Of Ghost Towns and Dinosaurs and Oil Spills, oh sigh...

The cliff dwellings and kivas of the Anasazi indians in the American desert southwest were abandoned virtually overnight.  The same is true of the villages and temples of the Maya in the Yucatan and throughout Central America. 

There are several other examples of seemingly instantaneous mass exodus throughout human history, but most modern people pay little attention to these stories.  “It can’t happen here,” you see.   That’s the sort of thing that happens to ancient pagan societies that don’t have cars, and toasters, and digital watches.

Life on Earth is not going to end any time soon, we want to start with that caveat.  But life as we have known it is soon going to be a distant memory; we are witnessing a mass extinction event, but no one in an official capacity has yet caught on to that fact.

There is now strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that the geyser of oil spewing from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico cannot be capped.  There are multiple leaks below the floor of the ocean, and stopping the flow where we currently see it would only cause more oil to flow from the places we can’t see.  British Petroleum has shifted their long-term strategic thinking to capturing as much of the oil as they can, rather than attempting to stop the flow.  Their efforts to stop the flow now appear to be token efforts designed to show the world that “Hey, yeah, we’re doing all we can!”

As an example, the relief wells which BP says they hope to complete drilling sometime later this summer are expected to have a roughly 1 in 6 chance each of working.  So you would expect them to drill at least 6 such relief wells, right?  Guess again.  They are drilling two.  There are only a handful of possible explanations, none of which are very encouraging. 

The most likely scenario is that the entire reservoir tapped by this well is going to find its way into the ocean; some percentage of it – probably a relatively small percentage of it – will be captured by BP.

The outpouring of anger at both BP and the U.S. government, however, is misdirected.  Yes, BP engaged in irresponsible and probably even criminal behavior, and yes, the federal government did not immediately take an active role in disaster mitigation, but there are several reasons why anger at this point is an exercise in self-delusion:

• There is nothing either BP or the federal government can do to prevent catastrophic, wide-spread damage.  Boons and barriers which Gulf Coast residents say should have been put in place months ago are, to be blunt, a stupid idea.  The amount of coastline to be covered, to start with, is impossibly large; stemming the tide of oil with any kind of manmade structure is very much akin to the little boy sticking his finger in the dike; it won’t work.  Going to the moon was child’s play in comparison.
  
  
• Further, protecting the shoreline misses the real danger, anyway.  Damage to marshes and tidal flats will be bad, but not appreciably worse than what was already happening due to low-level toxicity which occurs in highly drilled areas even without a spill.  James Carville may be under the deluded impression that wetlands improvements would be a reasonable response, but even though they are necessary, they cannot repair the damage done by this oil spill. 
  
  
• The real damage caused by the BP well leak is below the surface of the Gulf, not on the shoreline.  Coral reefs will die, whole colonies of whales will die, several species of turtles face near-certain extinction, numerous migratory fish populations will be dramatically excised, shellfish and shrimp will be eradicated.  The majority of the species on our planet do not live on shore; they live in the ocean. 
  
  Not on the ocean, in it.  Below the surface, which Joe NASCAR fan in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama does not seem to care about.  Yet.  They will learn their folly soon enough.  The usual response to oil spills is the spread of "boon", devices which trap the surface level oil and allow it to be collected and burned; when the spill is a mile below the surface, surface level oil is almost entirely irrelevant; the species who are in trouble are being poisoned long before the oil reaches -or doesn't reach- the beach.  The death of these species we never see in our daily lives will reshape the world we live in, and for some of us, it will not be pretty.
  
  
• The time to be angry was not after the oil started spewing from the Gulf floor.  The time to be angry was when offshore drilling was first approved.  The only reason no one was angry was because our nation is addicted to oil.  This is not the government’s fault, nor is it BP’s fault.  It is the fault of the American consumer.  We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.  The glorification of the internal combustion engine (see earlier NASCAR reference) is directly related to the current mess, and while our government has, so far, not done anything to intervene, the responsibility for our disgraceful continuation of self-destructive behavior lies on our own shoulders.

