In the Mire & Remembrance

Baby Tern on a barrier island in Barataria Bay, one of the areas hit hardest with BP oil on 2010. This chick and most of the others were swept away with high waters from Debbie.

(Image credit: Julie Dermansky, used with permission)

It's been a while, hasn't it? Things are better and appalling and not forgotten.  Yesterday, I actually thought of that baby tern as a metaphor. Today, I'm in a better and clearer frame of mind. 

Since my last post, I've filed a shelter petition for the young woman I call Lillie (don't even get me started on the legal end of this and what I have to say about child welfare.) I've seen the young man I was worried about land pretty much on his feet, and inch ever closer to aging out. I've seen Keyoncé disappear yet again, into the murky world in which he fails to thrive but doesn't struggle enough in to leave or to die in. Snow White is going to use my car for her operator's driver's license exam and we can have positive conversations again. Marina and Serena are fine in their group homes and in fact, they appear to be thriving. My other two GAL youth, Tammy and Shammy, are doing okay. My "not really my case officially" GAL youth is doing better, though I'm still worried about her living circumstance. Overall the trend is up. But, then again, less than a week ago, I've seen things like this (below) coming back into the home of my brand shiny new GAL youth, whose case I just got on because she is diabetic and this is what her prospective adopter is sending her home  with (late for her medication, no less) from visits: 

(That yellow bag? Cheetos-type fries, mostly gone. The cup? Milkshake. The 24 oz. soda? A FRAKKING 24 ounce soda. The doughnut, the sugary Bubblicious gum, the buttered popcorn. Quantum field help me, what is she eating all afternoon, if this is what worked its way home?)

And yet, in spite of all these many things, what motivated me to write a post is Julie's ongoing, powerful series on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf. Julie is my kind of person. I think I must operate on the same frequency. She isn't letting it go. She won't let us forget. Why? We shouldn't forget. The animals, the people, the everything about what BP did there with the Deepwater Horizon. Everyone and everything along the affected Gulf Coast will be seeing the effects for decades. We must not forget their struggle. 

Please join me in commending Julie's work at the Atlantic. Like it, share it (yes, it's hard to like, but it's important to do so for social media connections and you help her get the recognition to keep on taking these pictures). Spread the word. Stick it to BP. Show them, and the entire industry, that the American attention span isn't quite as short as they hoped...

We will not forget Barataria Bay, its birds, its marine life. Or any place, affected by the DH spill.

Julie- Thank you.

Use Feedburner to subscribe to Bright Nepenthe and receive consolidated posts once a day by email.
Enter your email address:

You will receive a subscription verification email to which you must reply. Thanks for subscribing!
© Bright Nepenthe, 2012

Earth Day

Footage by NASA

Today, April 22, was Earth Day. It was also the two year and two day anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill, an event which will have changed my corner of the earth forever. The video above, a time-lapse sequence gathered by NASA, shows the evolution of the spill for the year following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, on April 20, 2010. Looking at the images at end, you might think, Oh, good, the oil is gone. Or... not as visible. Where did it go, I counter? Where. Did. It. Go?

It's still there.

As the NY Times' op-ed columnist Abrahm Lustgarten dubbed it the other day, the Deepwater Horizon spill is the stain that won't wash away. And that is in more ways than one. Because in addition to the obvious anniversary media coverage, there have been quieter articles, far more disturbing articles, for the past year. Actually, I would go back to that very unsettling piece in Mother Jones in the October/November 2010 issue, about the BP coverup and the hidden damage that was slowly to be revealed. Revealed by what was missing, what was dying and what was diseased. They had this chart, which I can't get out of my head:

Illustration by Nicholas Felton for Mother Jones 

How deep would the damage go they asked? How much would the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem and food web be altered? The article talked about potential damage to krill, phytoplankton, and various keystone species, such as killifish, and what that might do to the entire marine food web. Damage some of these small species and you will potentially wipe out larger fish.

Deformed Gulf Shrimps On the left is a Gulf shrimp with growths, while on the right are a group of shrimps without either eyes or eye sockets. Left: Keath Ladner. Right: Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera

(Image from Popular Science)

From the little guys, like the mutant eyeless shrimp, covered with bizarre lesions that have resulted as of tomorrow in closure of shrimping in the Mississippi Sound, Mobile (Alabama) Bay, Bon Secour, Wolf Bay and Little Lagoon (all also in Alabama) to the giants of the Gulf, how bad is the damage in the Gulf? It is clear there has been widespread ecological damage, whether the government or BP are willing to admit it or not.* The Sarasota Herald-Tribune ran a long article in November, 2011, detailing a truly stunning level of problems in a diverse number of species, from hundreds of dead dolphin washing up on shore (500+ as of November, 2011 and how many more simply sank, I wonder?) to tiny plankton and deepwater coral. Small fish are overtly diseased and large fish, like whale sharks, are nowhere to be found. Let's not get into the cetacean situation, diseased dolphin or the sea turtle situation. Ditto on the human children, living, or should we say just barely getting by, at the water's edge in South Plaquemines Parish, LA. It is too depressing, right? 

