A Gush of Optimism

In 2005, I had enough of an instinct that Katrina was going to be huge, deadly disaster that I wrote a post here a couple of days before outlining my sense that the administration was behaving far too lazily, that real damage was going to hit a hugely populated area, and that the Armed Forces should be mobilized, because it might require martial law.  I deleted it, thinking it was too much guesswork, too easy to underestimate even the Bush Administration.

I bring that up only to introduce that instinct is telling me that the Gulf Oil Spill, now spewing out an Exxon Valdez every five days, is going to bury the Gulf - if not kill it forever. This is going to be a environmental disaster incomparable in recent U.S. history. It will unfold slowly, but in comprehensible time, and get uglier, and uglier, and uglier.

The Gulf is already a fragile and heavily damaged ecosystem, unlike the one pristine Sound - I'm no expert and I don't propose to understand some sort of secret magical facts. But  there is a value to instinct: synthesis of disparate facts, likelihoods, and more nebulous but powerful social and political realities.

This spill is likely to be at least ten times the scale of the Exxon Valdez by volume. It's going to hit an area with 1000 times the population of Prince William Sound. Fishring, tourism, life-ways may die for a generation. It will roll on for many years.  The stench will hit millions of noses; the pleasure of the sea, bathing, wildlife, sightseeing, will turn to tar balls.  Legal realities will have oil companies lying publicly, repeatedly and nakedly.  Economic stress and cognitive dissonance among oil workers and outside friends and family will cause substantial personal conflict.  It's going to a Disneyland of misery.

In this, I find a dark optimism. The Gulf of Mexico, at least on a long time scale, will recover in some measure.  But a much smaller disaster like this, on the American mainland shore, help spark the modern environmental movement, changing the minds of people like the late Nixon Interior Secretary Walter Hickel. It lead to the EPA in the first place, to the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water act, etc, and largely under Republican administrations.

You can state scientific realities like the likelihood of the loss of half of all earth species in the next century, but it doesn't resonate in information-soaked lives. A soaking in real oil, however, becomes a horrible, emotionally scarring clarity that drier biological and climate facts cannot be. We can perceive it in real time, in ways that allow us to attach emotional importance to it, in socially powerful ways that can actually change economic behavior.

I am making a horrible calculation (one that reminds a little of buying some world justice by bombing German civilians in the War.) The social impact of this, if it unfolds like I feel it might, can be massive. We may lose the gulf of Mexico, and yet finally gain the cultural and political will to truly conserve our planet.