Gulf Oil Spill Project

Over the past week I have been racing forth and back across the Gulf Coast between Louisiana and the Florida panhandle searching out the impacts of the latest human disaster created from our short-sightedness in exploring alternatives to a petroleum based existence. The past week has been interesting - on multiple levels - travel and photography are just two.

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster caught the world's attention for the past couple months and then with the capping of the well greatest human cause environmental disaster began to slip from the media's attention and the worlds - here on the Gulf, especially in Louisiana it is still very much front and center - and as I saw Monday (Aug 16th), out on places like Grand Isle (photo above) it will be for years to come . We need to know who we are, what we have done, why we let it happen, and what is the long-term impact. That's why I came - I hope to help tell that story.

Over the coming weeks as I continue to understand what this disaster means to the Gulf Coast, human lives here, the food chain, and long-term impact on and to our cultural, political and social relationship to the environment I will be blogging about it specifically in a different site you can find here at the Gulf Oil Spill Project.

Partnering with me on the project is the National Audubon Society and photographic support is being provided by Pro Photo Supply (my blog about the photojournalism can be found here) - for each of those I will also be blogging and doing other presentations. As soon as those are up and running I'll post links to them here.

Finally this blog will continue to comment on my travels and observations on the planet - perhaps more, perhaps less, depending on the craziness of the schedule. It will take a new look soon as I will be migrating it to some new blogging tools which should provide you with more imagery, video, sound all to better experience the world I'm perambulating in and through.

Thanks to everyone who is along for the journey - Gerry

Gross Negligence - by whom?

You don't need to sit down for this, in fact most Americans won't even pay attention to the news, but here it comes...

The BP oil spill is the new world record holder for human inflicted environmental disasters. The spill has released just under five million barrels - an estimated 210 million gallons - of oil. That's 20 times more oil than was released during the Exxon Valdez spill--which previously held the record for the worst oil spill on U.S. territory. On top of that we have no estimate on the volume of methane gas poisoning the waters in and around the wellhead.

That figure "blows out of the water" the 3.3 million barrels released during the world's previous worst spill, the Ixtoc spill in the Bay of Campeche off the eastern coast of Mexico in 1979.

Writers Campbell Robertson and Clifford Krauss for the New York Times reported, the official estimate of the amount of oil spill means that BP faces fines of anywhere between $5.4 billion and $21 billion, depending on the degree to which federal investigators decide that gross negligence sparked the spill.

"Gross negligence", hmmmm?

Most Americans would say that's pretty obvious, isn't gross negligence spelled B P?

Negligence, yes, "gross", well I'm undecided. Certainly BP pushed the limits of safety, corporate ethics, destructive capitalism, and we will find out over time a whole host of other practices were compromised or simply toss overboard. But the blame for gross negligence maybe rests more broadly.

For true gross negligence I think we could start with elected officials over the past four to five decades who have failed to implement a comprehensive energy management plan for a nation (and in turn a world - we have been the leaders like it or not.) And then to the lobbying companies like auto makers who have slaved to profit margins, and insured those elected officials played along. But ultimately we have to look in our own rear-view mirrors at the people behind the wheel. WE. We elected official and didn't hold them accountable. We bought cars that ran on oil. We scream everytime gas smells $3/gal. - make it cheaper at "any" cost. We insured the system didn't change because it might be uncomfortable.

WE, you and me, are the ones responsible for the gross negligence.

Real gross negligence is being done by the media and the public indifference to a living planet that, from a human perspective, is being pushed to the limits of survivability. Just this past week the media has begun down playing the "great disaster" they so jumped on a couple months ago: "Where is all the oil?" an AFP headline asked. Time magazine ran a piece suggesting that the environmental impact of the spill has been "exaggerated." The New York Times ran a story that said the "Gulf oil spill is vanishing fast." Yahoo news ran a story suggesting that oil-starved microbes are gobbling up the oil. Anderson Cooper's CNN show ac360 is one of the few that has continued daily reporting from the Gulf Coast - and he too will likely pack up the mobile unit this week as BP looks to finally shut the well.

As for the longer-term, no one really knows what tomorrow's tide will wash up, that will take some drilling into, long into the future. The scientists are already taking sides, some optimistically portend that Mother Nature will mitigate the oils impact - but let's face it, you don't need and environmental PhD to grasp 5 billion of anything spilled into the environment unnaturally does damage, and to some creatures off our homo-centric radars, the damage could be terminal.