Talk about what the government or BP should do to clean up the mess is beside the point – the mess was inevitable, just as for a drug or alcohol addict, the disintegration of their personal relationships is inevitable.  There is no “fixing” the relationships without getting off the addictive substances.  There is no “fixing” the Gulf without ending all consumption of oil.  There may not be any “fixing” of the Gulf anyway, but certainly it won’t be fixed so long as there is a single drilling platform there.

Our government’s coziness with big oil is a direct result of our public coziness with big oil.  Democratic and Republican administrations alike have been beholden to corporate petrochemical interests for the better part of a century now; why did anyone think this was going to change overnight?  Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has sold his soul to oil; why single him out, though?   He is only the most recent in a very, very long line of politicians who came to power funded by the pusher-class.  Oil executives are powerful precisely because the American public has wanted them to be powerful for as long as anyone can remember.

So how bad is this event likely to be, long term, really?  Isn’t “extinction level event” a bunch of hyperbole?

No, it is not hyperbole.  There are 28 different species of marine mammals known to occur in the Gulf of Mexico. 

All 28 are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), and six are also listed as endangered species under the Endangered Species Act (Sperm, Sei, Fin, Blue Humpback and North Atlantic Right Whales).  There is a resident population of female sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico, and whales with calves are sighted frequently.

In addition, there is a long list of threatened and endangered reptiles and fish:  Kemp’s Ridley, Hawksbill, Green, Loggerhead and Leatherback sea turtles, Gulf Sturgeon, and Smalltooth Sawfish.  And then there are the “Species of Concern” who will also face potential extinction:  Alabama Shad, Dusky Shark, Key silverside, Largetooth Sawfish, Mangrove Rivulus, Nassau Grouper, Night Shark, Opossum Pipefish, Saltmarsh Topminnow, Speckled Hind, Sand Tiger Shark, Warsaw Grouper, and White Marlin.

All of that is not even mentioning the supposedly healthy populations which we will later discover were not so healthy after all.  Fish like the Blufin Tuna, which is a migratory fish, or several varieties of gulf shrimp, shellfish, and crab and lobster.

“But just because there’s oil doesn’t mean they’ll go extinct, right?”  Wrong.  Small changes to habitat can lead to catastrophic changes in species populations.  Why would a catastrophic change to habitat not have a catastrophic change in population?  If you don’t yet understand the scope of what is happening, Myrtle asks that you pull your head out, por favor.

So what happens to an ocean which has lost its native flora and fauna?  Maybe the listed species won’t return, but something will live there, right?  Not necessarily, and probably not in our lifetimes.  There will unquestionably be massive algal blooms and large populations of bacteria colonies due to the high hydrocarbon content of the water; oil companies even utilize oil-munching bacteria as part of their supposed “clean up” repertoire.

But algae and bacteria don’t just consume oil; they also consume oxygen.  And fish, turtles, and whales all need to swim in oxygenated water.  No oxygen at sea equals a “dead zone”.  As its name implies, nothing lives in a dead zone.  And dead zones don’t become live zones for a very, very long time, not until changes in chemistry and ocean currents cause oxygen to no longer be sucked out of the water before it can be used by aerobic organisms.

Which brings us back to the Anasazi and the Maya.  If you have never been to Mesa Verde in Colorado, let us recommend it.  This is a beautifully maintained national park, and the ruins of the cliff dwellings are quite lovely in addition to being fascinating.  The main thing, though, is to notice how quiet they are.  We don’t think of them as “ancient ruins”, we think of them as ghost towns.

There may soon be a whole host of new ghost towns, from the Yucatan in Mexico, to Port Isabell in Texas, to Pensacola and Tampa Bay in Florida.  Any of the communities in-between who depend on fishing or tourism may soon be abandoned, and it may happen so quickly that future archaeologists will say it happened “virtually overnight”.  It will be unfathomable to many that they have to leave towns they have lived in for generations; that won’t change the facts, however.  If you can’t make a living there, you can’t live there.  QED.

Life will go on, but not as we know it.  If we want to prevent future disasters, don’t go looking for “safer drilling methods”, and ask the government to take giant centrifuges and trash bags to the beach.  It’s too late to save the Gulf.  But if we stop oil consumption cold-turkey, we may just be able to save ourselves.

Happy farming!