A Hole in the World

by Naomi Klein

The Nation

June 24, 2010   
(This article appeared in the July 12, 2010
edition of The Nation.)

http://www.thenation.com/article/36608/hole-world

Everyone gathered for the town hall meeting had been
repeatedly instructed to show civility to the gentlemen from
BP and the federal government. These fine folks had made
time in their busy schedules to come to a school gymnasium
on a Tuesday night in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, one of
many coastal communities where brown poison was slithering
through the marshes, part of what has come to be described
as the largest environmental disaster in US history.

"Speak to others the way you would want to be spoken to,"
the chair of the meeting pleaded one last time before
opening the floor for questions.

And for a while the crowd, mostly made up of fishing
families, showed remarkable restraint. They listened
patiently to Larry Thomas, a genial BP public relations
flack, as he told them that he was committed to "doing
better" to process their claims for lost revenue-then passed
all the details off to a markedly less friendly
subcontractor. They heard out the suit from the
Environmental Protection Agency as he informed them that,
contrary to what they had read about the lack of testing and
the product being banned in Britain, the chemical dispersant
being sprayed on the oil was really perfectly safe.

But patience started running out by the third time Ed
Stanton, a Coast Guard captain, took to the podium to
reassure them that "the Coast Guard intends to make sure
that BP cleans it up."

"Put it in writing!" someone shouted out. By now the air-
conditioning had shut itself off and the coolers of
Budweiser were running low. A shrimper named Matt O'Brien
approached the mic. "We don't need to hear this anymore," he
declared, hands on hips. It didn't matter what assurances
they were offered because, he explained, "we just don't
trust you guys!" And with that, such a loud cheer rose up
from the bleachers you'd have thought the Oilers (the
school's unfortunate name for its sports teams) had scored a
touchdown.

The showdown was cathartic, if nothing else. For weeks
residents had been subjected to a barrage of pep talks and
extravagant promises coming from Washington, Houston and
London. Every time they turned on their TVs, there was the
BP boss, Tony Hayward, offering his solemn word that he
would "make it right." Or else it was President Obama
expressing his absolute confidence that his administration
would "leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was
before," that he was "making sure" it "comes back even
stronger than it was before this crisis."

It all sounded great. But for people whose livelihoods put
them in intimate contact with the delicate chemistry of the
wetlands, it also sounded absurd. Once the oil coats the
base of the marsh grass, as it had already done just a few
miles away, no miracle machine or chemical concoction could
safely get it out. You can skim oil off the surface of open
water, and you can rake it off a sandy beach, but an oiled
marsh just sits there, slowly dying. The larvae of countless
species for which the marsh is a spawning ground-shrimp,
crab, oysters and fin fish-will be poisoned.

It was already happening. Earlier that day, I traveled
through nearby marshes in a shallow-water boat. Fish were
jumping in waters encircled by white boom, the strips of
thick cotton and mesh BP is using to soak up the oil. The
circle of fouled material seemed to be tightening around the
fish like a noose. Nearby, a red-winged blackbird perched
atop a seven-foot blade of oil-contaminated marsh grass.
Death was creeping up the cane; the small bird may as well
have been standing on a lighted stick of dynamite.

And then there is the grass itself, or the Roseau cane, as
the tall, sharp blades are called. If oil seeps deeply
enough into the marsh, it will not only kill the grass above
ground but also the roots. Those roots are what hold the
marsh together, keeping bright-green land from collapsing
into the Mississippi River Delta and the Gulf of Mexico. So
not only do places like Plaquemines Parish stand to lose
their fisheries, but also much of the physical barrier that
lessens the intensity of fierce storms like Hurricane
Katrina. Which could mean losing everything.

How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be
"restored and made whole," as Obama's interior secretary
pledged it would be? It's not at all clear that such a thing
is even possible, at least not in a time frame we can easily
wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet to
recover fully from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, and some
species of fish never returned. Government scientists
estimate that as much as a Valdez-worth of oil may be
entering the Gulf Coast waters every four days. An even
worse prognosis emerges from the 1991 Gulf War spill, when
an estimated 11 million barrels of oil were dumped into the
Persian Gulf-the largest spill ever. It's not a perfect
comparison, since so little cleanup was done, but according
to a study conducted twelve years after the disaster in the
Persian Gulf, nearly 90 percent of the impacted muddy salt
marshes and mangroves were still profoundly damaged.

