Orpheus Reed
My Revolution colleague Larry Everest and I are just beginning to dive into the story and get our hands and minds around the scope and picture of what is taking place down here.
The Hearing
We jumped in by seizing an important moment to protest a hearing organized by the Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service (MMS) to begin the first official “investigation” of the causes of the explosion at the deepwater Horizon drilling rig. We were determined to make known that it isn’t just BP or some bad government officials or particular agencies, but that it is the whole capitalist system itself that is the driving force behind this disaster and is not fit to be caretaker of this planet. And that it is outrageous and completely illegitimate for organizations who are key components of this system and intimately involved with allowing and creating this situation (MMS and the Obama administration) to investigate their own criminality. And to clearly put out the message that we must resist this crime on the planet and that things don’t have to be this way- we can have a whole different system and we are building a revolutionary movement for that. (See, May 14, 2010 post, “Oil Spill: This system not fit to be Caretakers of the Planet” which was our press release, sent to media across the country.)
The People
We are getting a beginning sense of how people are feeling about the oil disaster down here. The shadow of Katrina and everything the system did to people is palpable. We drove across the Danziger Bridge and a friend with us told us about what had happened here right after the storm. New Orleans police assassinated and wounded unarmed Black people who were walking across the bridge without any provocation, and then lied to cover it up-such stories are all around us.
We’ve hearing some from people about their stories-what they’ve already been through with Katrina- on the coast and in the city of New Orleans. Two women who work cleaning temporary housing told us how Katrina leveled the fishing harbor and boats of Venice on the Gulf coast at the end of the Mississippi river Delta, and covered the delta where people lived with water. One, who was 62 years old, said she had come back anyway. She has been through 3 hurricanes now- Camille, Betsy and Katrina, but she is extremely worried about this oil disaster and what it will mean. Almost all the fishing is shut down in this part of Louisiana-both commercial fishing and sport charter fishing. So the fishermen have mostly lost their livelihoods- while some are being hired by BP to go out and lay boom to hold back the oil. Some of them are worried about what they say, for fear BP will fire them.
The woman I mentioned cleans the trailers where usually the sport fishermen who come down to go out on boats stay- now partly occupied with oil spill clean-up workers and some media. But with the fishermen gone and the threat of devastation to all the fish, shrimp, crabs, oysters, etc.- (which provide a resource that people live on but also are a central part of the culture down here), she doesn’t know what the future will hold. People are worried for themselves and for others, about losing their livelihoods. Some have told us about how they’ve been reading about the Exxon Valdez spill and Alaska, and how it ruined the environment and the fishermen, and fucked up their lives as well. How people went into debt, lost their boats, many couldn’t survive, or had to leave. Some turned to alcohol, got divorced. Then when Exxon finally paid out some money after 20 years, the money that sounded like a lot didn’t even cover their debts.
Two people who we know who live near the Treme section of town (featured on the HBO show) told us how they stayed during Katrina, They were repeatedly threatened by the police and national Guard that they better get out or else. New Orleans became a ghost town, and then people fought to be able to come back. People searched to find loved ones, fought to open up the projects that the system refused to open despite the fact they weren’t badly damaged so they could ethnically cleanse New Orleans of Black people and poor people. They said people are still traumatized from everything they went through in Katrina and there is a big shortage even of mental health workers now since the storm. And now this oil spill. What can we do? We talked about the importance of people coming together, fighting to make a social force of the demands we advanced in our press statement, digging into and spreading the understanding of how this spill is the latest concentration of wholesale destruction of the planet by this system and we face an environmental emergency that has things going to a horrible place. But things don’t have to be this way-there’s this Party and it’s leader Bob Avakian, and we’re building a movement for revolution and people should become part of this. They are calling a protest this week which we’re joining, and where we’ll get out the article in Revolution 201 and the special environmental issue.
Yesterday we drove down to the little fishing village/marina of Venice. It’s about 70 miles south of New Orleans where we’re staying, at the tip of the Mississippi River Delta, the furthest point south on the Louisiana coast. I had been reading about the rich and incredible wetland and estuary ecosystems here- home to hundreds of species, birds, oysters, crabs, fishes, plants and grasses that are the base of the marshlands, etc, etc. But to actually see this in a beginning way-even from the road, was amazing. At a certain point at the end of the delta, the road narrows so land is only the width of the road and on both sides there is marshland waters-islands of trees and grasses, and birds of every kind. We jumped out of the car to take pictures of white egrets right next to the road, of terns soaring overhead, herons and many other species we could not identify. To think that Louisiana has 40% of the wetlands in the U.S., and that now all of this is threatened because of this spill, and because capitalism does not and cannot see all of this as anything but external and of no real concern-is truly horrifying and enraging.
