Acts of Creativity

I haven’t posted lately because of two reasons- the first is that we’re about to publish the largest issue of Saponifier magazine since its launch. It’s a fantastic issue and I am really happy to have been a part of it.

The second reason is because I’ve been following the situation in the Gulf of Mexico. If you’ve followed my blog for any amount of time, you probably know that I have an affinity for the beaches and marshes of my home state, FL. What you probably don’t know is that I was raised partially in Perdido, a tiny town on a barrier island located in extreme northwest Florida and southeast Alabama. My grandparents made their home there; my grandmother’s family were some of the region’s earliest residents, arriving with the Spanish and descending from ancestors with names like Bonifay and Gonzalez.

It’s where I learned to fish, where I caught my first crab, where I learned what ‘sugar sand’ was. It is where I saw my first wild dolphins, where I sat and watched them play for hours.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq6oBxUysYg

It is home to many of my most treasured memories. Now it is being inundated with oil.

There are odd things going on. Video has been circulating that shows what appears to be methane gas bubbling out of the surf in Pensacola. Oil is being found along the beaches of the east coast of Florida from Jupiter through the Palm Beaches. In fact, it’s being found on beaches as far north as Indian River County- I know, I took pictures of it.

There are even rumors of oily rain falling in parts of Louisiana.  But the truth is much worse than any speculation.  No conspiracy theory is necessary to transform this incident into a nightmare of epic proportions.

The bits of tar littering the beaches here are nothing compared to what has inundated Pensacola.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5R_b5j9CSY

The devastation seems endless.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OVNd6Fa9fg

This article left me speechless. Here’s an excerpt:

“Endangered sea turtles and other marine creatures are being corralled into 500 square-mile “burn fields” and burnt alive in operations intended to contain oil from BP’s ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration confirmed today.”

Cleanup workers are coming out and saying that the efforts they’re putting forth are all just for show, while other news outlets are reporting that the oil has simply been buried- either by the tide or by human hands.

Meanwhile, people are getting sick. As this article explains, “The illness is called “TILT,” or Toxicant-Induced Loss of Tolerance. Patients lose tolerance to household products, medication, or even food after being exposed to chemicals, like burning oil, toxic fumes, or dispersants from the spill.”

One of the most revealing videos I’ve encountered is the film of Kindra Arnesen speaking at a meeting in Venice, LA. The video is 15 minutes long and worth watching through.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkYJDI8pK9Y

The portion of her speech that really twisted the knife in for me is towards the end.  It comes when she says:

“As I’m travelling along back towards Red Pass I look over the gulf and I notice there are big swarms of birds. Now, that’s not unusual, I figured they was diving on bait, but what if they were diving into the oil sheen. Of course, birds don’t know any better. We travelled out towards the birds..I wanted to see what they were diving into, I wanted to know, I was curious. As we get out to the birds…I don’t know if you’ve ever been on the water much, if you’ve seen a big school of fish, they have like a boil on the water. It looks like a pot boiling- the fish boil the water, it moves. As we drift into it, it’s big bull reds, with their mouths open, on top of the water, laying sideways, swimming upside down in a circle. Again- hundreds of thousands of them- school after school after school after school. They were dying. They were so disoriented that they were running into the side of my boat.”

The transcript for the 60 Minutes show she refers to is available here. I found this section rather enlightening (emphasis mine):

“MICHAEL USHER: Biologist Dr Riki Ott is a world expert in marine pollution. She saw first hand, 21 years ago, how massive oil spills impact communities. Riki was working in Alaska when the ‘Exxon Valdez’ disaster struck. Even today, that pristine waterway has not fully recovered.

DR RIKI OTT: What we have is an ecosystem that’s still recovering, and the scientists are saying, it is going to be another 50 years minimum before that oil goes away.

MICHAEL USHER: Exxon was considered the worst ecological disaster of its time, but already, even by BP’s own estimates, this is 10 times worse, and the numbers here are rising every day.”

And now, in the midst of all this, our attention has to shift to Tropical Storm Alex. There is an excellent discussion of the situation over at The Oil Drum, and if you’re interested in storm predictions or information, stop by and visit Rob at Crown Weather.

I’m sure that if you’ve read to this point, you’ve realized that my heart is breaking. Yesterday afternoon, I watched the sea turtles heading into shore, coming in to nest. I wondered how long they’d survive.

I wondered if their babies would ever hatch- and if they did, would it be to die in a putrid mixture of petroleum and chemical dispersant? I watched the crabs darting in and out of the surf, wondering how long it would be before their claws were coated with oil, their bodies nothing but debris in the ocean.

And I wondered how long it would be before the oil made its way to my current home. How many more Atlantic sunrises will I be able to see, to film? What would life be like without them?

The scale of this disaster is so large that I can’t fathom it. I vacillate between white-hot anger and complete despair. I want to do something, to help in some way, but that is the worst part of it all.

There is nothing we can do but watch.  Sure, we can donate funds or dish detergent, but that isn’t action; that isn’t going to be enough.  It isn’t going to make any one of us feel as if we’re helping to save a way of life that my family and others like us have lived for generations.

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