hour documentary, “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise.”
As if the place hadn’t gotten enough attention during the past four-plus months, the Gulf States can’t stay out of the news these days, which is a good thing. Given the continuing debate over just how much oil is still stewing in the ocean it deserves to be in the headlines for a long time to come.
As I predicted a few days ago, every day seems to bring a new estimate on just how much of the oil spewed by BP is still out there. The statistics grow evermore confusing. The government says “74 percent of the oil is gone.” A University of Georgia team claims “79 percent is still there.” And today a report in Science – which the Times calls “the most ambitious paper to emerge yet” – casts grave doubt on the government stats and suggests there is a huge plume of oil two miles long floating beneath the surface, which will pose problems for the ocean, wildlife and man for months, possibly years, to come.
While that chatter dominates Gulf-related headlines, I think now is an appropriate time to reflect on all the other bad shit impacting the region on top of the multi-million gallons of crude that were recklessly dumped into it.
The Deepwater Horizon explosion and sinking was one of two sizable man-made disasters that will have long-lasting impact on Louisiana shores. The other goes back to 1927, when man (i.e. the Army Corps of Engineers) began his failed attempt to “control” the Mississippi River. The twin debacles, combined with a historically corrupt and inattentive state government, has assured that despite the cantankerous quality of life that makes the state the most unique of all fifty is also treated like America’s toilet bowl.
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
When, on August 4th, President Obama’s chief environmental adviser Carol Browner put the White House stamp of approval on stats claiming “74 percent of the oil spilled into the Gulf” had already been cleaned up, captured, burned, dispersed, evaporated, degraded or dissolved in the water … most of the people I know living along the coastline of Louisiana rolled their collective eyes.
Mike Roberts, a shrimper who lives on Barataria Bay – the hard-hit marshlands leading to the Gulf – said, “they obviously haven’t been to my backyard recently, which is still caked with oil.”
His wife Tracy Kuhns, Louisiana Bayoukeeper and director of the local family fishermen’s association, has been outspoken about BP and the government’s math since the gushing began. “They haven’t gotten it right from the very beginning when they told us only a few hundred rather than a few thousand barrels were leaking a day … why should we trust them now?”
On the other side of the estuary, P.J. Hahn, a Republican politician whose job it is to look after the future of the coastline of Plaquemines Parish and has been out on the water virtually every day since the gusher first began, said of the federal government numbers “they sound just too good to be true.”
One thing those “too good to be true” stats helped produce were some very optimistic news reports. “Sunshine is evaporating the oil, and bacteria are rapidly digesting it,” reported Bloomberg Businessweek.
“In a year or two we can forget this ever happened,” Roger Sassen, an adjunct professor of geology and geophysics at Texas A&M, told Bloomberg. “The fact that the Mississippi is the drainage ditch for the fertilizers and nasty agricultural chemicals of the entire central U.S. is much worse than this transient spill.”
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
I hadn’t thought much about baptism since the last time I watched “The Godfather” until I saw a photo last week of 29 Marines (the Ohio-based 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment) on the verge of setting off for Afghanistan being given full rites in the Pacific Ocean near Camp Pendleton.
Which made me wonder exactly how many people use the ocean for baptism … and where did the notion of being plunged underwater to affirm ones Christian beliefs come from anyway?
Marines interviewed said they believed the rite would help them “perform our job the way we need to in a very challenging environment” and bring them home safely. Initially I thought their Sunday morning full-submersions — administered by the battalion’s commander and part of what he dubbed Operation Sword of the Spirit, a program meant to prepare the battalion for duty in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand province — was unusual. (The widely promoted event angered some Marines in Afghanistan, who saw it as ready-made p.r. for the Taliban to use to pump up a “Holy War” theme.)
But the almighty Google proved that notion wrong. Apparently many times a week somewhere along the edge of the country – from Ocean Grove and Pacific Palisades in California to the sand beaches of Florida and New Jersey – Christians, both adults and children, walk voluntarily into the sea to have their beliefs affirmed.