We do know this: far from being "made whole," the Gulf
Coast, more than likely, will be diminished. Its rich waters
and crowded skies will be less alive than they are today.
The physical space many communities occupy on the map will
also shrink, thanks to erosion. And the coast's legendary
culture will contract and wither. The fishing families up
and down the coast do not just gather food, after all. They
hold up an intricate network that includes family tradition,
cuisine, music, art and endangered languages-much like the
roots of grass holding up the land in the marsh. Without
fishing, these unique cultures lose their root system, the
very ground on which they stand. (BP, for its part, is well
aware of the limits of recovery. The company's "Gulf of
Mexico Regional Oil Spill Response Plan" specifically
instructs officials not to make "promises that property,
ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal." Which
is no doubt why its officials consistently favor folksy
terms like "make it right.")

If Katrina pulled back the curtain on racism, the BP
disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more
hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us
have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural
forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the
hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order brown
pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks).
No amount of money-not BP's recently pledged $20 billion,
not $100 billion-can replace a culture that has lost its
roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have
yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people
whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are
losing their illusions fast.

"Everything is dying," a woman said as the town hall meeting
was coming to a close. "How can you honestly tell us that
our gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one
of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to
our gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like
you know, when you don't know."

This Gulf Coast crisis is about many things-corruption,
deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath
it all, it's about this: our culture's dangerous claim to
have such complete understanding and command over nature
that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with
minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. As the
BP disaster has revealed, nature is never as predictable as
the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models
imagine. During recent Congressional testimony, Hayward
said, "The best minds and the deepest expertise are being
brought to bear" on the crisis, and that "with the possible
exception of the space program in the 1960s, it is difficult
to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically
proficient team in one place in peacetime." And yet, in the
face of what geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as
"Pandora's well," they are like the men at the front of that
gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don't know.

BP's Mission Statement

In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a
machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent
conceit. In her groundbreaking 1980 book The Death of
Nature, environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded
readers that until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually
taking the form of a mother. Europeans-like indigenous
people the world over-believed the planet to be a living
organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful
tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against
actions that would deform and desecrate "the mother,"
including mining.

The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no
means all) of nature's mysteries during the Scientific
Revolution of the 1600s. With nature now cast as a machine,
devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could be
dammed, extracted and remade with impunity. Nature still
sometimes appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and
subdued. In 1623 Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new
ethos when he wrote in De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum
that nature is to be "put in constraint, molded, and made as
it were new by art and the hand of man."

Those words may as well have been BP's corporate mission
statement. Boldly inhabiting what the company called "the
energy frontier," it dabbled in synthesizing methane-
producing microbes and announced that "a new area of
investigation" would be geo-engineering. And it bragged
that, at its Tiber prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, it had
"the deepest well ever drilled by the oil and gas industry"-
as deep under the ocean floor as jets fly overhead.

Imagining and preparing for what would happen if these
experiments went wrong occupied precious little space in the
corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after the
Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, the company had no systems
in place to respond effectively. Explaining why it did not
have even the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome
waiting to be activated onshore, BP spokesman Steve Rinehart
said, "I don't think anybody foresaw the circumstance that
we're faced with now." Apparently, it "seemed inconceivable"
that the blowout preventer would ever fail-so why prepare?

This refusal to contemplate failure clearly came straight
from the top. A year ago Hayward told a group of graduate
students at Stanford University that he has a plaque on his
desk that reads, "If you knew you could not fail, what would
you try?" Far from being a benign inspirational slogan, this
is actually an accurate description of how BP and its
competitors behave in the real world. In recent hearings on
Capitol Hill, Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts grilled
representatives from the top oil and gas companies on the
ways they had allocated resources. Over three years, they
had spent "$39 billion to explore for new oil and gas. Yet
the average investment in research and development for
safety, accident prevention and spill response was a paltry
$20 million a year."

These priorities go a long way toward explaining why the
"Initial Exploration Plan" BP submitted to the government
for the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well reads like a Greek
tragedy about human hubris. The phrase "little risk" appears
five times. Even if there is a spill, BP confidently
predicts that, thanks to "proven equipment and technology,"
adverse effects will be minimal. Presenting nature as a
predictable and agreeable junior partner (or perhaps
subcontractor), the report cheerfully explains that should a
spill occur, "Currents and microbial degradation would
remove the oil from the water column or dilute the
constituents to background levels." The effects on fish,
meanwhile, "would likely be sublethal" because of "the
capability of adult fish and shellfish to avoid a spill
[and] to metabolise hydrocarbons." (In BP's telling, rather
than a dire threat, a spill emerges as an all-you-can-eat
buffet for aquatic life.)

Best of all, should a major spill occur, there is apparently
"little risk of contact or impact to the coastline" because
of the company's projected speedy response (!) and "the
distance [from the rig] to shore"-about forty-eight miles.
This is the most astonishing claim of all. In a gulf that
often sees winds of more than forty miles an hour, not to
mention hurricanes, BP had so little respect for the ocean's
capacity to ebb and flow, surge and heave, that it did not
think oil could make a paltry forty-eight-mile trip. (In
mid-June a shard of the exploded Deepwater Horizon showed up
on a beach in Florida, 190 miles away.)

