A Tragedy of Oceanic Proportions
If we don’t come to our senses and find the right balance fairly soon, nature is likely to do it for us.
By now, almost everyone is familiar with the tragic oil spill in the gulf waters off the southern border of the United States. The factual events of the disaster are tragic enough. On April 20, methane gas shooting up the drill column under high pressure ignited, causing an explosion and raging fire that eventually caused the Deepwater Horizon oil platform to sink. Eleven workers have never been found and are presumed dead. And, with every passing day since the initial explosion, estimates have increased of the amount of oil and gas pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, with no immediate end in sight.
It’s still far too early to get an accurate picture of the likely toll this disaster will take on the environment. Some of the most pristine beaches and the most delicate wetland habitats in the world are under threat. Industries dependent on sea life have been decimated and might never fully recover. So, without any doubt, this is truly a tragedy of oceanic proportions.
As tragic as the facts of the oil spill are, the greater tragedy might lie in the lessons we have long failed to learn that likely played some roles in the cause of the disaster as well as the lessons we still might not be learning as a result of the disaster.
Following the energy crisis in the 70s, the United States sought to bring government efforts to regulate the nuclear industry and efforts to find innovative energy solutions for the future under one cabinet-level entity, which resulted in the creation of the Department of Energy. Almost 40 years and many millions of dollars later, the American public hears essentially the same old tired lines from politicians and industry spokespersons alike: we need to temporarily expand our mining of traditional energy sources while we seek to develop more eco-friendly and renewable new sources. The foolhardiness of trusting in bureaucratic solutions as well as a monumental lack of commitment from industry and the public alike have combined to place and keep us in the deep energy rut in which we presently find ourselves. This, I believe, is the greatest tragedy of all.
Almost every period of economic hardship in recent history has been rooted, at least in part, by the lack of cheap, reliable energy. The industrialized world depends on energy. And it’s not that we don’t have the talent or the resources to address our energy problems. What we lack is the will to modify our lifestyles and to reach a consensus about the balance we really need to strike. And it’s hard to have an honest discussion or debate about the most essential issues we need to resolve because every stakeholder guards their individual interests and every ideological camp has their unwavering biases and causes célèbres.
In the end, nature is the great equalizer and will have the final say. All of our actions have consequences, especially our actions that impact the environment. If we don’t come to our senses and find the right balance fairly soon, nature is likely to do it for us, and it probably won’t be pretty.
3 Responses (One Discussion Thread) to “A Tragedy of Oceanic Proportions”
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Relying on non-renewables is just plain dumb. The alternative technology is available.
It is not nature that is the problem but all the all too human economy with vested interests and devaluing of the environment.
One hopeful development is the ‘cradle to cradle’ approach of McDonough and Braungart:
http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
Well said, Evan! I think many folks are stuck in the rut of just trying to keep their heads above water and the erroneous thinking that they really can’t make much of a difference. But in reality, we can all do our part, and every little bit helps.
Switching over to renewable sources of energy is not only environmentally and economically smart, it’s politically smart! Some of the most repressive and hostile regimes on the planet have no incentive to consider change because of the dollars that flow in every day from industrialized countries dependent upon their most abundant natural resource. So, our current ways are not just dumb, they’re dumb, dumb, dumb!
Thank you for raising this topic. My comment won’t be cheerful at all, but it is as honest a statement as I can put together.
What I find most frightening is the denial, the complete lack of any technological or scientific ability to deal with this situation. We are seeing what happens when private and public policy, and regulation, are dominated by wishful-thinking artists, who essentially decree that nothing like this could ever happen…
Why not? Not for any real reason. Just because they didn’t want it to. Because they didn’t feel like making the effort to think about it, or its consequences, or do the work involved in developing a competent, realistic assessment and response; or to spend the relatively minuscule amounts needed to prevent easily foreseeable catastrophes.
Of course, there were – and are – plenty people who know better. In our current social and economic climate, these people are rapidly marginalized, tagged as “negative”, branded as troublemakers and whistleblowers. I have worked in these environments; I have seen what happens to problemsolvers in organizations that refuse to face the fact that there are ever problems.
Consider the engineer at Morton Thiokol who tried, desperately, to get NASA to delay a Shuttle launch… because he knew the O-rings on the solid booster weren’t designed to handle the existing weather conditions. He could not make himself heard, because the people he was talking to refused to hear. Instead, he was mocked, and he was fired, and the people he tried to warn then went ahead with the launch as planned; and that was the end of Challenger and all aboard her.
We learned nothing then; Columbia and her astronauts were destroyed in 2003 by the very same disdain for reality that brought Challenger down in 1986.
We will learn nothing now unless, and until, we look at the underlying causes of this disaster.
Character disorders are contagious. They spread, like any virus, through entire organizations. They kill, and when they do, they almost always take out innocent bystanders – in this case, horrific numbers of innocent bystanders, innumerable species of them, indiscriminately, within a massive radius.
Sooner or later, reality can no longer be ignored, and it tends to get our attention in drastic ways.