The eleventh largest body of water, the Gulf of Mexico is being raped as I type. The sense of helplessness that I can do nothing about it is frustrating me as it is to many fellow kindred souls. Starting on the 20th of April, which is about a month back, 200,000 US gallons (or about 800,000 liters) of oil is gushing into the water system, EVERYDAY. Eleven workers are dead, 17 are injured and it must be costing BP, the principal developer of the project, millions of dollars in restoration. But will BP pay the real cost of this disaster or just an "economic" cost?
BP will only pay a minuscule percentage of its profits in "cleaning" this gush but we will all pay the real costs. Our future generations and all those unborn children and animals, birds, fishes, plants will pay the social, environmental costs of a spill that will soon be forgotten in the daily din of human existence. From my limited understanding of the situation, a hydraulic system leak caused the explosion, which is causing the gush of oil into the water. Petroleum companies usually use highly toxic chemicals to break up this oil, causing more problems than solutions. They will also try and salvage as much as they can from the oil, but this amount is negligible. The oil will not dissolve into the water system, neither will it sink. It will NOT go back to Earth, as easily as it came out. The molecules will stick together and ugly goblets of oil will spread across the water, some landing on beaches where children play and others entangling flora and fauna into a death grip. At the risk of being romantic, I ask, who will stand up for these animals? Since we live an anthropocentric and egocentric lives as humans, and behave as the World (and all its resources) belong to us (and not the other way, that we belong to this universe), we only think in terms of what we monetarily lose. Economists and accountants will only calculate the dollars lost in the spill and the non-renewable resource wasted. A small blip on the GDP of some country and who cares if a few ecosystems are destroyed! The animals and plants do not have representatives to argue their case. Who cares if the oil will change the sex of the fish in the next few generations, its never captured in the economic calculus.
At this point, its time to ask a few basic questions. Why wasnt more precaution taken in this deep-sea drilling? In a report filed with the US Interior Department in 2009, BP quoted that an event like this happening is unlikely and if it did, it could be contained. Now, reports are indicating that it might take a few more months until the gush is contained. Was BP not prepared adequately for such an eventuality? Was BP not focussed as much on disaster management as it is on drilling more and more oil from pristine and interior regions? A more important question to ask at this juncture would be why did BP or other oil companies have to go to the deep sea for oil? Or an even more important question to ask would be why do we depend more and more on oil to provide us with warmth, cooking, goods and transportation?
A few hundred years back people burned candles and Whale fat for light and wood for cooking while using horses for transport. Then, post industrial revolution in Europe and various technological breakthroughs in the US (Oil Creek Pennsylvania in 1859, where oil was first discovered and drilled), slowly led to an addiction to oil, which we can find in almost every aspect of our daily life. Its cheap even at about $3 a gallon because the social cost of drilling oil (which is non-renewable and would take millions of years for Earth to make it for us again using our own dead bodies) is not paid by us. If as a civilization we could put man on the moon and do all these incredible things that we do today, which were inconceivable just a few years back, why the hell cant we stop our addiction to oil? We can blame Ronald Reagan who reduced the fuel efficiency standards set by Jimmy Carter, we can blame the Big Three car makers of the US to lobby the congress/senate and reduce public transportation so people can buy more cars, we can blame the OPEC which cunningly adjusts its production as to stimulate demand (through the weapon of price), we can blame perverted business decisions that put short-term growth ahead of longer-term sustainability of this planet but ultimately we have to blame ourselves. If all of us take an oath to push hybrid technologies and divorce the inefficient internal combustion engine from gas (which wastes >90% of a gallon as heat and exhaust), if all of us start carrying bags to buy groceries instead of using cheap plastic (made from oil) bags, if all of start taking this planet and its natural resources as seriously as we take the next winner of American Idol, we will not have to go deeper and deeper into pristine ecosystems and natural habitats for oil and we will surely think twice before we drill a hole into our mother Earth and suck her blood like an avaricious leech with a ravenous greed. As demand comes so will supply be generated. Kill the demand and the supply will fall (and so with it a few totalitarian regimes).
As I was thinking of the Gulf of Mexico tragedy in the last few days, a strange thought stuck in my head. If there was a fire in our house, we would go to any length to stop it. If we there was a torrential rain and the water came gushing into our basement, we would stop watching TV and rescue our precious furniture. But if something like an oil spill occurs somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, a majority of us do not even react or think deeper as to how it could affect us or how they can contribute in lessening such damage. Its because a majority of us do not "own" anything in the Gulf of Mexico. What if you had a financial stake in this disaster and you were rewarded if this tragedy is addressed immediately? Will that call you to action? It will. Sadly, all our motives, ambitions and even social relationships revolve around the dollar (or some other currency). Wake up and smell the mint, everyday, until we die. Our perception is that whatever happens to Earth and its natural systems, is meaningless to us because it does not "affect" us nor we will incur any damage as a result of it. Likewise, if the Earth is doing well, it doesn't matter to us, because we are not "rewarded". But the butterfly effect of this tragedy will have a damaging repercussion on all of us, our children and their children. These are the events that will change the course of history and create a new dimension to the path of humanity, a dark dimension. And if we chose to do nothing about these things and alter our lifestyles so as to make some contribution to the world we live in, we will all pay a price. Life on Earth is a cobweb, its interrelated and interdependent. If the planet is healthy, we will be healthy. But the pathetic rules we created for our selves in the last hundred or so years where we wallow in our little selfish shells, dancing in the human carnival wearing different masks leads to an apathy that covers our conscience like an oil slick that covers the soft fur of a sea creature. Its up to us to decide how each of us will react to this, if we will let this be a wake-up call. But such foolish, corny hope took a hit when I read a BP senior executive saying that "I'm optimistic, I'm very optimistic that the Gulf will fully recover". Optimistic? Fully recover? Is this hope or dope speaking?
This is the real tragedy of the commons. Welcome to the suck!
