A hole in the world
By Naomi Klein The Guardian
Rebellion Translated from English by Leyens Germain
All participants present at the meeting of the municipal assembly had been instructed repeatedly to show civility to the lords of BP and the federal government. These distinguished people had spent time in his busy schedule to go to a school gym on a Tuesday night in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, one of many communities coastal brown where the poison enters the wetlands, part of what has become described as the biggest ecological disaster in U.S. history
"Talk to others as you would talk to you," asked the president of the last meeting before giving the floor to questions.
And for a moment the crowd, composed mainly of fishing families, showed a remarkable self-control. Patiently listened to Larry Thomas, an affable public relations officer of BP, said that while they pledged to "do better" in processing their claims for loss of income, then spent all details a sub-heard much less friendly to the end the dandy of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, for its acronym in English) while I said that, contrary to what we have read about the lack of trials and that the product is prohibited in Britain, the chemical dispersant is sprayed in massive quantities of oil is really safe.
But patience began to end when Ed Stanton, captain of the guard, took the podium for the third time to reassure them with the statement that "the Coast Guard want to ensure that BP will cleanse."
"Put it in writing!" someone shouted. By now the air conditioning had stopped working and the refrigerator began to run out of Budweiser. A shrimp boat called Matt O'Brien approached the microphone. "We can not hear this anymore", said with hands on hips. No matter how many promises we offer because, he explained, "simply do not trust you! And to hear him, gave him such acclaim that the Oilers would have thought that (the unfortunate name of the football team of the school) had scored a point.
The confrontation was cathartic, at least. For weeks the residents had suffered a barrage of words of encouragement and promises Fancy coming from Washington, Houston and London. Every time I tuned their televisions saw the head of BP, Tony Hayward, giving his solemn word that "I'll fix it." Or President Barack Obama expressing his absolute confidence that his government "would leave the Gulf Coast better than before," he was "sure" that "would be even stronger than it was before this crisis."
all sounds very good. But for people whose livelihoods puts it in direct contact with the delicate chemistry of wetlands, also sounded completely ridiculous, even painful. Once the oil covers the base of the marsh grass, As he had done only a few miles from here, no miraculous machine or chemical concoction can safely remove it. You can remove oil from the surface of water outdoors, and can be removed from a sandy beach, but a wetland covered in oil just stays there, slowly drying. The larvae of many species for which the wetland is a spawning site, shrimp, crabs, oysters and fish, were poisoned.
was already happening. Before, during that day, I traveled through swamps near a shallow pot. Fish were jumping in the waters surrounded by white booms, heavy cotton strips and mesh BP used to absorb oil. The circle of contaminated material seemed to be closing around the fish like a noose. Nearby, a red-winged blackbird perched on a blade of reed oil contaminated by two meters tall. Death came up the cane, the bird could have been standing on a lit stick of dynamite.
And then there are the plants themselves, or Roseau cane, as they call the tall stalks and leaves. If oil penetrates sufficiently into the swamp, not only kill the plants on the ground but also the roots. These roots are the underpinning of swamp in that area. The swamps, in turn, prevents these large expanses of green, full of life, collapsed and drowned in the waters of the Mississippi Delta and the Gulf of Mexico. So places like Plaquemines Paris not only risk the loss of its fishing industry, but also much of the physical barrier that reduces the intensity of severe storms like Hurricane Katrina. This could mean losing everything.
