The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (36 page)

 

Bill looked a little dazed as we paddled back to the boat in silence, so I asked him about it later. "Petit Bois is so unconnected to the rest of the world," he said. "You can't hear anything but the tingle of the sand. To come over the dunes and see that regimental deployment—it kinda makes you stiffen up. And then the waves turning up tarballs instead of shells and pebbles. That long line of machines rolling toward you. It's been violated twice: first by the oil and then by the assault to save it. I don't know what the long-term impacts of the cleanup will be. The only thing I'm fairly certain of is that I'll be finding chunks of oil probably for as long as I'm able to keep going there. And I'll worry about it every time I see it. That just pisses me off."

Of course, the White House would tell Bill not to worry. In early August, not long after our visit, energy czar Carol Browner would go on the
Today
show and—in a gaffe redolent of Dubya's "mission accomplished" moment—say, "More than three-quarters of the oil is gone. It was captured, it was skimmed, it was burned, it was contained. Mother Nature did her part." First off, "the oil" here refers to the total leakage, but 17 percent of that was captured directly at the wellhead; it never even entered the water. An honest accounting requires considering only the crude that escaped. Displaying a sort of medieval understanding of biology, Browner also explained, "some of it will become very small microorganisms and disappear into the gulf."

Okay, Browner's no scientist, but she got her numbers from the Department of the Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NOAA should know better—especially when you consider that its administrator is the respected marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco. Of the oil that actually entered the gulf, 9.6 percent had been either skimmed or burned, according to the feds; what Browner and the media seized upon was NOAA's misleading categorization of the other 90.4 percent, which was qualified as dispersed, dissolved, or residual.

The notion that "out of sight" (dispersed or dissolved in this case) equals "gone" has underpinned centuries of environmental abuse. With well over a million gallons of chemical dispersant dumped on the slicks, NOAA, it would seem, hoped to dispel most of the oil to the mythical land of Away and declare victory. But an independent Georgia Sea Grant report authored by five prominent marine scientists has shown that, as of early August, with natural degradation and evaporation taken into account, 70 to 79 percent of the oil remained in the gulf, much of it slimily blanketing the seafloor or hovering in vast plumes, its toxins potentially wrecking our food chain from the bottom up. And that's not even accounting for the oil known to be soaking into coastal wetlands.

Get used to the artful dodges.

 

I'd be lying if I said the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2010 was a miserable place. Most of it was stunning. But there was misery to be found, and over the course of several weeks, I found it. A few days after our sailing trip, I visited the Gulf Coast Research Lab in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and rode in one of Jimbo's SWAT boats to a stretch of marsh grass so coated with oil that my fingers stuck to it. Sprawled across the grass was a long piece of absorbent boom, now black with oil, that had broken loose. Next to it was a big chunk of high-tech flotation foam, probably wreckage from the Deepwater Horizon. It had been reported to BP a week earlier.

At Grand Isle, Louisiana, the beach was closed for miles, blocked off with orange plastic construction screen. Signs on the road advertised
ONSITE DISASTER RELIEF CATERING.
The sand had been scrubbed, spun, and surf-washed so thoroughly by contractors that it sparkled. But at the far end of the island, at Grand Isle State Park, I found a young ranger named Leanne Sarco quietly Q-tipping oil off hermit crabs one at a time. She wore white and was oil-smeared from her shoes to her blond hair. Sarco led me along a path to the last wild beach on the island, a magnet for birds and other wildlife. Crude rippled in the tide pools. The sand was the color of coffee grounds. When you squeezed a handful, globs of black jelly oozed out. The state park had asked BP not to bring in its machinery for fear that the cleanup effort would be more damaging to the ecosystem than the oil. But it was not a pretty sight. She told me that the oil had seeped several feet below the surface and would be bubbling up for years.

The irony nobody wants to talk about is that all the lands in the Mississippi River Delta now hosting cleanup crews are dying anyway. The levees that unnaturally hold back the Mississippi present a perilous Catch-22, ostensibly protecting the land from flooding and storm surges yet helping to ensure that it will all fall into the gulf: square miles of Louisiana vanish every year. Even if we could somehow degrease the hundreds of miles of oily coastline without harming a single bird or blade of grass, the river delta would still most likely cease to exist sometime this century. It's sinking. New Orleans is on course to disappear beneath the waves, the American Atlantis.

