It was a simple question asked by Don Imus. He asked it this morning: "Has there ever been such an ecological disaster like this anywhere at any time?"
I paraphrase Mr. Imus, but I do complete justice to the question. Has there ever been such a horrid thing as this oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico?
Mr. Imus received an adamantine answer from his newsman: "Never. Absolutely not. No."
I wrote about the Ixtoc 1 oil disaster earlier at Contratimes (here and here). It is an important bit of history, nay, it is a wildly important bit of history. I hope Contratimes readers learn more about it (here's a great start, as is this).
Friday night I asked a question at a political gathering of like-minded folks: Does anybody remember the June 1979 Ixtoc disaster? No one remembered.
Why? Perhaps because at the time of that incredible disaster in the Gulf Americans were obsessed -- as were the news media -- with two things, Three Mile Island (March 28, 1979) and the Iran Hostage Crisis (November 4, 1979). Yes, the media attended to the Gulf gusher that dumped 30,000 barrels of crude oil every day into the Gulf for TEN MONTHS, but there were other dangers to worry about (and America was still struggling with the gas crisis that hamstrung, or was exacerbated by, the Carter administration). As I've admitted earlier at Contratimes, this writer, who was just a young man at the time, has no recollection of the Ixtoc 1 disaster. But I sure remember the national panic around nuclear power and the crazy ayatollah in Tehran.
Despite America's national preoccupations at the close of the 1970s, it nonetheless amazes me that none of my friends or peers remembers the Ixtoc 1, and this for the simple reason that you'd think we'd all remember a disaster that began on an oil rig whose name is an accidental anagram for Toxic. How could we not have remembered the Toxic Ixtoc off the Gulf coast of Mexico?
Have the media and administration ignored the Ixtoc 1 disaster because it actually works against their preferred narrative -- and their political agenda? Does it harm the administration to remind us that what Mr. Obama claims is "unprecedented" isn't unprecedented? Does it hurt their cause to inform citizens that the Gulf actually recovered far better than expected?
I have listened to loads of pundits and read their opinions. I cannot comprehend their ignorance, or their silence, about this important event that began in 1979. Nor can I explain their silence about the recovery of the Persian Gulf after Saddam Hussein dumped vast quantities of oil into that sea in 1991. Here's an interesting passage from The Weekly Standard article (to which I linked earlier today):
As the New York Times noted in a 1993 story, the Persian Gulf recovered surprisingly faster than anticipated from the 1.2 million ton spill Saddam Hussein engineered in 1991: “The vast amount of oil that Iraqi occupation forces in Kuwait dumped into the Persian Gulf during the 1991 war did little long-term damage, international researchers say.”
I am not so dull-witted or hard-hearted as to suggest the current oil leak in the Gulf is NOT an unmitigated disaster, one that we can brush aside as "not all that bad." I have always been an environmentalist, though I stand in what might be called the "Franciscan tradition" rather than the political ecology movement I was weaned on as a child. What is happening tears my heart out; I simply cannot look at the images of pelicans covered in crude oil. But I am concerned far beyond the environment of the biosphere; I am deeply concerned about the environment of the human mind, be it the individual or the collective. I am worried that we are not only forgetting, we are not even learning or knowing. It's not that we've forgotten, it's that we never knew in the first place. What I mean is this: The Deepwater Horizon leak is NOT unprecedented, nor is it -- yet -- the "worst oil spill in history." Not to KNOW this, or to willfully ignore it, is a pollution of the mind.
It's its own disaster, entirely toxic.
Peace.
©2010/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.
1 comment:
Hmmmmm-oddly enough, you have raised a subject which I had thiught of recently;namely, how the sinking of oil tankers, and to a lesser degree, warships during WW2 by US/German submarines impacted the local sea enviroments. (Sorry, Italy, Russia, Britain, et all, but y'all were small potatoes in the Undersea Wars of that time)I understand there were no studies done at the time, as noone even knew or card anything how enviromental impact studies in the 1940's, but I do have to wonder how many hundreds of thousands of gasoline and oil were poured into the oceans by sinking fuel ships!
Post a Comment