How long until an ecosystem so devastated to be "restored and healed," as promised by the secretary of the interior of Obama? By no means clear that there is a remote possibility of achieving such a thing, at least within we can easily conceive. Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and some species of fish never returned. Government scientists now estimate that an amount of oil equal to the Valdez may be entering the Gulf coastal waters every four days. A worse prognosis emerges from the discharge of the Gulf War in 1991, when an estimated 11 million barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf, the largest spill of all time. That oil came to wetlands and stayed there, digging deeper and deeper because of the holes dug by crabs. It is not a perfect comparison, as it proceeded so little cleaning, but according to a study conducted 12 years after the disaster, almost 90% of muddy salt marshes and mangroves were still affected deeply damaged.
know that: Far from being "healed", is more than likely that the Gulf Coast will be affected. Its rich waters and skies are less crowded living now. The physical space that many communities hold on the map will also decrease due to erosion. And the legendary culture of the sea will shrink and wither. After all, fishing families along the coast not only gather food. Maintain an intricate network that includes family tradition, cuisine, music, art and languages \u200b\u200bin danger, as the roots of the plants that hold the earth in the swamp. Without the fishery, these unique cultures lose their root system, the spot where they are. (BP, for its part, knows well the limits of recovery. The plan of the company jet for regional spills in the Gulf of Mexico specifically instructs officers not to make "promises that the property, the environment or any otherwise be restored to normal. "What is undoubtedly the reason why its officials constantly prefer terms such as" healing ".)
If Katrina revealed the reality of racism in the U.S., the BP debacle reveals something much more hidden: how little control we have, even the most resourceful of us on the impressive intricately interconnected natural forces which interfere with such indifference. BP can not seal the hole made on Earth. Obama can not order fish species survive, or that brown pelicans do not disappear (no matter how kick ass.) No amount of money, nor the $ 20,000 million recently promised by BP, or 100,000 million-can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders still do not accept the lessons of humility, people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated quickly loses its illusions.
"Everything dies," said a woman when the city council came to an end. "How can you honestly say that our Gulf is resilient and will recover? Because none of you has any idea what will happen to our Gulf. You're sitting up there with poker faces and you act as if you knew when you do not know. "
The Gulf crisis has to do with many things, corruption, deregulation, fuel addiction Fossil "But under all this has to do with: the claim terribly dangerous for our culture to have a full understanding and control of nature so that we can manipulate and radically remodel with minimal risk to natural systems that sustain us. But as revealed by the disaster of BP, nature is always more unpredictable than they can imagine the mathematical models and sophisticated geological. During his testimony Thursday before Congress, Hayward said: "The best minds and deepest professional competence are being applied" in the crisis, and that "with the possible exception of the space program in the sixties, is difficult to imagine the meeting at a single site in peacetime a larger team, more technically competent. " And despite what the geologist to Schneidermann Jill has been described as a "Pandora well, are like men in front of the gym: they act like they know but do not know.
Mission Statement
BP In the span of human history, the notion that nature is a machine that can change according to our will is a relatively recent conceit. In his groundbreaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that until the 1600's, the Earth was alive, taking the form of a mother. The Europeans, as the indigenous people around the world believed that the planet was a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also angry moods. So there were strong taboos against actions that distort or profane "mother", including mining.
The metaphor changed to be unpacked some (but by no means all) of the mysteries of nature during the scientific revolution of the 1600's. As now presented nature as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its components could be dammed, drawn and redrawn with impunity. Nature still appeared as a woman, but one that was easily dominated and subdued.
Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new spirit when he wrote in 1623 in De dignitate et Augmentis scientiarum that nature must be "limited, shaped, and made like new by the art and hand of man. "
Those words would have been the corporate mission statement of BP. Boldly occupying what the company called the "energy frontier", was dabbling in the synthesis of methane-producing microbes and announced that "A new area of \u200b\u200bresearch" would obviously geoingeniería.Y boasted that, as Tiber reservoir in the Gulf of Mexico, now had "the deepest well ever drilled by oil and gas," so deep under the seabed as jets fly overhead.
Imagination and preparation for what would happen if such experiments in altering the fundamentals of life and geology were poorly occupied very little space in the corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after the Deepwater Horizon exploded on 20 April, the company had no systems installed to react effectively to this situation. Explaining why he was not waiting on the coast or even the containment dome eventually failed, a BP spokesman Steve Rinehart said, "I do not think anyone has referred to the fact that we now face." Apparently, "it seemed inconceivable" that the safety valve should fail, therefore, why prepare?
