SUSAN CASEY-LEFKOWITZ
Director of NRDC's international program, specializing in energy development and wilderness protection issues

Now that BP has apparently capped the well, can we all just get back to life as usual?

This was not just a one-time accident. What we’re seeing in the Gulf is symbolic of what we’ll start seeing more and more of in the quest for ever-riskier sources of oil, in places like the Arctic or the Alberta tar sands. What this disaster really tells us is that we need to kick our dependence on oil and move toward better sources of transportation fuel, because there really is no way to fix all the damage to an ecosystem like the one in the Gulf. What we really need is clean energy.

You’re very concerned with migratory birds, both in Canada’s boreal forest, which is threatened by tar sands extraction, and in the Gulf. Why is that?

Most of us don’t think about birds when we’re putting fuel in our gas tanks, but we should, because they’re threatened by our efforts to extract fuel from the places where they nest in the summer, rest in the winter, and touch down on their journeys each fall and spring. The costs of our oil addiction aren’t just far away and hidden -- it’s about the hummingbirds that feed in our backyards. It’s about the red-winged blackbirds that roost in the local marsh. Birds are a way to really connect people to the impacts of their choices, in a way that you often don’t get when you’re talking about digging up tar sands in Canada or drilling in deep water in the Gulf. Or even when there’s a horrible accident on the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, where a million gallons of tar sands oil spilled into the water, that still seems far away for a lot of people. But birds really bring it home because birds are something people tend to love, whether you’re an ornithologist or a professional birder or you have a backyard feeder or just like to watch birds in the park. It’s a real connection.

You’ve said that the Gulf is one of the worst places for an oil spill to happen, from the perspective of birds.

That’s right. The migratory season has already started, and the oil in the Gulf is probably going to have an impact on migrating birds for years to come. I think we’ll only know a fraction of how bad it is. There will be some birds that are easier to monitor than others, but for a lot of birds, it’s going to be really hard to know if their numbers are declining because of the spill.

Has the spill moved us in the direction of clean energy at all?

I think the spill has led to a bigger public debate about our reliance on oil. And there is a lot that the administration can now do to move us in that direction. There’s been a commitment to reducing subsidies for fossil fuels. There’s been a recommitment toward higher fuel-efficiency standards. New energy-efficiency standards have been proposed for appliances. Essentially, we as a country need to be making a choice for these things, instead of choosing to get every last drop of oil out of the ground, no matter how risky it is or how fragile the ecosystem that we might destroy.

Read Casey-Lefkowitz’s recent op-ed at Politico.