Читать книгу The Tarball Chronicles - David Gessner - Страница 12

UP IN THE AIR

Today the weather cooperates. The helicopter arrives, landing on Ryan’s lawn at eight in the morning, splattering shadows outward. I run toward it, hunched down and sensibly worried, like any beginning helicopter passenger, about decapitation. While I’ve never been in a helicopter before, Brian and his coworker on the Cousteau team, Nathan, are old pros, having been out to the rig not long after it first blew. I, on the other hand, am like a little kid, clutching my disposable camera and notebook as we lift off. The blades spray wind and light across the grass below. A wavering turkey vulture flaps away from the noise. The lodge shrinks as we rise, and I see that my first impression—this land as a fragile strip between waters—was correct. Brian points down at a cop car hiding behind a tree. As we fly south toward Venice where we stop to refuel, it’s hard not to notice how much oil is being used to help clean up the spilled oil: helicopters are coming and going constantly from the pads. Once we are back in the air Brian points out the window toward a larger Black Hawk helicopter carrying a sandbag west over to one of the threatened islands. The huge bag hangs and sways below it on cables like a spider’s egg sac.

Thirty percent of domestic U.S. oil production now comes from the Gulf, and in the headlong rush to drill deeper and find more, that production has increased 34 percent just since 2009.⁵ If this began as a little boy mess, it has bloomed into an emergency that, according to the little boys, only they can fix. And so now helicopters fly all day long trying to save us from the oil, burning thousands of gallons of gas in the process. Everywhere you look you have ships, cars, trucks, planes, and copters charging every which way to protect us.

But for the moment I give irony a rest. What overwhelms the ironic, swamps it actually, is the landscape. It was one thing for Ryan to say that 14 percent of the country’s coastal wetlands span out from the road near his home, it is another to actually see them. We fly south but can’t outrun all the green, the great mangrove islands and marsh grasses. As an outsider, prone perhaps to regional prejudice, I somehow accepted that it didn’t really matter much that these waters were home to over four thousand oil and natural gas wells. We needed somewhere to dump our industrial complex, but how can this place be that place: it shimmers with green.

Suddenly, a hundred feet below me, I see black and white wings and realize that we are soaring above a half-dozen Frigatebirds, officially known as magnificent Frigatebirds. While they are spectacular, spending whole days in the air, the adjective in the bird’s name has always seemed overdone to me, since they get their living in a somewhat seedy manner. They are kleptoparasitic, never deigning to stoop as low as to fish for themselves, but instead swooping down from on high to steal fish from other, more industrious birds. They seem to float far above the mess we have made, but of course they can’t stay above it for long. Eventually they must dip in and steal fish that are just as dirty as they were at the moment they left the water.

In the landscape below you can see geology at work, how the Mississippi dumped its nutrients for millions of years and how the land then spread southward from the delta, extending itself in miles and miles of watery grasslands, which in turn became home to young fish and oysters and shrimp and millions of birds. Far from a shit hole, it is a wonder. Green jigsaw pieces of grass fit with blue pieces of water while a river runs through this already-watery world. A great snaking river, hemmed in still, even at this point, funneled by engineers toward the Gulf itself. It is a shocking sight: the great freshwater torrent running home toward salt. It is still almost beyond sense. The bayou world of marsh grasses and creeks and straight man-made canals is one thing, but then through them, or looking like it is superimposed on top of them, is the great brown weaving Mississippi. I have never before seen freshwater of that magnitude moving through a coastal water ecosystem.

Before I came here I boned up on the Mississippi, and read a book called Rising Tide by John M. Barry. Barry’s book told the story of the great flood of 1927, but what really struck me was the frontispiece. If ever a picture was worth a thousand words here it was: an illustration of the branching tree of the Mississippi and all its tributaries. The picture was called “Mississippi River System.” Somehow I had never thought of it that way before. When I pictured our largest river I saw it running straight down, expressstyle, north to south from Minnesota to New Orleans. But this picture told a different story, a story that stretched from the headwaters of the Missouri River in Montana to those of the Allegheny in upstate New York. It made it look like every creek in the United States fed the Mississippi, which isn’t far off. The feeder streams and rivers were capillaries and veins and arteries, a great cardiovascular system of almost the entire country from east to west and north to south. And all of it ends up here.⁶

We fly on. I would have thought we were past any towns at this point, but suddenly a human outpost appears below us amidst the watery grasses. Through my headphones the pilot says that this hamlet, which sits at the mouth of the Mississippi, is called Pilottown. Here local river captains take over ships returning from sea to steer them up the Mississippi—the sea captains don’t know the river’s currents and tides like the local river captains do. The only way to get to this little outpost is by sea or air. According to our pilot it’s a wild place, renowned for its drinking and prostitution as much as its frontier remoteness.