This 2011 photo provided by Donald Waters shows a fish harvested from the Gulf of Mexico with unusual lesions and infections. 

(Would YOU eat this fish? I sure wouldn't...)

(Image credit: Donald Waters/AP)

I guess I should just focus on the being good, wise shepherds of our Earth, which is what Earth Day is supposed to make us think about. But that leads me right back to the Gulf of Mexico...


We can look at the complex interplay in the Gulf states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, between the oil industry and the seafood industry as posing the ultimate question. We hear again and again about how we need to be less dependent upon Middle Eastern oil and that our only option is our own limited oil (with a distressing number of years from actually availability, a in a distressingly small supply) or that we need to use our natural gas resources, in spite of its addition of CO₂ upon burning it, and even if we know from ample evidence (watch that little Vimeo video on the upper right sidebar!) that fracking that gas may permanently spoil our water supply. 


On this Earth Day I contemplate what we will do with all that energy when we have less or no food to eat and no freshwater to drink? If it's so crucial for business that we have to use all this gas and oil, who will be buying stuff when they are too hungry and too thirsty to work and go to the mall? What is the plan then Big Oil?


Not long ago, I was surprised that several of my email correspondents knew of, or had read, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which I've mentioned on the blog before as presaging the world out of balance, driven so chemically, by pesticides and industry and cover-ups. Carson was concerned about DDT and it's terrible effects on birds (oh, gee, it's also rather bad for people...). September 27 will mark the 50th anniversary of Carson's book. 


Look how far we've come.


If you want to really think about our 42nd annual Earth Day, I encourage my readers to check out photographer Julie Dermansky's Flickr set Louisiana Wetlands with 249 exquisite photos of what delicate wetlands are supposed to look like. And then, take a look at her BP Oil Disaster series with 600 photos of everything that BP, and the oil industry as a whole, want you to forget. In these two photo sets Julie, whose photos have been featured many a time on this blog, has captured a beautiful world, sullied for a cause that I have a harder and harder time grasping these days.


There's more to come on this topic in the weeks ahead. For instance, what about bees being impacted by neonicotinoid pesticides like Merit, threatening our land-based food supply? (Readers of the blog know that in addition to our fruits and vegetables, much of our livestock feeds on bee pollinated fodder.) What will we do when all the insect pests are resistant to imidacloprid, except for bees, who were our friends?


Every day ought to be Earth Day. For a few posts more, it will be.

---

*Surprisingly, one of the loudest recent clarions has been that of Al Jazeera. The irony of a media outlet in the oil-rich Middle East featuring such evidently controversial material is rich...

Use Feedburner to subscribe to Bright Nepenthe and receive consolidated posts once a day by email.
Enter your email address:

You will receive a subscription verification email to which you must reply. Thanks for subscribing!

© Bright Nepenthe, 2012

Julie Dermansky's One Year Remembrance Album

dead sea turtle painted red at sunset

Friday April 15th, 2011 Waveland, MS

Dead sea turtle on the beach in Waveland Mississippi,  painted red by the Institute for the Marine Mammal Studies so it wont be counted a second time, left on the beach until a crew comes to remove it. 

An unprecedented number of dead young  Kemp's Ridley and Loggerhead  sea turtles have washed up on the shores of Mississippi along the Gulf of Mexico starting almost a year after the BP oil spill. 

Test are being done on the high number of turtle and dolphin corpses found on the beaches but results have not been released. ~ Julie Dermansky

I got Julie Dermansky's Newletter this afternoon when I was sitting in the pediatrician's office with my son. It's really hot in Miami these days and I was drinking a too-sweet Sprite in one of those weird-shade-of-green plastic soda bottles that's made from petroleum. (For a refresher on what we make from petroleum, revisit this post. We might have one like it on things made from corn soon, btw.) Anyway, I opened her email on my little iPad and felt ill, sad and small. About an hour before, I'd just posted my Memo blog post below, saying I'd never forget Deepwater Horizon. But Julie's photos, her most recent blog post, and her recent additions to her Flickr photostream show that sadly, the ones who are not forgetting the most are the animals. And not just marine animals, either. Poisoned water works its way inland. Even terrestrial animals can't forget, if you look at that poor little armadillo in her flicker stream. 