That realization sucker-punched me the day I spent in Terrebonne Parish on boom patrol with Virgil Dardar, a fifty-two-year-old man of Cajun and Native American descent. Virgil, who goes by the nickname Kadoo, lives on Isle de Jean Charles, a three-mile spit of dry ground in the marshes thirty miles northwest of Grand Isle. For 170 years, his ancestors survived by fishing and hunting the marshes. They used to farm, too, until their soil became inundated with salt water. Hurricanes like Katrina, Rita, and Gustav have left the island a disaster zone of smashed homes, beached boats, and dead trees. Isle de Jean Charles is crumbling into the water in real time. Stand at the end, dangle your toes over the edge, and watch it go.

The paved road to Isle de Jean Charles cuts across two miles of open water that used to be marsh. Now, waves gnaw at it 24/7. It submerges completely every time a south wind accompanies the high tide, emerging a few hours later and a few millimeters smaller. Even at low tide, much of it is down to one jagged lane. A snaking line of orange cones leads cars along the safest path.

Kadoo has been an oysterman all his life. But the oil spill closed all the oyster grounds, possibly for years, so he'd hired on to patrol those same areas for oil or loose boom. He was surprisingly chipper about it. Good money, a fast skiff, and a hot breakfast and bag lunch every day. Best of all, he felt respected.

Indeed, as Kadoo drove me around with BP's Chatt Smith, I realized the company would be utterly lost without local watermen like Kadoo. The area is changing so fast that the maps are virtually useless. When we left the dock, we boated beneath power lines that had been on dry ground thirty years ago. They were sunk deep, their poles cocked at alarming angles, and the boat channel ducked right through them. Dead cypress and oak trees stuck out of the water, their skeletal trunks bleached by the sun. I asked Kadoo if he remembered them. "Oh, sure," he said, "them trees was alive fifteen years ago."

Bill Finch had explained to me how freakish the presence of a seawater-killed cypress community was: "You'll never see a salt marsh next to bald cypress unless something's gone wrong. In Louisiana, it's gone wrong. The marsh is retreating so fast that it's being slammed into these cypress, and they're dying." Ever seen a healthy cypress swamp? Moss-draped trunks stand in a few feet of fresh water, the air thick with honeysuckle and the thrum of buzzing cicadas. Fish stir the waters, and alligator eyes poke out of it. In the ferns, tree frogs trill. It's the original Dagobah, and you wouldn't be surprised if Yoda came tottering out of his mud hut to hail you as you passed. To know a place so supple and dense with life and then witness its transition to nothing but dead trunks and salt water must be profoundly demoralizing.

But that's what has happened in Terrebonne Parish. Southern Louisiana, which sits on nothing but Mississippi River mud up to several miles deep, has always sunk, but the sediment from the flooding river, as well as storm surge from the gulf, have always replenished it, slowly building up the land. Since the last ice age, which ended 10,000 years ago, the Mississippi has extended the marshes as much as fifty miles into the gulf. The river's levee system choked that off, and 10,000 miles of canals—dug through the marshes by an oil industry in search of new reservoirs—delivered two crushing blows to the erosion-halting marsh grasses, disrupting natural water-flow patterns, which left the grass drowned or dried out for extended periods, and bringing lethal salt water in.

As we navigated our way out of a liquid labyrinth, it was not lost on me that my guide through this land of the dead was actually named Virgil. We came to a spot on the map called Lake Tambour, then to Lake Barre, then Lake Felicity, but it was all water. Chatt explained that the chart was an older one and that each "lake" had once been enclosed among bayous. Long gone.

I asked Kadoo if the population of the island was going down. "It ain't comin' up," he said. "We lose a few more every hurricane."

"You know you're going to have to leave someday," Chatt said gently.

"When I die," said Kadoo. I asked what he planned to do when the BP job ended. "Stick with this spill-response stuff," he said. "I got my training. Always be a spill somewhere."

