How can we forget? Exxon Valdez and the Kirby Barge

"​The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting​," wrote Milan Kundera.  

Many people remain blind to or unaware of the power that must be challenged if we are going to revolutionize our economic and political systems to align their interests with justice and ecological integrity.  This is due partly because of a massive disinformation campaign by corporate and political elites, and partly because everything we do--heating our homes or transporting ourselves to work--is inextricably bound to these power structures that feed us toxic and dirty energy.  If this energy is in everything, we do not have a choice.  If we do not have a choice, we can slowly become blind to alternatives.    

It is sadly fitting that on the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska, we are dealing with another ship-caused oil spill,  this time in Houston and Galveston after a barge owned by Kirby Inland Marine Co. leaked bunker fuel into the Gulf of Mexico.  While the size of the spill is sixty times smaller than Exxon Valdez spill (11 million gallons from the Valdez vs 170,000 gallons from the barge), the spill could not have come at a worse time for the birds that are migrating to and from the area.  (News just in: We are also dealing with another oil spill in Lake Michigan.  The culprit, BP.)

Just when we thought that we learned lessons from Exxon Valdez, that the BP Deepwater Horizon spill was fading into distant memory, just when politicians (and some scientists, and, maybe even the President) delusionally support of the Keystone XL pipeline by saying that its ecological effects are minimal or could be mitigated, we are presented with not one, but two oil spills.  Perhaps this is a good thing.  Perhaps 

We need to use these events to keep ourselves and the masses from forgetting, from losing focus on the struggles that lie in every next step.  We need to use these events to (re)orient ourselves to strategically challenge and fight the culprits of socioecological havoc and injustice of all kinds.  

We cannot forget that challenging big oil means confronting hegemonic power.  We must use these events, as Naomi Klein says, to make the increasingly popular calls for fundamental and systemic reform powerful.    

What does peace mean to you?

While both require planning, perseverance, and a steadfastness, peace stands in stark contrast to war. Peace preserves, accepts, and cherishes differences. War obliterates them.

I cannot say whether or not we are closer to living a life of peace or not, particularly when it comes down to the different cultures that make up this human world. Peace is likely not going to come from a compromise of our differences. Indeed, if even Americans cannot resolve their differences through compromise, then how can we expect the Western world to compromise on their differences with people in the East? Peace will come only when we accept the differences that exist. But acceptance is only a first step. We must cherish the differences, while at the same time making an intense effort at truly understanding why people would resort to flying planes into buildings. And so today, a decade on, how has peace influenced the debate on conflict resolution?

It amazes me that we think humans are the greatest thing in the world, but when it comes down to our differences, we will resort to violence to make sure that power stays concentrated with certain people. There is a clear discrepancy, it seems then, between doing all that we can to keep humanity alive, and then resorting to violence to kill humans when we don't agree. Of course, someone that has power might say then that it is in the interest of the broader humanity that their power is being used as violence against others, but that is unjustifiable.

Just as with many of the most complicated issues of our time, words have jumbled meanings. War can happen in the name of peace, and people convince themselves that this must be true. But what about this statement?

Since the Second World War, more than four fifths of the people killed in war have been civilians.

And despite the grief that comes with the loss of human life, there are many more dimensions that we don't think about when we think of war, and the environment is one of those things. How is the Earth's capacity for life changed when we war? Asked another way, what do our differences mean for the environment? Well, differences themselves are borne of the environment. Cultures are outcomes of environmental conditions, different ones, all over the world. This cannot be denied. And so when we resort to violence, we not only kill people, but we disturb and disrupt the ecosystems that build a culture.

There are many historical cases in which the ecological degradation has been used as a weapon to wipe people out, to oppress. In a prescient piece The environmental damage of war in Iraq from The Guardian, written eight years ago before the war, the potential ecologically degrading outcomes of war in Iraq were explored in the context of previous wars, both in the Balkans and in the Middle East:

During the 1991 war devastating damage was done to the oil industry in Kuwait. Iraqi forces destroyed more than seven hundred oil wells in Kuwait, spilling sixty million barrels of oil. Over ten million cubic metres of soil was still contaminated as late as 1998. A major groundwater aquifer, two fifths of Kuwait's entire freshwater reserve, remains contaminated to this day. Ten million barrels or oil were released into the Gulf, affecting coastline along 1500 km and costing more than $700 million to clean up. During the nine months that the wells burned, average air temperatures fell by 10 degrees C as a result of reduced light from the sun. The costs of environmental damage were estimated at $40 billion. Estimates of the numbers likely to die as a result of the air pollution effects were put at about a thousand. Since Iraq has the second largest proven oil reserves of any nation on earth, the potential environmental damage caused by destruction of oil facilities during a new war must be enormous.