This refusal to consider the failure clearly came directly overhead. A year ago, Hayward told a group of graduate students at Stanford University who has a plaque on his desk that says: "If you knew you could not fail, What will you try? "Far from being a benign inspiring slogan, it was really an accurate description of how BP and its competitors were conducted in the real world. In recent congressional hearings, Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts asked representatives of major oil and gas on revealing ways in which resources were allocated. For three years they had spent "39,000 million dollars to explore for new oil and gas fields. However, the average investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention and response to spills were 20 miserable million dollars a year. "
Hayward 
These priorities are very useful to explain why the initial plan submitted to BP exploration federal government for the failed well Deepwater Horizon reads like a Greek tragedy about arrogance human. The phrase "low risk" appears five times. Even if there were a spill, BP predicts confidently, thanks to "equipment and proven technology, the impact would be minimal. Presenting nature as a junior partner (or maybe subcontractor) predictable and friendly, the report explains cheerfully that if an oil spill, "the currents and degradation eliminate microbial oil from the water column or dilute the components to ambient levels. " The effects on fish, meanwhile, "would probably be sub-lethal" by "the ability of fish and shellfish to avoid a spill [and] to metabolize hydrocarbons." (In the version of BP, rather than a dire threat, a discharge appears as a dining buffet-free for aquatic life.)
Best of all, if a major oil spill occurs, there is apparently "low risk contact or impact on the coast "by the planned rapid reaction company (!) and" because of the distance [from the platform] to the bank, "about 77 km. It is the most surprising statement of all. In a gulf that often has winds of 70 km per hour, not to mention hurricanes, BP had so little respect for the ability to flow and relujo, up and down the ocean, he did not think that oil could do a 77 km trip negligible. (Last week, a fragment of Deepwater Horizon appeared on a beach in Florida (a 306 km away.)
However, this neglect would not have been possible if BP had not submitted their predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had been truly tamed. Some, like the Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more anxious than others. Alaska Senator was so impressed by the four-dimensional seismic imaging that proclaimed that drilling in deep water had reached the peak of the artificial control. "It's better than Disneyland in terms of how technology can take and go in search of an application for a thousand years and do it in an environmentally sound," he told the Senate energy committee seven months ago. Drill
without thinking was, indeed, the policy of the Republican Party since May 2008. With gasoline prices rising to unprecedented heights, conservative leader Newt Gingrich's slogan found "Drill here, drill now, pay unto less," focusing on now. The campaign was extremely popular outcry against the caution against the study, measured against the action. In the story of Gingrich, drilling oil and gas had anywhere in the country, in the Rocky Mountain shale, the National Wildlife Refuge Arctic (ANWR) and offshore deep-was a sure way to reduce the price at the pump, create jobs and to tow the Arabs, all at the same time. Faced with this triple victory, care for the environment was a thing of ladybugs, as Senator Mitch McConnell said: "In Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are beautiful. " By the time of the Republican National Convention "Drill, baby, drill!" Infamous, the party's base was such a frenzy by fossil fuels made in the USA, there would be drilled under the floor of the convention if someone had worn a hole big enough.
Obama eventually gave in, as it invariably. Choosing a cosmically unfortunate date, only three weeks before the outbreak Deepwater Horizon, the president announced it would open previously protected parts of the country to offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as thought, he said. "Generally, oil platforms do not cause spillage. They are technically very advanced. " That was not enough, however, Sarah Palin, who mocked the Obama Government plans for further studies before drilling in certain areas. "My God, my friends, these areas have been studied to death," said a Republican leadership conference in New Orleans South, just 11 days before the explosion. "We drill, baby, drill, we wait, babe, pierced!" And there was much rejoicing.
