One year after the spill, who can we trust?

I pray for Earth. 

On this one year anniversary of the BP-Macondo well blowout, which was the largest oil spill in US history, and if I recall correctly the largest marine oil spill ever, I have been trying to think about what has transpired over the year. As is always the case, the memory of such disasters is always short-lived for those not directly affected by the disaster - how long do we remember those killed ruthlessly through acts of violence in the Middle East? How long do we remember the woman raped here in Ann Arbor? In this world of constant "progress" and constant stimulation and excitement for the next, it is easy to quickly move on to the next thing. It is difficult to think about the past. What ends up happening, however, is that the past repeats itself. It is almost as if as a society, we have a collective cultural amnesia of sorts, even though we're better than ever before at documenting and recording what transpires on this Earth. We have satellites and cameras on cell phones and video recorders and Twitter and instant messaging. But does the constancy of all of this information obscure what it is we are doing to ourselves and the planet? It seems so. Boy, when those videos of the oil gushing through the well head were broadcast on TV, I thought, "THIS IS IT!"

As much as I was heartbroken by what happened, I felt this optimism of something big happening..something good...something positive. The public and myself, complicit in ecological degradation, would realise the risks of our individual and collective behaviours, and would make sure those risks would not be taken ever again...wrong.

Although the Minerals Management Service has been restructured so that the department issuing permits for drilling is different than the department receiving the revenues from issuing those permits, we have congresspeople like Doc Hastings saying, "Drilling is safe." As someone who isn't involved in the decision-making going on, I can still safely say that this is an overtly false statement. The risks of undertaking such drilling are almost too difficult to calculate. And, just like Weitzman's fat tails and dismal theorem, if the risks of calamity are adequately factored into risk assessments, we would realise that it is just too risky to do something like drill in deep oceans. Yet, many like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal have said that the permit granting process should be quickened up. It is not surprising that many people that "represent" us in Congress are actually supported by groups like the American Petroleum Institute. How can we trust agencies and bureaus whose guidelines are written by those in industry?

My mom told me the other day, "Darshan, if those in government really cared about people, the people, a lot of problems that exist today just wouldn't exist. Now do you understand why your dad doesn't vote?" My parents are amazing and prescient and keen.

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Here are things that you can read and catch up on, if you are interested...

Nil, Baby, Nil: Congress Fails To Pass A Single Oil Spill Law 

One Year Later, Congress and Industry Do Nothing to Make Drilling Safer 

Gulf Residents: Please Take our Dolphins and Turtles Away 

Ken Feinberg, BP Not Independent According To Judge 

BP spill: Life in Gulf of Mexico one year on

BP oil spill: The environmental impact one year on

What came first and the wisdom from the world

I hope to tie together a few threads of thought with this post today. I mentioned in a couple of posts (here and here) the fallacies and deficiencies of the current framework of "sustainability" thinking. What the dominant framework does is the following - it puts "economic" sustainability on the same footing as "social" sustainability and "environmental" sustainability. The global North, i.e. the agenda-setter and dominant rhetorical force, has successfully morphed the concept of "sustainability" to mean "sustainable development," the foundation of which are these deeply ingrained notions of what "economy" means (and you can read about that in those posts I've linked). At the very heart of this "economy" is the notion of technology, and the new. The new has come thick and fast in our world, and not a month goes by without us being bombarded with advertisements and images of what other people think is "good" for us. New knowledge is being successfully marketed and turned into products so that people can make money. In fact, it is this notion of new knowledge that the global North, and increasingly the large nations in the global South, thinks will get us out of this "sustainability" bind. But, with this new knowledge has come constantly increasing environmental degradation and biodiversity loss.


This world existed long before humans arrived on it. Epochs and eons have passed, species have gone extinct, and new forms of life have constantly evolved and appeared. A tree is the outcome of millions of years of slow and steady and constant evolution. A tree is a beautiful example of the outcome of a dynamic equilibrium; the tree has responded to changes happening so slowly that you cannot see them in happening now. These responses are delicately balanced, guaranteeing the survival of the tree. Such is the wisdom of from world. This wisdom stems from the dynamism of population and the unforgiving forces of air, land and water, driven by the sun. This is the wisdom that has led to the adaptation and evolution of rivers, lemurs, bats and snow leopards. With this wisdom, we realise that how these creatures have behaved and evolved has allowed them to fill a role and fill a place, just perfectly. This has inspired the greatest human thinking. Countless people have wondered about nature, and I hope we all have. The wisdom from the world has imprinted on Onwas and the Hadza, who have survived successfully for thousands of years, and are in tune with place and time. Yet with our definition of "economy," we have moved away from this natural wisdom, and are now desperately hoping we can get it back. But this wisdom exists, and is lying dormant. Our "economy" we feel is the best driver of human action, and is the only raison d'etre for human life. Some hope that the "economy," based on new knowledge, can lead to "sustainability." In effect, we have tried to, in a couple thousand years, tried to accomplish what it has taken everything else on Earth much longer to come to - a dynamic equilibrium, constantly evolving, yet inherently sustainable.

A natural course

While I was sitting in the lobby of a La Quinta Hotel in Canton, Ohio, last week, a debate between candidates running for a Senate seat in Florida was being broadcast on CNN. Marco Rubio, one of the candidates said, "The natural (emphasis added) state of the economy is to grow. If it is not growing, there is something hindering its growth, and we need to find out what that is and fix it."

This is in stark contradiction to what Professor Princen, in a panel discussion at the Law School last year, talked about. He laid out the idea of sufficiency. He gave the example of human growth and viewing the Earth from space. He said that humans only grow (generally) to a certain size, and over time, we go from being small children to fully grown adults. Our growth stops (maybe not girth); we are fully developed, maybe mentally and physically definitely. When we look at the Earth from space, what we see is not an overflowing, unbound teeming of life, but the finiteness of the space in which all life as we know exists - the thin layer of atmosphere, the brown of the land and the blue of oceans. Yet for some reason we think that within the finiteness of our Earth, we can grow, materially and monetarily, unboundedly.

A comment from my post On definitions and development said,

"Your comment on the meaning we put in the word "development" made me think of human development, as in a baby developing into a child, teenager, and then adult. That kind of development is following a line of growth that is already put into place, natural, and essential for that human to be able to explore and manifest all of his or her individual gifts, traits, and qualities. If only we thought of the world this way - development is not to get all we can out of it, but rather to cultivate it along the lines of what it is naturally made to be - and in so doing experience all the wonders it can produce - just as, I assume, a parent experiences when seeing a child enjoy and excel in one of his or her natural talents."

Is there a natural course of our existence, with all that we have invested in "humanity?"