Brett Michael Dykes, who writes the Upshot for Yahoo News, reported that Doug Radar, the chief ocean scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, told the Times Picayune that millions of gallons of oil remain unaccounted for.

"If you go back and look at the sheer amount of oil dumped - 60,000 barrels a day for 87 days - you get about 220 million gallons," Radar said. "Of that, 11 million gallons were burned and 30-some million were collected, meaning about 50 million gallons were eliminated. That leaves you about 175 million gallons of oil-based pollution loose in the Gulf. And when it degrades from the thick stuff you can see, that doesn't mean it's all gone. There's still an untold amount of toxins from that oil in the marine environment."

And what about that web-of-life we learned so much about in elementary school? That's the great mystery. Long-term it becomes broken links and chain-reactions, many beyond our best guesstimates. Researchers have already recorded that the Gulf's traditional summer dead zone - the annual dip in oxygen levels along the Gulf shoreline (due to Mississippi River runoff carrying agricultural fertilizer waste) - is twice as large as it was last year, representing an area the size of Massachusetts - stretching 7,722 square miles across Louisiana's coast well into Texan waters, scientists with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium announced yesterday (Monday).

So gross negligence? BP? My gut says the real criminals will never appear in court. The real crime is being perpetrated everyday by roughly 300 million Americans who won't accept a new energy-use paradigm. 300 million Americans who greedily refuse to become participants (better leads) in a global solution to living sustainably on this planet. The real gross negligence -- the courage-less creature at the wheel of the vehicle that creeps along in our rear-view mirror everyday, around the world, at 8AM and 5PM.

PS - and what about that "other" giant nation consuming oil. China has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases and biggest energy consumer, but they are searching for solution to the unsustainable -China Plans Huge Buses That Can DRIVE OVER Cars

BP Announces New Summer Movie Release: Silence of the Scientists

I really don't know where to begin this, so like a good writer, when stuck, just start writing and then eventually ya hit a grove. Of course, like a good writer, the alternative is to walk down to the pub, grab a pint or two and contemplate my ideas, hydrate my inspiration, then write. I'm opting for the first, since its 10 AM - not that that ever bothered Hemingway.

Here goes... I'll start with a question.

Is there a time when something is so off, its principals so clearly skewed as apparent by its actions (all that we know) in which we as a society need to stop and question its value in existing? Is it something we really need in our lives, in our world?

My background, my experiences are in nature, observing it, studying it, contemplating it, soliciting other perspectives on it. In nature the above question would be rhetorical at best, ultimately moot. The old saying goes "Nature abhors a void" but nature equally abhors anything mindlessly destructive to the system, all other life. The global petroleum company BP is treading down that path and perhaps it's time we as a society pause and consider its value in our lives, in our world.

In the past couple months the following information about BP activities has come to public light, and it's clear much more remains receding in the dim recesses.

• BP abandoned almost all prudent safety procedures in deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
• BP paid or insured few if any regulations governing their drilling activities in the Gulf of Mexico were know or under the scrutiny of the licensor (us hence the US).
• BP continually has under reported the extent of the spill scope.
• BP has, in coercion with local and government officials gagged the flow of information about the extent of damage along the Gulf Coast, including using coerced/paid local law enforcement to challenge, threaten and exclude journalists.
• BP has pressured government in the UK for release of a know terrorist who's actions killed
• BP is, still, working with the Lybian government on who's side it was pressuring the UK government to open the flow of oil leases.
• BP is current trying to buy the silence of scientists regarding their research into the Gulf spill damage.
  

Yes, this last one hits home. I have always had a soft spot for scientists. I think they try more than most, to do something of value for humankind. So it's with complete outrage that I read BP officials have been quietly moving through the science community trying to buy the silence of the scientists faced with understanding and analyzing the impact of this spill nightmare.

BP said it had hired more than a dozen scientists "with expertise in the resources of the Gulf of Mexico," according to a statement given to the BBC. That's great, get real scientists at work on this mess. But that isn't their objective apparently. According to a BBC report:

Bob Shipp, the head of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama, said BP's lawyers had approached him and wanted his whole department.

