In two weeks, I will board a train headed for Washington, D.C., and the 40th reunion of Environmental Action, where some 80 former colleagues will gather to do what people do best at 40th reunions – talk, reminisce, share stories, catch up on gossip, lament getting older, and this year, I’m sure, discuss with both anger and sadness the oil gushing up from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.
It is a dark cloud upon all of us. There is the awful reality, slowly seeping into our cerebral cortex, that the Gulf of Mexico is fucked, truly fucked, for at least the next two generations – some 40 years, if not longer. There are no technological quick fixes. The damages to our health, our economy, our environment, and our world, while seemingly evident, are not really fully visible or understood in terms of magnitude. We are all in the same kettle of fish, filled with tar balls and globules of oil. Tune in sometime in 20 years for the “unexplained” spike in cancer rates and immune-suppressed illnesses that will sweep the Southeast.
I have often made a career as an environmental writer, detailing how the best-made plans by men and women have inevitably ended in disaster. The poisoning of the Cree Indians in northwestern Quebec by man-made mercury; the industrial accident at Bhopal in India; and the threat of economic devastation and contamination from nuclear power plants in Montague, Mass., Seabrook, N.H., Barnwell, S.C., San Luis Obispo, Calif., and Palos Verdes, Ariz. Along with stories about garbage, the threat to drinking water, toxic waste, waste incinerators, global warming, nuclear waste disposal, asbestos, lead poisoning, even the threat of drilling for oil on the Georges Bank on the Outer Continental Shelf off the Massachusetts coast, I have covered the waterfront of environmental sins of commission.
As environmental activists, writers and lobbyists, we were, it seems, always ahead of the curve and in front of the wave. As such, it makes it difficult for me to watch TV news reports of the travesty, because the folks always seem to get it wrong, caught up in the “Are you for it or against it?” worldview. Context, nuance, even the basic facts, slip away. Sometimes, watching Jon Stewart, and laughing, makes the heartache go away, but not for long.
In 1978, for The Real Paper, a Boston weekly, I wrote a story, “The Siren Song of Oil,” about plans to drill for oil off the Massachusetts coastline. It began: “It’s a curious song that will infect the breezes warming the Massachusetts coastline this summer, a mechanical melody sweet with promise, its rhythm as constant as the slapping of waves on the beach. The southerly winds will carry the distant hum of machinery gnawing away at the crust beneath the ocean in search of all those tiny plants and animals that have rotted and petrified into the wealth of Western Civilization, oil and natural gas…” (The weekly never published the piece, because the editor said it was “too predictably anti-oil.” So it goes.) Thankfully, a federal judge intervened to stop the proposed drilling. Instead, this summer, 2010, construction will hopefully finally begin on offshore wind turbines for the Cape Wind project.
Let me share with you a couple more excerpts from the unpublished article, which remarkably, quoted from a report that cited the lack of environmental data for oil spills. The article concluded with the suggestion that a better investment would be offshore wind generators.
“That the sea contained oil and natural gas beneath its crust was never a great secret. In her book, The Sea Around Us, published in 1951, Rachel Carson had explained the relationship of the ocean to oil. Most of the great reserves of oil on what is now dry land were once ancient oceans. ‘Wherever great oil fields are found,’ she wrote, ‘they are related to past or present seas. This is true of inland fields as well as those near the present seacoast.’
‘Our search for mineral wealth,’ her tract continued, ‘ often leads us back to the seas of ancient times, to the oil pressed from the bodies of fishes, seaweeds and other forms of plant and animal life and then stored away in ancient rocks, to the rich brine hidden in the subterranean pools where the fossil water of old seas still remain…’
“Our search for oil, coal and natural gas in the 20th century, more gluttonous than poetic, has become America’s manifest destiny. And, like our country’s drive westward a century ago, it proceeds at any cost. Often the land is ravaged, the wildlife destroyed, the native people uprooted.”
Another excerpt: “In one of the most complete forecasts on the impact of offshore drilling, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation published a 175-page book last month [January 1978] entitled, New York State and Outer Continental Shelf Development: An Assessment of Impacts. The report analyzes the entire process of offshore oil development from the pre-leasing phase through exploration, development, production and shutdown… [The report found that the informational base for decision-making] ‘is inadequate, particularly in regard to environmental data. Little is known about the long-term impacts of [such drilling], including oil spills, on the marine environment.’”
One more excerpt: “In early March 1976, L.W. ‘Luke’ Trahin, representing the Morgan City, Louisiana, Chamber of Commerce, spent a week in New Bedford testifying to how wonderful offshore oil would be. His home city, which nestles next to the Intercoastal Waterway south of New Orleans, serves as the major staging ground for offshore operations in the Gulf of Mexico. He told the New Bedford residents to “look for economic growth, no oil boom.”
When asked what would happen when Louisiana ran out of its reserves of natural gas and oil, Trahin answered bluntly, “It’s beyond man’s comprehension to plan 40 years from now. Years from now most of us will be dead. It’s not our province to worry about that. Let each generation take care of its own.”
And when a local reporter asked him what could be done to protect against a major oil spill, he responded with the faith of a true believer in the free enterprise system. “The oil industry works for the best possible environment. Spills are avoided for the simple reason that if you spill it, you can’t sell it.”
It all comes down to economic priorities. As long as the country’s appetite for oil and natural gas increases, the oil companies will spend billions of dollars to develop new oil fields, whether they be under the ocean of prime fishing grounds or under the streets of Paris [a not-so-obvious reference to The Madwoman of Chaillot, a play by Jean Giradoux, a tragic farce about greedy oil men who attempt to buy up all the sewers of Paris]. The energy shortages are real, our consumption of energy unrealistic.
…One might ask what if the billions of dollars were to be spent on the development of better solar technology, or the implementation of William Heronemous’ [an engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst] plan for offshore wind generators, or a public conservation program. It’s matter of economic priorities. And profit.”
This morning, walking around the narrow point on Narragansett Bay in my new neighborhood, I thought a lot about environmental consequences – and the fact that the environmental economic costs are never quite become part of the equation.
Recently, for a publication call The Bay, I was asked to write a “neutral, objective” story promoting plans to site a LNG facility in Narragansett Bay. I ended up refusing to write the piece, because it was against my beliefs to write something that purported to be neutral about a project that was based in greed and had future environmental disaster written all over it. I asked: How could a publication that calls itself “The Bay,” i.e., covering the cultural life on Narragansett Bay, consider writing an article promoting such a project? The editor didn’t take kindly to my decision, and she told me I’d never write for the publication again. It’s a badge of honor I’ll proudly wear.
As I was walking with my dog, I started singing the words to the Bob Dylan tune, Tangled Up In Blue: “All the people we used to know, they’re an illusion to me now, some are mathematicians, some are carpenter’s wives. Don’t know how it all got started, I don’t what they’re doing with their lives… we just saw it from a different point of view...”
I think about former colleagues at Environmental Action Magazine. Francesca Lyman, who wrote about global warming in 1984, years before it was fashionable. Jim Jubak, who wrote poignantly about his own family’s relationship to asbestos, now writes about Wall Street and stocks. Kathy Hughes, who understood how to tell a good story, and now does if for public television. Rose Marie Audette, tenacious in her search for the truth, who is now a lawyer. Of course, Anne Bullen, who provided us with good taste in design.
On the 15th anniversary of Earth Day, in 1985, we published a special edition of the magazine, “Visions,” asking people to imagine the world in the year 2000. No one, of course, predicted that Environmental Action would be go belly up in 1997. I pulled my copy out a while ago, and found it still to be relevant to the questions we face today.