None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however,
had BP not been making its predictions to a political class
eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some,
like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others.
The Alaska senator was so awe-struck by the industry's four-
dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea
drilling to have reached the very height of controlled
artificiality. "It's better than Disneyland in terms of how
you can take technologies and go after a resource that is
thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound
way," she told the Senate Energy Committee just seven months
ago.

Drilling without thinking has, of course, been Republican
Party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to
unprecedented heights, conservative leader Newt Gingrich
unveiled the slogan "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less"-with
an emphasis on the Now. The wildly popular campaign was a
cry against caution, against study, against measured action.
In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and
gas might be-locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge or deep offshore-was a surefire way
to lower the price at the pump, create jobs and kick Arab
ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring
about the environment was for sissies: as Senator Mitch
McConnell put it, "In Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana
and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty." By the time the
infamous "Drill, Baby, Drill" Republican National Convention
rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-
made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the
convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.

Obama eventually gave in, as he invariably does. With cosmic
bad timing, just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon
blew up, the president announced he would open up previously
protected parts of the country to offshore drilling. The
practice was not as risky as he had thought, he explained.
"Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are
technologically very advanced." That wasn't enough for Sarah
Palin, who sneered at the Obama administration's plans to
conduct more studies before drilling in some areas. "My
goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death,"
she told the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in
New Orleans, just eleven days before the blowout. "Let's
drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!" And there was
much rejoicing.

In his Congressional testimony, Hayward said, "We and the
entire industry will learn from this terrible event." And
one might well imagine that a catastrophe of this magnitude
would indeed instill in BP executives and the "Drill Now"
crowd a new sense of humility. There are, however, no signs
that this is the case. The response to the disaster-
corporate and governmental-has been rife with precisely the
brand of arrogance and overly sunny predictions that created
the disaster in the first place.

The ocean is big; it can take it, we heard from Hayward in
the early days, while spokesman John Curry insisted that
hungry microbes would consume whatever oil was in the water
system because "nature has a way of helping the situation."
But nature has not been playing along. The deep-sea gusher
has busted out all of BP's top hats, containment domes and
junk shots. The ocean's winds and currents have made a
mockery of the lightweight booms BP has laid out to absorb
the oil. "We told them," says Byron Encalade, president of
the Louisiana Oysters Association. "The oil's gonna go over
the booms or underneath the bottom." Indeed it did. Marine
biologist Rick Steiner, who has been following the cleanup
closely, estimates that "70 percent or 80 percent of the
booms are doing absolutely nothing at all."

And then there are the controversial chemical dispersants:
more than 1.3 million gallons dumped with the company's
trademark "What could go wrong?" attitude. As the angry
residents at the Plaquemines Parish town hall pointed out,
few tests had been conducted, and there is scant research
about what this unprecedented amount of dispersed oil will
do to marine life. Nor is there a way to clean up the toxic
mixture of oil and chemicals below the surface. Yes, fast-
multiplying microbes do devour underwater oil-but in the
process they also absorb the water's oxygen, creating a new
threat to marine life.

BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent
unflattering images of oil-covered beaches and birds from
escaping the disaster zone. When I was on the water with a
TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat,
whose captain asked, "Y'all work for BP?" When we said no,
the response-in the open ocean-was, "You can't be here
then." But of course these heavy-handed tactics, like all
the others, have failed. There is simply too much oil in too
many places. "You cannot tell God's air where to flow and
go, and you can't tell water where to flow and go," I was
told by Debra Ramirez. It was a lesson she had learned from
living in Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by fourteen
emissions-spewing petrochemical plants, and watching illness
spread from neighbor to neighbor.

Human limitation has been the one constant of this
catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how
much oil is flowing or when it will stop. The company's
claim that it will complete relief wells by the end of
August-repeated by Obama in his June 15 Oval Office address-
is seen by many scientists as a bluff. The procedure is
risky and could fail, and there is a real possibility that
the oil could continue to leak for years.

The flow of denial shows no sign of abating either.
Louisiana politicians indignantly oppose Obama's temporary
freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing him of killing the
one big industry left standing now that fishing and tourism
are in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that "no human
endeavor is ever without risk," while Texas Republican
Congressman John Culberson described the disaster as a
"statistical anomaly." By far the most sociopathic reaction,
however, comes from veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn
King: rather than turning away from big engineering risks,
we should pause in "wonder that we can build machines so
remarkable that they can lift the lid off the underworld."

Make the Bleeding Stop

Thankfully, many others are taking a different lesson from
the disaster, standing not in wonder at humanity's power to
reshape nature but at our powerlessness to cope with the
fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else,
too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the
ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken
machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; it is
part of us. And thanks to BP's live camera feed, we can all
watch the Earth's guts gush forth, in real time, twenty-four
hours a day.