"They contacted me and said we would like to have your department interact to develop the best restoration plan possible after this oil spill," he said.

"We laid the ground rules - that any research we did, we would have to take total control of the data, transparency and the freedom to make those data available to other scientists and subject to peer review.

"They left and we never heard back from them."

Nelson warned BP's actions could be "hugely destructive".

"Our ability to evaluate the disaster and write public policy and make decisions about it as a country can be impacted by the silence of the research scientists who are looking at conditions," he said.

"It's hugely destructive. I mean at some level, this is really BP versus the people of the United States."

So where does it stop? I return to my original question,

Is there a time when something is so off, its principals so clearly skewed as apparent by its actions (all that we know) in which we as a society need to stop and question its value in existing? Is it something we really need in our lives, in our world?

Sounds ludicrous you think. We would just remove a company from our planet. Why not? BP now equates to BioPoison - life threatening. It's not infected every last worker, but clearly it has become what all corporations run the risk of, slipping off the tightrope, losing balance. BioPoison infects the inner ear, one no long hear the voice of reason and right, one loses balance. Their record is illustrating they have been tiptoeing that thin tightrope corporations balance on so precariously, only maintaining balance based on the collective conscious of a few men and women to listen to the inner ear, and realize their decisions do destroy with equal severity as they do value.

BP has lost balance, they're falling and like any one who does they desperately flail about, grasping at anything and everyone for hope of stability. The result is they take us down with them. Despite our hardwired human urge to save - this time we need, hold back our hand, look away, to let them go.

BP Lies vs Mistakes: The PhotoShop Cunundrum

Sometimes something smells so foul that it needs to be aired (out) on as many blog laundry lines as possible. Below is such a case. The original text and images (below intact) first appeared on a Yahoo blog by Brett Michael Dykes - and congratulations to John Aravosis of AMERICAblog for astutely catching Bad People doing yet more Bad Pr and first posting this. I won't rant on these PhotoShop "mistakes" here - I've said my fill before.

BP caught using altered image of command center

Is a picture worth more or less than a thousand words if it's Photoshopped?

John Aravosis of AMERICAblog made an interesting find Monday night: A high-resolution image on BP's website of the troubled company's Houston-based Deepwater Horizon response command center had been altered.

The altered image was later removed by BP and replaced with what they say is the original (the altered image is above and the original is below). You'll notice that three underwater images were inserted onto screens to the right on a wall of video feeds in the altered image, where blank images exist on the screens in the original.

The photo flap inspired the usually staid Washington Post to quip, "Apparently BP is no more adept at doctoring photos than it is at plugging deep-sea oil leaks."

BP spokesman Scott Dean told the Post's Steven Mufson that there was no diabolical plot to photographically beef up the company's command center. Rather, he said, a BP photographer with completely benign intentions just slipped the images in.

[Animals most threatened by Gulf Coast spill]

"Normally we only use Photoshop for the typical purposes of color correction and cropping," Dean told the paper. "In this case they copied and pasted three ROV screen images in the original photo over three screens that were not running video feeds at the time."

He added, "We've instructed our post-production team to refrain from doing this in the future."

(Pictures courtesy of AMERICAblog)

UN-embedded Journalism

Excellent piece of UN-embedded journalism by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone - worth the read!

The Spill, The Scandal and the President

The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder

From the article:

Even worse, the "moratorium" on drilling announced by the president does little to prevent future disasters. The ban halts exploratory drilling at only 33 deepwater operations, shutting down less than one percent of the total wells in the Gulf. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the Cabinet-level official appointed by Obama to rein in the oil industry, boasts that "the moratorium is not a moratorium that will affect production" – which continues at 5,106 wells in the Gulf, including 591 in deep water.

Most troubling of all, the government has allowed BP to continue deep-sea production at its Atlantis rig – one of the world's largest oil platforms. Capable of drawing 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor, Atlantis is located only 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana, in waters nearly 2,000 feet deeper than BP drilled at Deepwater Horizon. According to congressional documents, the platform lacks required engineering certification for as much as 90 percent of its subsea components – a flaw that internal BP documents reveal could lead to "catastrophic" errors. In a May 19th letter to Salazar, 26 congressmen called for the rig to be shut down immediately. "We are very concerned," they wrote, "that the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon could foreshadow an accident at BP Atlantis."

Photo courtesy of al.com