Amidst this natural wonder sit a huge natural gas plant. Further up the road toward NOLA you pass monstrous oil refineries for Chevron and Conoco Phillips. Along with BP and others out there in the Gulf these huge enterprises have turned the waters into a laboratory for mining of new deepwater oil reserves- with no means and no plans, and no concern-for the annihilation they’ve now unleashed.
They’ve been aided and abetted by the whole government that approved their projects and now wants to expand this catastrophe of offshore drilling more massively, repeatedly allowed them to police themselves, refused to enforce needed safety standards and is driven to compete for strategic control of these new oil reserves in competition with other imperialist powers. Green and capitalism are an oxymoron and to see what’s on the line now as a result- the destruction of species, ecosystems and people’s lives- sickens me. Tomorrow we will get a chance to go out on a boat into the wetlands to document these beautiful places before this spill has largely hit, and we’re looking very much forward to this.
We met some journalism students from University of North Carolina at a bar and grill in Venice. They said they are part of a project on “energy and employment” and told us about some of their experiences observing what is happening. They had been to a training BP was doing with Vietnamese fishermen to lay boom for the spill. They said BP had literally just found someone off the street who spoke Vietnamese, without any knowledge of being able to explain the technical concepts the fishermen would need to understand, so the information couldn’t be conveyed. BP ended up just doing the training in English, which the fishermen didn’t understand very well. So here these fishermen are being sent out into this toxic stew without the kind of training and understanding they need to deal with it. (See Larry’s May 11 post for their reaction to our protest at the hearing.)
Ecosystem Impacts
We’re starting to report on these things and also to get hold of scientists about the impacts of the spill-what is already happening and very importantly, what will happen. But already there have been some important reports on the nature of the oil and spill and where it’s affecting things. Today on Democracy Now, Rick Steiner- a marine conservation specialist from Alaska who has just been in the Gulf talked about how this oil spill is different from the Exxon Valdez. It’s coming out 5,000 feet below the surface and it’s getting emulsified (mixed up with water). It’s also getting hit with these chemical dispersants that are supposed to break up the oil but two things. First, they are also toxic to the environment themselves, and secondly-this is causing the oil (along with the water mixing) to be deeper in the water column and to extend down from the surface. All this oil isn’t sitting on top so it is harder to skim or burn (which also has big problems in terms of people’s health and the environment), and so many of the impacts are likely to be down deeper in the “water column”.
Another consequence, the oil mixed with water can wash under the booms that are being placed to protect coastline, deltas, wetlands and barrier islands-but these are only effective against oil sitting on the surface. This emulsified oil can go right under the booms and there is real potential for it to penetrate deeply into the wetlands. The degree to which this has already happened isn’t entirely clear and something we want to try to find out. Mainly it hasn’t had a big impact yet, but the threat is impending.
Steiner told Democracy Now, “There’s no way to restore a spill-injured ecosystem. There’s really no way to rehabilitate oiled wildlife successfully, and there’s very little way to adequately compensate human communities whose lives have been turned upside down by these kinds of things. So it’s all bad. There’s no good.”
“…There’s a lot of very precious, very unusual marine habitats in the Gulf of Mexico. There’s some deepwater coral reefs up on the—as you start going up the continental shelf. And then there’s these cold seeps where methane, this natural gas, just percolates out of the seabed and forms these really rich, unusual biological communities, extremely productive, that live just simply off the methane coming out of the seabed, and a number of endemic species that are found nowhere else. And I think, because a lot of this oil is entrained in the deepwater masses, likely, that some of these very productive special habitats will be hit. And we need to take a good look at that.”
He also brought out that Obama’s bid to expand oil drilling includes the Arctic-where such as spill would be basically impossible to combat and have disastrous effects.
The Coast Guard reported today they have already found 18 birds, 87 sea turtles and six dolphins dead along the Gulf Coast, and I don’t think they are even searching for them. They say they “can’t confirm” whether they were killed by the spill-but this spill is undoubtedly causing havoc with sea life- dolphins and turtles have been seen swimming in this muck.
And the oil keeps pouring out, in fact, an article in the New York Times this evening quotes scientists who are arguing the flow rate from the ruptured pipes (a video BP tried to prevent from being released based on “proprietary interests- showing again the way the rules of capital are a barrier to the needs of the environment and understanding reality of this spill) is much higher even then the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has estimated.
Two other interesting short reports- from Jeremy Symons of the National Wildlife Federation. He recently was out on a boat in the Gulf touring the oil spill areas. He also talks about the nature of this particular spill and some potential impacts.
Also see this NWF rundown of the impacts this spill is likely to have on diverse wildlife and ecosystems.
More to come.
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