Other environmental effects of the 1991 Gulf War included destruction of sewage treatment plants in Kuwait, resulting in the discharge of over 50,000 cubic metres of raw sewage every day into Kuwait Bay.

Secondly, specific weapons likely to be used against Iraq will also create environmental damage. Top of the list of concern are depleted uranium (DU) projectiles.

Guess what? Depleted uranium has wreaked havoc in Iraq. Surprised?

When it comes to "just war theory", both jus in bello and jus ad bellum, how do we hold warring factions to these customs that make attempts at doing "minimal damage to the environment"? Is it even possible? The government and corporations we patronise deal with the issues of defense and war on a day-to-day basis. They in fact make a huge profit from war. The tentacles of war have weaved their way into each and every one of our communities, in all fifty states, from manufacturing to financing to politics to constitutional amendments. So how can we think about peace when war pays the bills?

There is a lack of peace within us. In fact, being peaceful and thoughtful is made to seem passive and subservient. When we find it tasteful to use guns against other people, and use guns as a sign of power and control, we will no doubt find it tasteful to use bombs to blow tops off of mountains to reach for coal - indeed this is a sign of power and control, not over people in this case, but the environment. What may be hindering our cause to find harmony and peace with nature is the violence we are able to perpetrate against our own kind. Or maybe our ability and willingness to perpetrate violence against nature, beautiful and delicate, is standing in the way of finding peace with our own kind. In the end, if we cannot find peace within us, we cannot find peace without us. 

I believe that if we find peace within ourselves and where we are, we can radically redefine notions of "progress" and "community." When I say peace, I in no way mean complacency. When I say peace, I mean that we recognise, understand and internalise our place in the world, our place in our communities, our place within our families, and our place in our own minds and bodies. Being at peace doesn't necessarily mean being satisfied with where we are ethically and morally; clearly, given our increasingly complex world, much of the complexity of which is man-made, there are ways in which we need to be redefining what it means to interact with each other, what it means to be a good citizen and a good steward. As a society as a whole, we are far from the ethical, moral and spiritual heights we need to be at to fully understand our impact on other humans, as well as the environment. There is no way we can envision a sustainable future when we find peace in violence. But if we can find peace in where we are materially and in physical place, we will have reached some level of peaceableness with the environment. Peace with the environment allows us the time to think and appreciate about its marvels, of which humans are one. Such a peace will not allow us to use violent force against any aspect of our environment, humans included. 

What does peace mean to you?

Are we fighting the right battles?

The impacts of human behaviour are felt throughout the natural world. If you just scratch the surface of the ecological issues facing us, you'll see that there are issues of all sorts regarding air and water and land degradation, biodiversity loss and persistent organic pollutants ending up in breast milk. Places that we have never even been to are now feeling the repercussions of our collective choices. And more likely than not, there are scores of environmentalists focusing on these issues. There are people that are trying to make sure that the air is clean, that our waters are unpolluted, that the soil isn't eroded. There are people trying to get certain plastics banned, and there are people that are trying to get coal-fired power plants reduce mercury emissions so that they don't end up in tuna that their children it.

As environmentalists, it seems that we're always fighting battles on many different fronts. Yet, as soon as one battle is won, the next one rears its head. There is no time to catch your breath. Oil spills are happening all the time. Once we've dealt with one toxic chemical being released into our waters, industry comes up with another chemical that we soon realise is toxic, too. Then we have to fight to ban that chemical. (Such is the same with human rights violations, which are, to me, the same issues as environmental issues.) There's something wrong here.


