Sick of Oil
Most of the Gulf scientists that I talked to last summer spoke about recovering from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in terms of decades, not days or weeks. But the media, in the main, has spoken otherwise.
As early as last August there was a general acceptance that the spill was "over" -- something that must have been immensely appealing to both BP and the government. Soon after I returned from a monthlong reporting trip to the Gulf in early August, I read the happy headline: "Mighty Oil-eating Microbes Help Clean Up the Gulf." These microbes, like benevolent Scrubbing Bubbles, were described as little "miracle-workers" that had evolved just in the nick of time -- ta da! -- to clean things up.
In August a government report claimed that much of the oil was gone -- that over half of it had been recovered, burned off, naturally dispersed, or "evaporated." (This report was almost immediately contradicted by some scientists, such as Dr. Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, who reported that oil had been found on the ocean floor and that plumes of oil floated beneath the surface.)
Not long after the report was released, President Obama took a very public swim at Panama Beach, Florida. During the summer I had become friends with Bethany Kraft, the executive director of the Alabama Coastal Federation, and she called to say that it was Bush on the aircraft carrier all over again. "He might as well put on the flight suit and give a thumbs up," she said. "Mission accomplished!"
A minute later she tempered her remark. "Look, I want people to come back to the Gulf, too," she said, acknowledging that the surface waters were mostly clear and tourism was hurting -- something the president was only trying to help with. "I just don’t want the rest of the world to forget about us."
By late August, about the time the blue-winged teal were migrating down to the Gulf, the national media had begun to talk about the oil spill in the past tense. The news cycle was officially over. One night I watched Dianne Sawyer interview Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish in southern Louisiana. I had gotten to witness Nungesser in person as he worked the crowds during the summer, but his sweaty charm didn’t translate well to the small screen. He tried to explain that the Gulf wasn’t quite as clean as was being reported.
"Are you suggesting that BP is covering up what happened to the oil?" Sawyer asked with an arched eyebrow. What a nut, she all but mouthed to the camera.
It was starting to take on that feel. Oil is over, people, and if you don’t believe it you are one of those worrywart kooks.
In September I received an e-mail from Eva Saulitis, a scientist I had met during a trip to Alaska a few years before. Eva has spent the last twenty years studying killer whales out on Alaskan waters. She has become intimate, or about as intimate as a human being can be, with a particular group of whales, a small population of genetically unique, mammal-eating killer whales that live in Prince William Sound.
"The males are roamers and singers," she told me. "You can hear their calls from miles away on a hydrophone, and they are part of the acoustic landscape of the sound. Each group has its own language."
Originally the group she studied had 22 whales, but it lost over half its number after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and now there were just seven left roaming the sound. Eva had seen photographs of the group swimming directly through the thick of the oil. She took their extinction personally.
In September she wrote of the Gulf:
This is a potent time in the timeline of the spill, when the world turns away, fixates on the newest disaster (aka upcoming elections), and the people in the spill region feel forgotten and lost. At least that's how it was in Alaska. People still feel that way twenty-plus years later.
She was right: The news had gone underground. When I tried to sell the story to a major magazine in the fall, the editors snickered. No one wants to read about that anymore, they told me. It’s an old story. Can’t you understand that we are all sick of the oil? Even in September when another rig blew up -- another rig blew up! -- it barely caused a ripple on the national airwaves (13 people were on board when it exploded and caught fire about 80 miles from the Louisiana shoreline; fortunately this time no one was hurt and no oil leaked). Then another news item also passed virtually without comment: BP quietly announced that it had made a $1.79 billion profit in the fall quarter.
I wrote back asking Eva for an Exxon Valdez reading list, thinking that the best way to learn what was ahead for Gulf residents was to look back at what had happened in Alaska. Eva suggested a list of books that I started tackling in the evening after teaching school. Alaskan residents must have experienced a deep sense of déjà vu during the summer. It was all there: massive confusion about who was in charge, rage at Exxon but a willingness to take their money, a whitewashing marketing campaign to make the rest of the world forget, scientists beholden to corporate dollars, security guards and police everywhere, activists portrayed as loonies, ecosystems covered in oil, animals killed.
One of the possible lessons of the Valdez spill was how useless most of the skimming and cleaning had been, how much of it, and the specialized science, had been "false hustle," as the great basketball coach Red Auerbach said of those who pretend to be playing hard, done for the appearance of doing. But the key lesson that BP might understandably take away from the Valdez is that appearances count. Even if false hustle didn’t actually help ecosystems, it appeared to -- while placating locals by paying them to clean -- and the greatest corporate lesson of all is that appearances are paramount. If it is unclear what the long-term impact of the dispersants will be, it is clear that those results are preferable, from a both a corporate point of view, to oil-soaked animals and habitats. Oil on the birds and shore = huge outcry. But dispersants? People aren’t quite as eager to rail against damage they can’t see.
"Everyone reacts when they see birds covered in oil," Bethany Kraft told me. "But only us crazies care about dispersants."
Of course, Bethany and other Gulf residents are also happy that oil didn’t reach the shore. But what they worry about is that, with the danger no longer visible, the rest of the country can turn its back. Out of sight, out of mind. Once the obvious symbols -- the oiled pelicans -- went away, the media could, too. If anything has impressed me, it is how brilliantly this strategy seems to have worked.
By the time I returned to the Gulf, in late October, the disaster had long exceeded the national attention span. The general consensus, in the Gulf, was that the oil was over-reported at first but that later it was being underreported. On my return, I read that there was no more oil on the beach on the same day that I walked through oil on the beach. I saw 500 pounds of shrimp, all of them with black gills, something the man who caught them had never seen during thirty years on the Gulf waters.
If I have learned anything over the past year it is to be skeptical of the national narrative, to refuse to be taken on the media’s knee and told a soothing story.
Now, as is our tradition, we will briefly return to the story, a year later, as if on this magical date grand conclusions can be drawn. They can’t. We can tell our superficial stories and keep moving from headline to headline as if we were children suffering from attention deficit disorder. But there is a longer, deeper story going on below the Gulf’s surface, a story yet untold about the connectivity of ecosystems and the recklessness of our hunger. It is a story that will not end at a date convenient for us and our news cycles. And it is a story that is very much going on, a story that, no matter how much we try to tell it in the past tense, still unfolds in the present.