After Pilottown, we reach the end of land. Orange and red and blue lines bubble out around the outer islands, as if a giant child had clumsily tried to trace the land’s outlines. These are the lines of boom, a colorful, if ineffective, protection against the oil. As of yesterday, 3,474 kilometers of boom have been laid down. And yet, with any sort of good wind or storm, the water and oil will splash right over the boom, rendering it useless.

As important as doing something is right now, looking like you are doing something is perhaps more important. This is a lesson BP has learned well. “False hustle,” was what Red Auerbach, the old Celtics coach, called it, and false hustle has become a BP specialty. Just this week the company had to sheepishly admit that they had doctored a photo from their spill command center in Houston that showed workers monitoring great banks of video screens glowing with underwater images. There it was in the papers: three passionate and concerned workers keeping their eyes on our waters. The only problem was that half of what they were seeing on the screens had been photoshopped into the image. Before this bit of trickery, most of the screens were blank.

I try to make out changes in the water’s color as we fly past the boom out into the Gulf, wondering what is oil and what is not. I see great black sheens and stretches of lighter water, but I have spent enough time on the coast to know how ocean colors can change, with or without oil. I don’t want to sound like an idiot, but I decide to ask Brian if I am seeing what I think I am seeing. He tells me that he can’t really see much oil at the moment, and the pilot agrees.

“You wouldn’t have believed it when we first came out,” he says. “You wouldn’t have been able to miss it then. It covered everything.”

I assume that by now much of it has been sunk to the ocean floor. When I look down my eyes can’t penetrate the surface, but just yesterday I read an interview with Samantha Joye, a scientist from the University of Georgia, who spoke of witnessing black plumes, many miles long, that travel deep under the water, large dead areas with no oxygen and no fish.⁷

After another fifteen minutes we reach the Deepwater Horizon rig itself. As we approach, the dozens of boats below look like Tonka toys gathered around the rig, as if trying to protect and comfort it. But as we get closer, it is clear the rig needs no comfort. It is emblazoned with BP’s green and sunny logo and appears almost cheery, as it is no doubt supposed to look. The scene looks not just sunny but industrious, with no hint of despair.

From up here the rig may look like a toy, but it is in fact a great metal island, capable of housing over a hundred men. In broad daylight it is hard to picture the fiery hell of April 20, the night when the methane bubble blew up through the well and exploded at the platform, killing eleven men, injuring seventeen more, and sending dozens leaping off the platform into the flaming water. What was it like to take that ten-story plunge? The chief engineer said later that he thought of his wife and his little girl before closing his eyes and making the leap. Those, I am sure, would have been exactly my thoughts.

In the story being told right now the Deepwater explosion was a great tragedy, but also something anomalous, an “accident,” of course, a terrible accident. But is something an accident if crucial tests are skipped, if costs are cut, if warning systems are turned off so alarms won’t ring, and if even the CEOs of Shell and Exxon—a Big Oil gang that is known to stick together—have sworn in front of Congress that the Deepwater Horizon well did not come close to meeting industry standards? Is something an accident if a multi-billion-dollar company, the world’s fourth largest, decides it needs even greater profits, and sends a topdown directive to cut costs company wide by 25 perecent? “I’m not a cement engineer,” BP’s CEO Tony Hayward told Congress in way of defense, but presumably he had a few cement engineers working for him. He also said, “I’d like my life back,” a sentiment no doubt shared by the eleven dead crew members and their families.