John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper
Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to fly
over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After
filming the thick red streaks of oil that the Coast Guard
politely refers to as "rainbow sheen," he observed what many
had felt: "The gulf seems to be bleeding." This imagery
comes up again and again. Monique Harden, an environmental
rights lawyer in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster
an "oil spill" and instead says, "We are hemorrhaging."
Others speak of the need to "make the bleeding stop." And I
was personally struck, flying with the Coast Guard over the
stretch of ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank, that the
swirling shapes the oil made in the ocean waves looked
remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping for
air, eyes staring upward, a prehistoric bird. Messages from
the deep.

This is surely the most surprising twist in the Gulf Coast
saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the
Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared
dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is
coming alive.

Following the oil's progress through the ecosystem offers a
kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day we learn
more about how what seems to be a terrible problem in one
part of the world radiates out in ways most of us could
never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could
reach Cuba-then Europe. Next we hear that fishermen all the
way up the Atlantic in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are
worried because the bluefin tuna they catch are born
thousands of miles away in those oil-stained gulf waters.
And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf Coast wetlands
are the equivalent of a busy airport hub-everyone seems to
have a stopover: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75
percent of all migratory US waterfowl.

It's one thing to be told by an incomprehensible chaos
theorist that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can
set off a tornado in Texas. It's another to watch chaos
theory unfold before your eyes. Carolyn Merchant puts the
lesson like this: "The problem as BP has tragically and
belatedly discovered is that nature as an active force
cannot be so confined." Predictable outcomes are unusual
within ecological systems, while "unpredictable, chaotic
events [are] usual." Just in case we still didn't get it, a
bolt of lightning recently struck a BP ship like an
exclamation point, forcing it to temporarily suspend its
containment efforts. And don't even mention what a hurricane
will do to BP's toxic soup.

There is, it must be stressed, something perverse about this
particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans
learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it
seems we are all learning about nature's circulatory systems
by poisoning them.

In the late '90s an isolated indigenous group in Colombia
captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque
conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud
forests, the U'wa let it be known that if Occidental
Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their
territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping
off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of
ruiria, "the blood of Mother Earth." They believe that all
life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out
the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually
withdrew from the region, saying there wasn't as much oil as
it had previously thought.)

Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and
spirits living in the natural world-in rocks, mountains,
glaciers, forests-as did European culture before the
Scientific Revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at
Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a
practical purpose. Calling the Earth "sacred" is another way
of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully
comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we
proceed with caution. Even awe.

If we are absorbing this lesson at long last, the
implications could be profound. Public support for increased
offshore drilling is down 22 percent from the peak of the
"Drill Now" frenzy. The issue is not dead, however: it is
only a matter of time before the Obama administration
announces that, thanks to ingenious new technology and tough
new regulations, it is perfectly safe to drill in the deep
sea, even in the Arctic, where an under-ice cleanup would be
infinitely more complex than the one under way in the gulf.
But perhaps this time we won't be so easily reassured, so
quick to gamble with the few remaining protected havens.

The same goes for geo-engineering. As climate change
negotiations wear on, we should be ready to hear more from
Steven Koonin, Obama's under secretary of energy for
science. He is one of the leading proponents of the idea
that climate change can be combated with techno tricks like
releasing sulfate and aluminum particles into the
atmosphere-and of course it's all perfectly safe, just like
Disneyland! He also happens to be BP's former chief
scientist, the man who just fifteen months ago was
overseeing the technology behind BP's supposedly safe charge
into deepwater drilling. Maybe this time we will opt not to
let the good doctor experiment with the physics and
chemistry of the Earth and choose instead to reduce our
consumption and shift to renewable energies, which have the
virtue that, when they fail, they fail small. As comedian
Bill Maher put it, "You know what happens when windmills
collapse into the sea? A splash."

The most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be
not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like
wind but a full embrace of the precautionary principle of
science. The mirror opposite of Hayward's "If you knew you
could not fail" credo, the precautionary principle holds
that "when an activity raises threats of harm to the
environment or human health" we tread carefully, as if
failure were possible, even likely. Perhaps we can even get
Hayward a new desk plaque to contemplate as he signs
compensation checks. "You act like you know, but you don't
know."

[Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated
columnist, fellow at The Nation Institute and author of the
international and New York Times bestseller The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Published
worldwide in September 2007, The Shock Doctrine is slated to
be translated into seventeen languages to date.  She is a
former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and
holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University
of King's College, Nova Scotia.]

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Video - In Deep Water: A Way of Life in Peril
http://www.thenation.com/video/36621/deep-water-way-life-peril

==========

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