In
the wake of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I'm reminded of two disquieting
forces that have been building in America across some forty years - forces now threatening individuals,
communities, and the planet as a whole. The first is the lingering, tenacious
fantasy of the unregulated marketplace - an enticing, and at the same infantile
vision not only hostile to regulation, but quick to tout the benefits of industry
without ever accounting for the social costs of diminished health and damage to
critical land systems. Projects like BP's Deepwater Horizon effort in the Gulf,
for example, had long been required to submit a "blowout scenario," which included
detailed plans for how a company would deal with exactly the kind of event we're
now witnessing. But at the industry's urging, in 2008 the Minerals Management
Service, within the U.S. Department of Interior, changed the rules to exempt many
drilling projects, including this one, saying such plans were too cumbersome for
companies to deal with on certain types of exploratory projects.
It's
long been fashionable to curse the government for what can seem like heavy
handed environmental regulation. And truthfully, some bodies of regulation are in
fact unnecessarily cumbersome. But it's worth noting that such flaws are often the
result of us not having been proactive - of waiting until catastrophe happens
and then scrambling amidst public outrage to come up with effective regulatory policy.
We moved quickly to outlaw DDT, for example, but only after biologist Rachel
Carson gave us a terrifying first-hand look at the consequences it was having on
people and wildlife. Laws regulating air quality were taken seriously only
after multiple studies showed millions of children with dangerous levels of
lead in their blood. It was the Calumet and Cuyahoga rivers catching fire in
the Midwest during the late 1960's, along with a devastating loss of aquatic life
in the Great Lakes, that finally jolted legislators into passing the Clean
Water Act.
The
other dangerous force in play today is one that places total faith in solving energy
and environmental problems by means of new technologies, offering barely a nod to
the idea of simply using less. The blow-out preventer technology used on the BP's
Deepwater Horizon project was the most advanced in the world. Yet it failed.
(To be precise, the BOP seems to have worked partially, but was likely damaged
by erosion from abrasive materials, such as bits of rock, hurtling through the
system at high speeds.) Technology, of course, can be a beautiful thing; almost
never, though, when it's rushed into service before its time. Meanwhile the
simplest acts of personal choice, from car-pooling one day a week, to drying
clothes on a line, even going one day a week without meat, can make profound
and immediate differences on the health of our communities and our planet.
Some
of the towns along the Gulf Coast may never recover from this spill. Their
economic base shredded, friends and neighbors might well be forced to trade the
touchstones of home (which for many have included the comfort of generations of
family), for jobs in other places. They will go from having made a life, to making
only a living. It's certainly right to say that economic development and a
healthy environment aren't mutually exclusive. In practice, however, we'll
never know the truth of that claim until we're willing to give equal weight to both.
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