Far from anomalous, disasters had, by the time of the spill, become commonplace in the world of British Petroleum. Over the past decade the company went from the little brother of oil to one of the big guns, acquiring Amoco and Arco in the process. But during that heady rush the company’s M.O. was to take risks and cut costs, safety be damned. This is not overstatement. BP has led the Big Oil league in deaths and disaster. In 2005, fifteen people were killed and 170 injured when BP’s Texas City refinery blew up due to shoddy safety standards. In July of that same year BP’s flagship for deepwater drilling, the giant off-shore rig Thunder Horse—Thunder Horse!—was toppled, seemingly by Hurricane Dennis but in fact by faulty valves hastily installed. The next year BP hit the disaster trifecta when 20,000 gallons spilled from a rusty pipeline in Prudehoe Bay on the north slope of Alaska.⁸

Which brings us back to the question: if things happen regularly and for the same reasons, do they still qualify as accidents? Which leads in turn to the next and larger question: if we, as a country, keep acting in ways that lead to shocking events, isn’t it time to stop being shocked?

Not that it isn’t shocking. A twenty thousand gallon spill like the one in Alaska is a disaster. But over two hundred million gallons have spilled from the well below me since early April.

We circle the rig again. I stare down to try to see the deeper story. It was down there that eleven people were sacrificed in the name of profit. Is that an exaggeration? Tony Hayward and Carl-Henric Svanberg might be scapegoats—and fine scapegoats they are, complete with their James Bond villain accents—but what about the board of directors? And what about the system that created the board? The group and the philosophy that demanded that this company, despite earning billions of dollars, had to earn even more to sate them; that to do so, to provide more billions, a 25 percent cut in operations had to be enacted, even as those operations were expanding downward into new territory, 13,000 feet below the ocean floor? How were those cuts enacted? Simply and systematically: by cutting corners and skipping regulations and eliminating safety measures. Piles of money, enough to support a small town for decades, were being divided between a board made up of a dozen or so people. And yet no one could be bothered to pay a few hundred thousand on tests, nor could they abide alarms that might slow them down.⁹

Take this down to a personal level and it seems almost inconceivable. This is not the first time I’ve traveled this country and I am always surprised by how decent people are. But where are all those exceptional individuals in a moment like this one? Is it only in large groups that people are allowed to bury their morals? No healthy individual would ever do to their family or friends what this corporation has done to the people of the Gulf. Individuals would face immediate ostracism. Maybe it’s as simple a problem as the size of the organization, or even the words organization and system. When profit is made the greatest priority and one’s job—one’s self-interest—hinges on that profit, simple commonsensical goodness flies out the window.

I am wrestling with these ideas and can’t stem the tide of confusion. It’s too much to handle all at once. In our oversimplified political discourse we talk a lot about the importance of business and growth, but we also talk a lot about freedom and individual rights. But a corporation like BP is about as individualistic as a batch of flesh-eating bacteria—there is no debate over what the collective will is: grow and profit, no matter the cost. What does freedom mean when we blindly trust that an entity like BP will not destroy the world we rely on for our health, happiness, and well-being?

We don’t stop there, though. Before I came down here I watched the congressional hearings where Tony Hayward testified. A woman jumped up from the back row and waved her hands, which she had painted black, and yelled: “He should be charged with a crime!” She was quickly dragged away. Maybe most people will roll their eyes and call her a wacko, but she is right. Rather than being charged with a crime, this man’s famously inept and dangerous company is being charged with running the cleanup. It is hard to imagine a culture in which this could possibly happen: not only do we trust them, but, when they err, we trust them yet more.

As we spin over this giant pool of water a graphic and slightly inelegant metaphor comes to mind. It’s as if BP were a houseguest who takes a shit in your bathtub and then, loudly and boorishly, orders your children to clean it up. Worse still, he slips each of your kids a fiver and has them sign a piece of paper promising that they won’t tell anyone what really happened. The truly wild thing down here is that everyone has gone along with this plan, carrying it out as if it makes sense, nodding and going about their unsavory business.

After we fly over the rig we head toward Grand Isle, a national park at the end of one of the green fingers of land that reaches out into the Mississippi Delta. It has long been regarded as one of the most beautiful spots in Louisiana, but even from way up here I can see the brown, burnt fringe of dead grasses from the oil. This is where the caramel goo first rolled in.

