how we got here?

Ever wonder how we got into this mess? Ya know, wars, oil disasters, whirlpool economics, over-population, consumption happiness, well you get my gist. I do. Sometimes I think that it's because I have a habit of wading into it, this mess. I decided several years ago to become a photographer of the mess; thinking by illustrating it I could help make sense of it, and maybe, just maybe, shift the path.

It's hard to explain - how we got here - even harder to illustrate. A few folks at the Post Carbon Institute with the help of a white board and a magic marker (this kind of thing takes magic) thought they would give it a try, and a hope. I think it's worth 300 seconds of your life - to consider your life on Earth - for all life Earth.

Pub, Pints and Petroleum Politics

I don't know if I always had a journalist gene, or it's just something that intertwines itself within the double-helix for curiosity, but stories that don't walk a straight line fascinate me. Especially stories that don't just dip their toes, but wade waist deep into the confluence of environment, politics, conservation, money. Any one of those, combined with the erraticism of human nature, would be enough, but find that wedding of the waters and you better start looking at the local levies - something eventually will give. Maybe what intrigues me even more are the convolutions that the various channels take, and the moments of serendipity. Those moments I'm finding are often over a pint in a pub.

You can just call it drinking, but it's more. It's journalistic in perhaps the oldest sense of the craft. A filtering process refined in the great newspapers and radio days, and polished in the early years of television. Sorting on the fly what is and isn't helpful verses pure raconteur BS - which of course can always lend a bit of color. Out side the DC beltway, and unless you are overseas, there seems to be less hard stuff being drunk these days, but a couple craft beers, local brews, do just fine.

Some watering holes work better than others. Each locale has its flavor and approach. I'm not skilled at them all - yet. For example I'm not good with bad beer. In other words, fishing dock lounges are my Achilles heal. The kinda places where the lingering combination of grease and cigarette smoke veneer even the clean flatware, and the smell haunts you in your motel room even the next morning as you stare in disbelief at the paisley-plaid curtains (yes, somebody really did think combining those two was a good design idea.) Places where nothing on tap, or more often bottled, is darker going in that it is coming out. Beers often referred to by the person behind the bar as "beer product" and generally bear the label "lite". And all of the establishments start and end with someone's first name - women's names are the worst for me, they hold the promise of cleanliness going in, then dash your hope and smother your senses.

Yesterday afternoon I visited one of my favorite pubs here on New Orleans' Magazine Street - finally yielding to that little voice. The same little voice that over the years tells me, "talk to that guy or gal sitting next to you" and I finally relent to discover a valuable lead or relationship that far exceeds the cost of the local draft microbrew.

There were just two of us sitting outside at 4PM and serendipity killed the power on the outlet he was using. So laptop in one hand, pint in the other, here he came. Sharing an outlet bonds you in this digital age, the way a bad cab ride or train trip did a couple decades ago, or a five-day monsoonal rainstorm in the third-world still can.

An hour later, and half a pint (second round) remaining, we shut laptops and commented on the weather - snow up north in home towns. My home town, Portland, was his envy. After this was over he would like to head there. This, turned out to be the BP mess. Serendipity. Much of the next several minutes was peppered with him saying, "off the record", but, in their turn comments, facts and anecdotal debris floated down several of the above mentioned channels, pushing me closer to the confluence of this oil mess. Information like, there are places people just aren't looking, "there's $5 billion in charter fishing in the Gulf", why isn't anyone talking to these guys. Yes, follow the money.

I'm headed for Grand Isle this weekend based on that last half pint. My Nawlins "Deep Throat" connected me to other activities, separate, out of Grand Isle. A coastal confluence. All channels seem to be flowing south to Grand Isle - now if the island just had a good pub!

PS - I debated on where to post this, here or over on my general blog Perambulations - in the end both - it's as much a Louisiana/Gulf story as general journalists journey.

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

More than a little Spat

I haven't quite been able to figure out exactly why this BP oil spill mess keeps gnawing at me? I mean beyond the fact that you would have to be working with half a brain not to outraged at the reason, historic and current, blind energy greed, that have us in this position. But more than that I think its my childhood love for the sea. I grew up thinking and planning to be a marine biologist. I shuffled off to university with wet feet and a salty freshening breeze blowing on shore. I learned to scuba dive before I could drive, and the first place I drove, literally, was to the beach with the back of my little Datsun pickup (mini by today's standards) stuffed with diving gear. The first photo job I applied for was on the Calypso with Jacques Cousteau (okay, I was really naive.) So as the Jimmy Buffet song goes, "the sea's in my veins," and there it remains.

As I read reports and news releases, call folks on the Gulf to set up interviews, and work through the last details with National Audubon Society and prepare to start documenting in the Gulf with their interests (Important Bird Areas) in mind, its all those years of walking beaches and face-mask pointed into the sea that makes this assignment hit closer to soul's home.

Marine biologists will admit that not a great deal is known about the effects of oil on organisms in deep water.

"We know almost nothing about the ecology in the deep ocean," says Professor Ed Overton, an environmental scientist at Louisiana State University from a recent interview with BBC.