In his testimony before Congress, Hayward said: "We and the industry will learn from this terrible event." And you could ever imagine that a catastrophe of this magnitude certainly inspire a new sense of humility to the supporters of "drill now." However, no sign of that is the case. The reaction to the disaster-in corporate and government areas, has been plagued by the precise type of arrogance and overly cheerful predictions that created the mess to begin.
The ocean is big, you can stand it, we heard from Hayward to start. While
spokesman John Curry insisted that hungry microbes consume all the oil I was in the aquatic system, because "nature has a way to resolve the situation." But nature has not made them the game. The supplier from the depths of the sea has broken all top hats, containment domes, and injections of BP trash. The winds and ocean currents have ridiculed the floating light barriers that BP had made to absorb the oil. "We told them," said Byron Encalade, president of the Louisiana Oyster, "oil is going to happen on booms or below." Of course he did. Marine biologist Rick Steiner, who has been monitoring the cleanup, estimated that " 70 or 80% of barriers do absolutely nothing. "
And then there are the controversial chemical dispersants: more than 37 million gallons pumped with the attitude of the company's brand: "What can go wrong?" As correctly pointed out at the meeting angry residents Plaquemines Parish town, there had been few trials and there is little research on what the record amount of dispersed oil will do to marine life. Nor is there a way to clean the toxic mix of petroleum and chemicals below the surface. Yes, germs multiply rapidly offshore oil devour-but in doing so they also absorb oxygen from the water, creating an entirely new threat to marine life. BP had even dared to imagine that could prevent unattractive images of beaches and oiled birds have escaped the disaster zone. When I was on the water with a television, for example, we were approached by another boat whose captain asked, "Do you work all for BP?" When we said no, the answer to the open sea, was: "So you can not be here. " But surely these clumsy tactics, like all others have failed.
just have too much oil in too many places. "No one can tell where God's air circulate and go, and you can not say where flowing water and leave," said Debra Ramirez. It was a lesson he learned while living in Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by 14 petrochemical plants emissions throwing, and seeing how diseases are spread from neighbor to neighbor.
The human limitation has been a constant of the disaster. After two months, we have no idea how much oil is flowing, or when to stop. The company claims that relief wells completed in late August, something repeated Obama in his speech from the Oval Office, what many scientists see as a bluff. The procedure is risky and might fail, and there is a real possibility that oil will continue to pour over the years.
flow refusal shows no signs of abating. Louisiana politicians outraged oppose the temporary freezing of deepwater drilling, accusing Obama of destroying the only major industry that now exists when the fishery and tourism are in crisis. Palin was running on Facebook that "no human effort ever no risk," while Texas Rep. John Culberson, described the disaster as a "statistical anomaly." However, far more sociopathic reaction comes from the veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn King: instead of away from large engineering risks, we should stop "and marvel that we can build machines so remarkable that they can uncover the underworld."
Stop bleeding
Fortunately, many are drawing a very different lesson from the disaster, and not marvel at the power of humanity to redesign nature, but to our inability to cope with the natural forces unleashed fierce. There is another thing. It is the feeling that the hole in the bottom of the ocean is more than an accident of engineering or a broken machine. It is a violent wound on a living organism that is part of us. And thanks to the material live cameras BP, we can all watch as the bowels of the earth tomorrow poured into real time, 24 hours a day.
John Wathen, curator of the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers who flew over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After filming the thick patches of oil to the coast guard politely referred to as "Rainbow brightness," said what many had felt: "The Gulf seems to be bleeding." These images appear over and over again in conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, environmental rights lawyer in New York, refuses to describe the disaster as "oil spill" and instead says, "we have a hemorrhage." Others speak of the need to "stop the bleeding." And I was personally impressed me, flying over the stretch of ocean where she sank Deepwater Horizon with the U.S. Coast Guard, because the forms that the ocean was churning in the waves of the ocean looked remarkably like paintings: a feathery lung breathing hard, eyes facing upward, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep.
And this is surely the most bizarre twist in the saga of the Gulf Coast, it seems that we were waking up to the reality that the Earth has never been a machine. After 400 years of having given up for dead, and amid so much death, the Earth comes alive.