But it is also still a miraculous landscape, full of fish and birds and gators (like the one we saw after lifting off from refueling). Ryan said that 14 percent of the continental coastal wetlands fan off of Route 23, but the area we are flying over now makes up closer to 40 percent. It is green and vast, wavering like a mirage below us, and for centuries it has received the gift of nutrients offered up by the great surging river. I have to laugh to think that just a week ago I would have told you that this was a second-rate coast. There is nothing second-rate about it, other than the way we have treated it.

The United States consumes 40 percent of the world’s oil. About 70 percent of that is for transportation, mostly for our cars. I am not here to wag fingers: I, too, drive a car and live in a car society. We are a hungry people. I, too, am hungry. We are hungry not just for oil but for the ease it brings, and, as creatures of habit, we have become habituated to this easy, oily way of life.¹⁰

Oil has often been called an addiction. Just as surely as a junkie’s life leads to degradation and crime, I can see spilled on the beaches below me the results of our addiction. Here is our degradation and here are our crimes, spread over these beaches and in these waters. We debate scientific theories in our culture. You may choose not to believe that the world will warm, and while your beliefs have little to do with what the world does, you have a right to them. But what I am seeing below me is not theory. Here, in this place, there is no disbelieving or believing. Here it is right in front of you and in your face.

What good does it do to self-flagellate? Oil in and of itself, far from being “bad,” is almost miraculous in its composition and effectiveness. Oil is the “solar energy” that environmentalists like me have long cried for. Solar energy from eons ago, energy sucked in and stored by plants, now long dead, that has been squeezed by earth and time, energy that we ignite to power our cars and cities and lives. And not only is oil “natural” and miraculous, it was also, for a while, a terrifically good idea. It powered things cheaply and well. One of the reasons we are having a hard time turning to alternatives is corporate resistance, but another is that it’s hard to find something nearly as effective. Who would have guessed that old fossilized trees and plants could do so much so well?

To think about oil clearly we need to clear our minds of guilt and blame. Who would have known, even fifty years ago, where all this would lead? Who would have known that it would lead to wars where our young people would die? Who would have believed that we would be capable of warming our own planet and of melting our ice caps? And who would have imagined to what extent the addiction would grow, to the point where all the oil that has spilled below, the millions and millions of gallons, would only be enough to power our country for six hours?¹¹ If these ideas seem too numbing, then consider a more everyday disaster. Who would have known that this substance, celebrated when it came spouting out of wells over a century ago, would have led to what is possibly the most nightmarish, if quotidian, of human miseries? I am talking, of course, about commuting.

For all this, the time for oil is passing. Not for any moral or philosophical reasons, but for practical ones. There simply isn’t enough to keep going. And the little that is left is hidden in places like the Macondo site down below me, places where drilling involves great risk. Do we want to rip the world apart to get those last drops? That is part of what we are talking about when we talk about sacrifice. We will gain oil. What will we lose?

The oil companies know how they would answer that question. And yet this industry, as monolithic and scary as it may seem at the moment, will topple to its knees soon enough. You can hear the industry’s death rattle if you listen closely. The corporations will not go easily, just like the railroad barons. But there is no denying the fact that no matter how deep they dig or how much of the earth they soil, there is only so much left. So what do we do next? And when will we start doing it?

As we head back toward Venice and Buras the pilot points at a giant oil skimmer that he claims is capable of sinking itself. It looks gray and unwieldy, like a battleship, and it is hard to picture it dipping down into the water.

“Kevin Costner just met with the BP bigwigs over in Port Fourchon,” the pilot says. “He’s got a ship that separates oil and water that his company developed. It’s going on the water today.”

Which of course makes sense, since the sinking land and rising water below are essentially Waterworld. I find myself smiling despite the grimness. It’s a common condition down here. If you are in the business of collecting small ironic tidbits then this is the right place for you. Take the fact that the day the rig toppled into the sea, two days after the explosions, was April 22, or as it is also known, Earth Day. ¹² Or try this one on for size: President Obama announced that he was opening up more United States waters to offshore drilling, a decision that would benefit BP first and foremost, twenty days before Deepwater blew.¹³

The president let the press know this on March 31 but he missed a golden opportunity.¹⁴ Had he only waited several more hours, he could have made his announcement on April Fools’ Day.