That comment comes as the Obama Administration once again filed a stop order on deepwater drilling in the Gulf. At the same time oyster fishermen (harvesters really) are coming to grips with the reality of their crops life cycle; oil and the toxic soup associated with it are not only polluting the beaches and mangroves, but plunging a dipstick deep into the future of all marine life in the wake of this disaster. In their case they have more than a little spat with BP and other oil companies that are responsible for this disaster. In fact, spat is at the very core of their future. Spat are baby oysters, and now is the time along the Gulf coast when they head off to become the encrusting bivalves nature intended. And nature's job for them - filter the sea.

The April 10th BP/Deepwater Horizon spill has carried on just long enough to spell spat doom. Late June the waters warm and trigger oyster spawning, about a 100 million eggs per female. After mid-water fertilization the infant bivalve wannabees attach to something hard, like another oyster, and start their quiet sedentary lives of inner contemplation - they are called spat, about the size of a big pinhead. Spat kindergarten through high school takes about three years, so if you are in the oyster harvesting business your crop is always three to four years in the making.

I wouldn't know so much, or care, about oysters other than they were a part of my summers and winters as a teenager growing up near Puget Sound, Washington. A friend's family owned oyster beds and forever needed a hand, and I needed the money. Lowtide, razor sharp oyster shells and the rich alive smell of the estuarine flats was better than flipp'n burgers.

And there's a culture to work drawn from the sea. Everything around it has a culture. A taste of that culture can be felt on trawlers, and shrimpboats, and village around the world. It extends into all the lives connected to the sea. Along the Gulf coast that means oysters as much as anything. A recent article in the Nola.com from New Orleans reflects the downstream impact of the oyster loss -

Gulf oil spill puts oyster shuckers, traditions on ice

Working those beaches taught me a valuable lesson, later reinforced formally at university, if you are an oyster you can not run, you can not hide, you are on the inside, what you take from the outside. In the Gulf that outside is a toxic world beyond what the past 200 million years has prepared the oyster for, and it is becoming clear it will be that way for years to come.

Photo courtesy: Mary Campbell/GLOBIO

76 more years win insanity for life

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague..."
- the Matrix

Did you catch that? "...until every natural resource is consumed"

I have always admired wisdom - real wisdom. Not the kind we cavalierly toss about in the media, label political leaders with in election years, bestow on military leaders, aggrandize money-makers with, rather the wisdom born from careful thought, holistic thinking, kind application, careful reflection and consideration of future. I've also always have a soft spot for fore-thought and inspired thinking. I have always appreciated simplicity as well - a building block of wisdom really - like the kind many folks without the financial luxury of waste apply to their daily lives. In my travels around this planet I have never assumed myself to be the wisest human, I not only make mistakes, more consequentially I don't always use all that confetti of wisdom scattered about my feet. I have sought the wise, tried to learn from their experience of knowledge, and understand how to figure things out ahead of the mistake, the inevitable, the painful.

I was pedaling home from the market a few days ago and spotted a new billboard (an aesthetically abominable idea to start with) ad in my neighborhood (above.) I pulled from the bike path in amazement. As millions of barrels of oil and millions of cubic feet of methane gas spew from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico creating death zones and dead zones, I tried to fathom the stupidity of the advertising looming over me. Did centenarian petroleum company 76 (now owned by ConocoPhillips) really draw on a spec of its 120 years of experience before suggesting that we would, or should, still be running on gasoline that far into the future?

I also found the graphic subtly interesting with its hose draining from the future and its nozzle satiating the current. But then that was the ultimate virus talking - corporation marketing department - selling, exploiting, mindless and virally greedy. (Remember - Viruses are not plants, animals, or bacteria, but they are the quintessential parasites of the living kingdoms.)

I'm not anti-corporate, I've contracted to many, I'm typing this blog on one, I photographed the above picture with one, I accessed the internet to share these thoughts with one, and before the day is over I'll ride, eat, crap into, and sleep on, several more. They are us. One of my issues with the anti-BPness going on is the irresponsible We. We refuse anything but cheap gas, and they are doing their cheapest to provide it. They are us. If you don't drive a car, buy shipped products, and don't have any plastic in your world, then you are not they, and you have a reason to be uncontrollably upset.

If they are us and us are they, then we have at least 40 years selfish procrastination to stare in the mirror at.

John Stewart's The Daily Show staff assembled one of the most painfully poignant, satirical sad video montages of historical procrastination I have ever seen. It ran, I watched, I wanted to cry. Instead I laughed that kind of pained laugh one does when the truth is so excruciating, insane, and depressing, that laughter is the only survival tool despite how wrong it feels.

P-a-u-s-e
(watch the clip first)

Maybe we aren't good at wisdom anymore? Seeing it, absorbing it, understanding it, and most importantly using it. If I can draw anything from all those travels and quiet perambulations with the thoughts and actions of wiser folks than me, it might be that we no longer think, no, not think, rather believe, that wisdom is a survival requirement. Or maybe we have decided wisdom must fit into our lives to be believed, be more media relevant, app'd to our iPhones... hmmm? Maybe just cheaper? Like our gas, maybe we want cheaper wisdom. The price of the old wisdom is just too high - patience, tolerance, kindness, listening, thinking, and reflection.

"I'm starting with the man in the mirror
I'm asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make that change"

- MJ