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Who's really accountable for the BP oil spill? Commentary by Clare Raybould, special to mongabay.com July 25, 2010
About 1 billion gallons of oil spill into the ocean each year. When you consider that 1 billion gallons would fill 1660 Olympic-sized swimming pools, you have to ask yourself, who are they drilling it for? Oil is a business, a man-made operation; oil’s extraction is a process and with this process comes risks. As a business one has a responsibility to identify possible risks and put controls in place to reduce the likelihood of them causing harm. We can question BP over and over about what precautions they did or didn’t take to control the risks of their operation, but what do we do to make sure these disasters stop? What responsibility must we take?
Swedish businessman Carl-Henric Svanberg said in one of the many articles on the incident: "It's a tragic accident. There are eleven people who have lost their lives." Define Accident... In addition to the people who lost their lives, our ocean has been devastated and whole ecosystems have been affected by the spill. For example, the snowy plover, one of the most at-risk species in the region, is not just dying from coming into direct contact with the oil, but from eating other smaller invertebrates that have also been contaminated with oil; they are being poisoned. This is happening to scores of other birds, mammals and fish. Species migration routes have also been affected, along with feeding and spawning areas equally. We cannot reckon the numbers of the Gulf wildlife dead, but among the victims are hundreds of birds, hundreds of sea turtles (one of which is only found in the area of the Gulf spill) and mammals. Although the leak has been plugged the oil is still seeping, most recently onto Raccoon Island, Louisiana's largest pelican nesting area, which is home to about 10,000 nesting birds. Experts warn the huge size of the spill means they probably will never be able to find more than a tiny percentage of the dead.
Accountability I find it difficult to believe that this disaster wasn’t predictable. I find it difficult to understand why the scale of this disaster to our environment wasn’t our first realization and why now it isn’t our first priority. What I mean by "accountability" is being responsible for your actions, taking responsibility for the worst consequences if they happen and learning from your mistakes. BP should have always been working on contingencies for a worse case scenario, putting long-term plans in place to recover a situation if the worst were to happen. Equally, however, we need to be aware that our demand for oil comes with consequences: damage, death and harm are all inevitable consequences of deep sea mining. Even without the Deepwater Horizon exploding—due to an equipment malfunction, error or whatever the root cause—the process of oil extraction buries marine communities, 'the origins of life on earth', and parts of the ecosystem that holds the key to sustaining life on earth in the future. So, what can I do to take responsibility? You can donate money or supplies or volunteer your time, but making environmentally responsible choices as consumers in the first place will make the biggest improvement, ultimately, to this situation. We need to accept what we can learn from this situation, accept that we are as vulnerable as the animals that have already died in this catastrophe and accept that we are as responsible as BP because we fuel their need to take risks. Yes, they might have acted recklessly, but we have a choice in whether we continue to 'blindly' demand that they carry on, whether we choose to fuel their desire for profit. Conservation International states that "to date, no single government or organisation has taken a truly global approach to the protection of the oceans we all depend on". The true victim of this catastrophe is our ocean, the entity we, as much as the animals, depend on. It could be said that individuals (we) also haven’t taken a step to change things for the better. To the question of why we should the answer is simple: if this all come down to greed: without the ocean, humans won’t exist.
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(07/08/2010) According to a new analysis by the World Resources Institute (WRI), the many ecosystem services provided by the Gulf of Mexico will be severely impacted by BP's giant oil spill. 'Ecosystem services' are the name given by scientists and experts to free benefits provided by intact ecosystems, for example pollination or clean water. In the Gulf of Mexico, such environmental benefits maintain marine food production, storm buffers, tourism, and carbon sequestration, but one of the most important of marine ecosystem services is known as 'primary production'.
(06/08/2010) Will we ever know the full wildlife toll of the BP oil spill? The short answer: no. The gruesome photos that are making the media rounds over the last week of oiled birds, fish, and crustaceans are according to experts only a small symbol of the ecological catastrophe that is likely occurring both in shallow and deep waters. Due to the photos, birds, especially the brown pelican, have become the symbol of the spill to date. But while dozens of birds have been brought to rescue stations covered in oil, the vast majority will die out at sea far from human eyes and snapping cameras, according to Sharon Taylor a vet with the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
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