It seems as if we are tackling important issues (albeit slowly), but we are missing the most important point. We are saying, "Stop using chemical X," and then we quickly trust and hope that chemical Y that will end up in bottles will be benign. What we aren't doing with our approach, is taking down the systems of oppression, systems that will inevitably result in the constant abuse and mistreatment of our Earth and its people. I don't have to name these systems; it is plain to see what drives ecological degradation and injustice.

I believe that those who are vested in the current norms would have it no other way. They would rather have us fight these individual battles, have us compromise on these single issues, and not have criticise and reform what it is, truly, that results in the multitude of problems facing us. They are probably sitting in their offices and boardrooms, disconnected from the issues, not seeing the faces of people affected by an oil spill, not seeing the birds choking for air.

What we need is a radicalism that drives at the very heart of the crisis they face us. Our societies are founded on inequality and disrespect. We treat the Earth as inferior to ourselves, and we disrespect it. We "use" the Earth to provide us with rare earth metals for computers. We probably blasted a big hole in the ground to get to those ores. We treat those in "developing" countries, or those in places less powerful here in the US, those whose "natural resources" we're using here as inferior to us by disrespecting their lands and mountains and water.

The other day, I wrote a post titled I am not extreme. Indeed, our behaviours, different than those defined by the norms today, need to be those that would be normal in the world we want to live in - a world of equality, humility and respect towards everything. Yet that does not mean that our efforts today should not be viewed as different. In fact, our efforts and thoughts today do need to be radical. We cannot be satisfied with just keeping our oceans clean. If we commit ourselves to such a battle and see satisfaction in that, we will have allowed those that polluted the oceans ample opportunities to find new ways of degrading the land.

Our efforts and thoughts do need to be radical today, and we must reconcile this radicalism with the hope that there will be no need for such radicalism in our world. And we must always remember that we cannot hope for others to think and act radically unless we think so and do so ourselves.

Further thoughts on risk

I have written about risk previously (here, here, here), which stems primarily from our limited mental capacities and a carelessness toward potentially disastrous outcomes. People take risks only if the desirable outcome provides much more "good" for them than "bad." Yet the way we have structured our society is that the potential good, or profit, is always concentrated, and the risks are diffuse and spread out over everyone else. The way corporations and government is set up is that those that make the decisions are furthest away from the non-desirable outcomes of an action, i.e. the risks. For example, after the BP-Macondo Well oil spill, their ex-CEO Tony Hayward, although having been battered in public, got a huge severance package, and millions of shares in BP. What about the risks of oil and exploratory drilling? Well, the Gulf of Mexico and the people and nature there will be bearing the worst outcomes of risk for many years to come. In this case, the risks of drilling exploratory wells were made evident by the spill. But do you know what? Even after the most disastrous oil spill in US history, Transocean, the rig operator, gave bonuses to its top executives for its "best year for safety in the company's history." Here's what an article from The New York Times says...

"Transocean moved on Monday to contain the damage from its description of 2010 as a good safety year, which appeared in a securities filing on Friday disclosing that its top executives received about 45 percent of their targeted performance bonuses for the year. 

Ihab Toma, Transocean’s executive vice president of global business, said in a statement on Monday that 'some of the wording in our 2010 proxy statement may have been insensitive in light of the incident that claimed the lives of 11 exceptional men last year and we deeply regret any pain that it may have caused.'"

When a nation decides to go to war, the risks and non-desirable outcomes of such a decision - potentially increased taxes, deaths of men and women, ecological destruction - are thrust upon the people of the nation, particularly the nation in which the war is being fought in. Those that made the decision to go to war do not ever go to the front lines; they are probably playing golf while others risk their lives for someone else's ego.

We've all heard about the precautionary principle - if an action is potentially dangerous, don't do it. Such is the argument made to stop using the atmosphere, the land and the water as dumping grounds, but to no avail. But it isn't that we aren't implementing the precautionary principle at all. Derrick Jensen argues that the way the precautionary principle is currently implemented is that if any action harms the profits of corporations, that is deemed potentially dangerous, and we don't do it. What if we were to, as Jensen suggests, move the burden of the risk is moved from everyone else to the one who is actually making a profit? People may argue that we have laws in place that "hold people accountable for their actions." Well, it is never the richest or most powerful person that gets into trouble. The less well off does, however. In fact, many leaders have immunity, and that immunity exists because no one would be willing to make decisions that are risky unless the immunity existed.