Typical mass-baptism announcements are abundant and include the Where (Pier Ave and the Strand, Hermosa Beach); the Date (July 11, 2010); the Time (3 p.m.), the Features (kids, open to all, volunteer) and Dress Code (ladies, wear dark t-shirt and shorts over your swim suit; guys, please wear a t-shirt and swim trunks).
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
What a difference a vote makes.
In a tally by the U.N. World Heritage committee meeting in Brasilia last week the Galapagos Islands were taken off the list of World Heritage sites formally considered “in danger.”
Tourists march on in the Galapagos. Photo by Fiona Stewart
The 19-island chain off the coast of Ecuador was added to the list in 2007, thanks to rapid increases in overfishing, most egregiously sea cucumber poaching and shark finning. While the islands are well protected from the heavy impact of tourist’s feet – 97 percent of the islands are off limits to the tourist industry, which has boomed in recent years – the seas that surround them had been less well protected.
The problem stemmed from horrific poverty on the mainland; tens of thousands of impoverished Ecuadoreans dreamed of moving to the islands to cash in on the tourism boom. About 30,000 did. When they arrived and found no pot of gold at the end of the tourist rainbow, many turned to illegal fishing.
After the president of Ecuador announced the island state at “great risk,” the Galapagos were added to the endangered list. After just two years, a vote of 14-5 took it off. Brazil, at the request of Ecuador, had asked that the Galapagos be taken off the list. Apparently the bad publicity of being ranked “endangered” (thus mismanaged) outweighed the need to use the listing to keep world attention focused on the problems.
(For the rest of my dispatch, go to takepart.com)
I built a fence in my backyard this summer, which seemed to require more zoning and inspection, applications and approvals than much of what we see built along the coastlines of the U.S.
It’s a fact that while zoning laws have been pretty tightly regulated on land, for more than a couple hundred years we’ve had a far more lax approach to that can do what on the ocean.
As a result, ocean-lovers are crediting the Obama Administration with some foresight for recognizing soon after it took power eighteen months ago that the country needed some kind of overarching national ocean policy, not so different in scope from the Clean Water and Clean Air acts which have been law for nearly four decades.
The mess in the Gulf has highlighted why the country needs some kind of comprehensive approach to managing and protecting the ocean and coasts. Half of the country lives along its edges; millions of jobs are created there, contributing hundreds of billions to the GDP. But the fragmented way we’ve managed the ocean and coast in the past has had a spotlight shown on it daily since the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank more than 100 days ago.
The coast of Louisiana may be the poster-child for why we need better ocean/coastal management: A Dead Zone the size of New Jersey grows each summer thanks to fertilizers washed down the Mississippi from 31 northern states. Its coastline is eroding at the rate of a football field every 30 minutes thanks to nearly one hundred years of shortsighted management. Various industrial pollutions credited to the big oil, gas and petrochemical operations that have operated there with a kind of free will for decades have caused obvious problems. On top of all that, there is a sizable fishing culture that has often been encouraged or allowed to overfish. Add in the coming trends of ocean farming all operated within spitting distance of the country’s third largest port and you realize how big a stew is brewing in just this one region.
(For the rest of my dispatch, go to takepart.com.)
Despite the hullabaloo created around the world by the Deepwater Horizon accident, oil spills are hardly a new occurrence. They’ve been happening since prehistoric man first accidentally tapped into an underground petroleum reservoir.
Long prior to BP’s debacle, yellow and orange booms have permanently ringed rigs in the Gulf – and around the world –, in effort to contain the inevitable daily leakage from a far-from-perfect extraction process. Study the reports from just the past twelve months of leaks and spills in the Gulf; they are common occurrences, though usually measured in the hundreds of gallons rather than millions.
And given our lack of a cohesive energy policy, our national unwillingness to truly commit to developing alternative energy sources and still-growing demand for energy from fossil fuels, such leaks and spills and gushings will continue.
Just read the headlines from the past few days: A thirty-inch pipeline near the Kalamazoo River splits and spills a million gallons of oil into a waterway headed for Lake Michigan. A barge slams into an abandoned well in Barataria Bay at 1 a.m. (an ecologically-sensitive estuary already dealing with a massive oil mess thanks to BP) sending a shower of water, natural gas and oil spewing into the air for days.
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
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