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Following the April 20th explosion of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig, media featured the spewing of oil under and onto the waters of the Gulf of Mexico off Mississippi. Sadly, media lost interest when this ceased to be news . It was worse. It was an on-going unstoppable disaster. As efforts to stop the flow failed, by mid June this spewing oil well had created the biggest US oil contamination to date. US coast guards operate booms to try to contain and collect on the surface, but beaches in Lousiana and Texas have shoreline oil devastation to local ecology. The effects of oil plumes in and under water are hardly mentioned. The devastation goes on. Interestingly, I had just been reading Wade Davis. In the fourth of his 2009 CBC Massey Lectures (published as “The Wayfinders”) Wade speaks of the “Sacred Headwaters” in Northern BC, the origins of three important salmon rivers, as one of the special sacred places in the world which many cultures recognize and venerate. Canada is a place where land is treated differently. There is corporate development in this special BC sacred place. “We
accept as
normal that people who have never been
on the land, who have no history
or
connection with the country, may legally
secure the right to come in
and by the
very nature of their enterprises leave
in their wake a cultural and
physical
landscape utterly transformed and
desecrated. What’s more, in granting
such
mining concessions, often initially for
trivial sums to speculators
from
distant cities, companies cobbled
together with less history than my
dog, we
place no cultural or market value on the
land itself.“
The same approach applies to drilling in waters offshore place with fishing industries and tourism. The impact of BP getting oil from the Gulf for fishing and tourism in the US Gulf States is not trivial. But beyond that, surely the treatment of oceans and the largely unknown underwater world which are common to life on the planet deserve some degree of respectful caution? Thoughts of respect and caution aside, another unnerving feeling about the whole affair is the inability of BP and/or the US government to turn off the gushing oil spout created at the bottom of the ocean. The situation recalls the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice made famous by Disney in his work Fantasia. As I recall, left alone and unsupervised to carry water buckets to fill a well, the apprentice uses his developing magic powers to command the broom itself to fill and carry buckets of water to fill the reservoir. He falls asleep. He wakes to find himself in a flood of water. He finds he can cast, but cannot stop, this spell. By the time the master sorcerer returns the place is flooded and the apprentice is about to drown. The trouble with BP’s oil well is that there is no master sorcerer to return and stop the forces BP has unleashed. Previously, I saw Nuclear Power as a special case of people playing with cosmic forces. And to some extent it is. But some features from the nuclear power arena extend to other areas of human endeavour like extracting and depending on oil. For Nuclear Power, I had always grasped the sorcerer’s apprentice danger of presuming to rule without adequate knowledge. I opposed Nuclear Power in part because, by the nature of the physics, fission power is a bomb trying to go off with the lid held on. If anything goes wrong, the bomb goes off. I am very uneasy about assuming there will be no human error over the long term – let alone no random acts of terror or anarchy. Searching for oil in sensitive environments is not so immediately and suddenly dangerous as a Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl . But the effects of the BP oil spill are so big and ongoing and they hit so many human activities in the Gulf, let alone lots of fellow creatures over a bigger area. Some things one has to say “no” to, and let the economy develop in other directions. Finally, the oil spill situation raises for me the question of who is allowed to do this. I grew up in an era where it was considered important to put essential services under public ownership. In the USA, the pattern used special charters for special corporations like power corporations. However, over the latter part of the 20th century, limited liability corporations acting under general corporate legislation and general government regulations became the norm. Governments always appreciated the convenience of an arm’s length relationship because it left them off the hot seat around contentious issues of public interest. However, that seems to be exactly why the government should be involved. A corporation has to maximise profits for its shareholders within boundaries set by law and regulation. A government has the more difficult task of deciding amongst many concerns and interests including, especially, the interests of those living at the location whose lives and work will be affected. The people who accept or ban drilling in the gulf or approve the regulations should include those whose lives and work are affected and their governments. And the natural world deserves a special margin of appreciation and caution. TOP Click:  |
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