 

From space, southern Louisiana looks like a bunch of tattered clothes hanging in the gulf, and the raggedy ends simply disintegrate in the rinse cycle of each hurricane. This lost land is a literal gap in national security: the natural buffering of storm surges once enjoyed by New Orleans has been severely reduced over the past century. It's the canals dredged by the oil industry that give big storms the keys to the city, making all the difference between Katrina being a nuisance and being a catastrophe.

Many experts think that at some point this century, almost everything on the Gulf Coast south of I-10 may very well have been sliced clean off the United States. (Driving from Biloxi to Houston? Enjoy those gorgeous ocean views!) That is, unless there's an energized national effort to restore the gulf. We must resist the country's tendency to write off the whole area. Make no mistake: this is no eulogy. While you were being told that the Gulf of Mexico had been fatally damaged, I was sailing through a paradise of pompano, shorebirds, and the most abundant dolphin populations I've ever seen. The gulf is not just worth saving; we
must
save it—especially from itself.

While I was in Louisiana, there was an event at the Cajundome, in Lafayette, called the Rally for Economic Survival: 11,000 packed the place to hear the governor, the lieutenant governor, and, of all people, the executive director of the Louisiana Seafood Marketing and Promotion Board rail against the Obama administration for stealing their jobs by imposing a six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling.

"Enough is enough!" raged the lieutenant governor, Scott Angelle, in his thick Cajun accent. "Louisiana has a long and strong, distinguished history of fueling America, and we proudly do what few other states are willing to do ... America is not yet ready to get all of its fuel from the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees!"

True, but of the six billion to seven billion barrels of oil consumed by the United States each year, only about 10 percent comes from federal Gulf of Mexico waters; we get the same amount from both the Persian Gulf and Canada. Louisiana is no longer a significant source of crude, onshore or offshore. What it does supply is cheap labor and a pliant local government. In this, it's eerily reminiscent of Third World places ruined by oil. The BPs of the world would have you believe oil brings prosperity to the countries where it's discovered, but it brings misery so dependably that economists have a name for the phenomenon: the resource curse.

Ecuador, Venezuela, Iraq: bad things happen to countries "blessed" with oil. The Niger Delta is the Mississippi River Delta's separated-at-birth twin, offering the scariest cautionary tale of all. This tropical river delta held some of the greatest wetlands on earth, with abundant shellfish, crabs, and shrimp, the foundation of the economy and culture, but it also harbored vast oil reserves. In the past fifty years, Shell has grown preposterously wealthy off that oil, while Nigeria, with the tenth-largest oil reserves in the world, has become a postapocalyptic wasteland. Almost three times as much oil has spilled into the Niger Delta as was spilled by the Deepwater Horizon: 546 million gallons and counting. The creeks are black, and the crabs and shrimp are dead. There are always leaking, corroded wellheads and pipelines. Gangs of rebels and oil thieves roam the jungle. Flaring rigs fill the air with mercury, arsenic, and carcinogens. Disease is rampant. The government is cardboard.

Southern Louisiana is no Nigeria, but it's also no longer quite recognizable as the United States. The trailer homes on pilings, the dearth of education, the chronic disease, the fat parish chiefs—I know the Third World when I see it. Cajuns haven't grown rich on crude; Houston has. And when the oil runs out, there's nothing left to fall back on.

I bet Angelle would simply argue that oil is worth billions more than seafood. But that's only because we aren't sophisticated enough to put a value on all the multifarious "ecosystem services" the gulf provides: benefits of the natural world, resources and processes we all too often take for granted. If we were to add these things to the ledger—all that gulf seafood and the health savings from it, the hurricane protection and wildlife habitat in all those marshes, to name only a few—and apply the calculus of their self-perpetuating sustainability, the astronomical value would blow your mind. It leaves petroleum in the pit. We can get oil from a hundred different places. What we can't get elsewhere are the Gulf of Mexico's oyster reefs and wetlands.
Best on the planet.
How much are all those acres of disappearing land worth? What price the mental anxiety of a culture watching its homeland disintegrate? How much added value do you assign oyster reefs because they've never, ever blown up and killed anyone? It's only ignorance—an inability to tally all the gains and losses—that makes oil look good.