I couldn't finish my soda. I looked at the bottle and all I could think was what price...? What is the real price of this plastic?


So much beauty has been lost to us with BP's Deepwater Horizon spill. Julie relentlessly documents it all. I am proud to help disseminate her work.

dead bird with blue feathers

Saturday April 16- Gulfport Mississippi

All images, and text captions, in this post: © Julie Dermansky, All Rights Reserved, Used With Permission

You can follow Julie's work at The Atlantic. She was in Egypt at Tahir Square in February. She also currently has an exhibit in New Orleans, at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art featuring her work after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. You can see much more of her work at jsdart.com.

Post text © Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Status Quo Bias vs. Simple Veritas

Day 45: Peter Samson, reporter for the Sun puts his hand in an oil patch on the surface of Barataria Bay. 

(Image, Caption Credit: Julie Dermansky, jsdart.com, used with permission)

Status quo bias: "The status quo bias is a cognitive bias which leads people to prefer that things remain the same, or that things change as little as possible, if they absolutely must be altered. While the status quo bias can provide a certain amount of self-protection by encouraging people to make safer choices, it can also become crippling..." (from WiseGeek.com)

I don't know about you but the thought that President Obama basically told us we should just pray about the Gulf oil spill situation seems rather hollow to me. If I'm going to pray for anything, it's that this administration and our Congress come up with a better plan than prayers. In the midst of this catastrophe, our legislators are pretty much frozen in their status quo biased positions, unable to find consensus on what needs to be done to avoid more of the same in the future. For instance, look at the Energy Bill, which is stalled in the Senate where the Democrats cannot agree even among themselves. The cap-and-trade system of penalizing heavy polluters cannot even find full support among Democrats? Of course, the Republicans think that any legislation should be tied exclusively to the oil spill. On and on they go... How is it different from any other times they've dealt with energy issues? It isn't.

I, for one, am just completely disheartened by this administration and by our Congress. I am tired of large corporations and their equally large lies, and tired of politicians who appear to pander to them and allow them to continue to exploit those lies (preparedness? I give you walruses in the Gulf of Mexico and long dead sea turtle experts...) to extract their private profits and spread their liabilities and debts to all of us and to all our environment, as well. And I am utterly disgusted with politicians who apologize to heads of corporations for Congress and the American people calling corporations on their lies (however late that calling is). A $20B USD slush fund? A shakedown? Rep. Barton's comments so offended his own party (or at least it gave them pause for thought about what their voters might think of their party) that he was forced to apologize for his apology or lose his standing as ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce subcommittee. What was the man thinking I wonder?

Veritas: Truth, which has been in short supply. (Largely thanks to BP. You're likely to see more of the same- lack of truth- thanks to BP's evidently beholden legislators and judges.)

You've heard from Jen what the Gulf Spill and its cleanup are really like. If you want to see what the real spill cleanup story is (the images Jen couldn't bear to capture) check out photographer Julie Dermansky's multimedia coverage for The Atlantic, "BP's Slippery Cleanup Effort" and her often poignant Flickr gallery. What do you get to see on the evening news and in your morning paper? Not the truth. You see what BP wants you to see, what they wanted Obama to see. Julie Dermansky shows us more truth than probably many of us can bear. Like Jen, she says it's worse than we think. Listen to Chris Hernandez's story of a day on the beach. A beach you or I hope never to set foot on in its then (probably still) state.

Julie lives in New Orleans and drives down to the Buras area to get these photos. Her camera sees the truth and you should watch, especially because it's exactly what BP doesn't want you to see. Maybe show a few people her video and share it on your Facebook page. I sure did.

I really want to believe that change is possible in this country. But the fact that every politician seems so beholden to some special interest or large corporation makes my hope falter. 

Once again, I suggest that if you really want to see change, you tell your legislators that you do, and your president that you do. Because they are not going to change until you let them know the status quo bias business just isn't working for you any more.

To contact your House Representative and your Senator, you can go to:

https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

http://senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

And write to your President at:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

Baby tern stuck in an oil patch on Grand Isle beach, rescued by Chris Hernandez 

(Image, Caption Credit: Julie Dermansky, jsdart.com, used with permission)

© original text, Bright Nepenthe, 2010