The experience of tracking the progress of oil through the ecosystem is a kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day we learn more about what appears to be a terrible problem in an isolated part of the world actually radiates outward, so that most of us would ever have imagined. One day hear that oil could reach Cuba, then to Europe. Then we heard that the fishermen above the Atlantic on Prince Edward Island, Canada, are concerned that the bluefin tuna fishing off its coast are born thousands of miles in the waters of the Gulf oil-contaminated. And also found out that, for birds, the wetlands of the Gulf Coast are the equivalent of an active hub carriers-all seem to stop: 100 species of songbirds and 75% of all U.S. migratory waterfowl. UU.
one thing for an incomprehensible chaos theory tells you that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas. Another is how chaos theory is specific to your eyes. Carolyn Merchant described the lesson as follows: "The problem, as BP has discovered tragically, too late, is that nature is an active force that can not be confined." The predictable results are unusual in ecological systems, while "events unpredictable, chaotic [are] common." And if we have not yet understood, a few days ago, lightning fell on a ship of BP as an exclamation point, forcing it to suspend its containment efforts. And even there mention what a hurricane would do to the toxic soup of BP.
There must be stressed, something uniquely twisted in this particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans learn foreign countries where they are bombing. Now it seems that we are all learning about circulation systems of nature, by poisoning.
the late 90's, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia made headlines the world with a conflict about "avataresco." From his remote home in the cloud forests, the U'wa have stated that if performed Occidental Petroleum plans to drill for oil in its territory, commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of the ruiria, "the blood of Mother Earth." Believe that all life, including his own, flowing from the ruiria, so that would extract oil destruction. (Oxy eventually withdraw from the region, saying there was not much oil as previously thought.)
Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits who live in the natural world, in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests, such as in European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, says that this serves a practical purpose. Called "sacred" to Earth is another way of expressing humility before forces that do not understand in its entirety. When something is sacred demands that we proceed with caution. Even with awe.
If we finally learn this lesson, the implications could be profound. Public support for more offshore drilling decreases abruptly, is down 22% from the peak of the frenzy of "drill now." However, the issue has not disappeared. It's just a matter of time before the Obama announce that, thanks to an ingenious new technology and strict new regulations, Now it is perfectly safe drilling in the deep ocean, even in the Arctic, where a cleanup under the ice would be infinitely more complex than that occurring in the Gulf. But maybe this time we are not so easily remain calm, to play so fast with the few shelters protected.
The same goes for geoengineering. As negotiations continued climate change, we must be prepared to hear more of Dr. Steven Koonin, the undersecretary of energy for science of Obama. One of the main proponents of the idea that climate change can be combated with technical tricks as free particles and aluminum sulfate into the atmosphere -And indeed everything is perfectly safe, like Disneyland! It also happens to be the former chief scientist of BP, the man who just 15 months ago still oversaw the technology behind the supposedly offensive to secure BP deepwater drilling. Perhaps we choose this time for not allowing the good doctor's experiment with physics and chemistry of the Earth, and prefer to reduce our consumption and switch to renewable energies have the virtue that, when they fail, fail small. As described by the comedian Bill Maher: "Do you know what happens when the windmills are falling into the sea? A dip. " The
most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but full support to the precautionary principle in science. As a mirror opposite the credo of "if you know you can not fail" in Hayward, the precautionary principle states that "when an activity involving threats of harm to the environment or human health" go gently, as if the failure was possible, even likely . Maybe we can even get a new motherboard for desktop Hayward contemplates that the compensation checks while signing. "You act as if you knew, but did not know". ... ...
Naomi Klein visited the Gulf Coast with a crew of Fault Lines, a documentary program presented by Avi Lewis on Al-Jazeera Television Inglés. Was a consultant for the film.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/jun/19/naomi-klein-gulf-oil-spill
Mirrors that show all their fears , 
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:) 