The Gulf Between Us

It is fair to say that I am pissed for the second time that I can remember. Yesterday, I read Terry Tempest Williams' horrifying essay, The Gulf Between Us, which was published in the current issue of Orion Magazine. Instead of writing about "the facts" and "what we've been told" of the BP-Macondo Gulf Oil Spill, she centres her writing around the personal stories of people affected by the spill, from Louisiana to Florida. Accompanied by stunningly, beautifully sad images by J Henry Fair (you must click on this link and watch and listen to the slideshow), she witnesses and listens to people whose lives have been turned upside down because of the spill. She talks about people being mistreated, bullied and threatened by local government and BP for speaking up, the untold stories of hundreds and thousands of dolphins, whales, birds and sea turtles killed because of the spill - because of oil being set alight on the blue surface of the ocean, and the mainstream media's ineptitude and thoughtlessness in covering the spill. This post is about BP, Corexit (the dispersant used to "get rid of the oil"), perceptions of the problem, and the ineptitude of people we elect to office.

As many of you might be constantly thinking, it is so unfortunate what we are doing to other people, animals, plants, and ecosystems.We would think that environmental disasters and suffering can change human perception of problems, and mobilise people to rid our world of the fundamentals that cause these problems. Unfortunately, maybe only war (the kind in which people use missiles and guns to kill other people) is something that can mobilise people consistently today.

It seemed to me that addressing issues like climate change and sustainability would inherently be a difficult task because of the almost imperceptible changes that point to problems in our society. It seemed that it would take something visceral and explosive to mobilise people. That explosive event, for our generation, was the BP-Macondo Oil Spill (I don't mean to discount the countless environmental+human disasters that take place every day in South America and Africa and Asia, but the BP Spill was one of the only events covered by media from all over the world in which the environmental+human impacts of the spill were focused on. The Chilean miners being trapped underground was portrayed as more of an issue of the bravery and courage of humans, a redemptive story, rather than one of asking the question - Why were they trapped down there anyway?). Unfortunately, it seems to me like the opportunity to truly get people acting has come and gone. The Obama Administration's tepid response along with an almost collusion-like effort between regulatory agencies like the EPA and companies like BP to make it seem like the efforts expended were yielding incredible results, and their success in keeping personal accounts of the Spill out of the minds of people has lost us a chance to forge true change. In the end, issues will be settled in the courts, with Judge Carl Barbier, who will oversee about 300 lawsuits, owning corporate bonds in Halliburton and Transocean, two of the other defendants along with BP. People will be paid off, settlements will be made, and "the most complex litigation" in US history will soon be forgotten.

Yet lives, sentient and non-sentient, torn apart because of the spill cannot be easily mended together by money. Who will be there to defend the dolphins, who are choking at the surface? Apparently, dolphins have been illegally killed and have either been trucked down to Mexico to serve as food or dumped in landfills. Corexit ("corrects it, get it?"), which has been dumped by planes over land and water during the night, will continue to have toxic impacts on people and animals, yet it seems like it fulfilled its intended purpose perfectly - as long as the oil is not on the surface, as long it is spread vertically in the water column, who cares? Corexit contains 2-butoxyethanol (yes, carcinogenic) and a "proprietary organic sulfonate." I guess people have no right to know what they are breathing in and drinking, in the name of intellectual property.

I was talking to Kevin last night about the outcome of the midterm elections. Democrat or Republican, I couldn't care less for most of them in the Congress or White House. All of them need to be kicked out, and some of them need to be sent to jail. Their generation is one of the major contributors to the problems we face today - war, terrorism, environmental disaster and poor healthcare - we need to be the ones that show no mercy for their vested interests, and create what Laura Smith calls "durable change."


 I constantly think back to Graham's comment in September, "We've generated a lot of "knowledge" in the past two hundred years, but we've gained very little wisdom." Our problems are not being effectively addressed by technocrats and lifelong academics. It seems like Margaret agrees - "“We might not be the most educated people schoolwise, but we know more about nature than any PhD. We know. We know what’s goin’ on.”