This was never more evident than after I finished reading Charles Wohlforth’s The Fate of Nature (2010), which has a few ominous chapters dedicated to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Wohlforth was a journalist who covered the spill in the field and after reading his account, I was humbled by the realization that none of my observations of the BP oil spill were orignal. The landscape is almost exactly the same, except for the fact that BP is going to wind up paying less money for a bigger disaster and that photoshop didn’t exist yet, so Exxon couldn’t tamper photographs of their control room.

Wohlforth’s thoughts about the Exxon spill are in blockquotes:

As I spent more time on the sound, in the oil, the press conferences and carnival of activity in Valdez seemed increasingly irrelevant and disconnected from reality. Exxon officials always announced numbers — miles of boom, numbers of skimmers, million of dollars spent — facts that, if they meant anything at all, couldn’t be checked.

Yep.

When the workers began landing on oiled beaches they were given oil-absorbent rages to wipe off individual rocks.”

In the Gulf of Mexico, it’s paper towels and saltmarshes.

A man said that taking an Exxon paycheck for doing nothing was his way of punishing the company.”

I heard one fisherman in the Vessel of Opportunity program say that the BP oil spill was God’s way of redistributing wealth.

Did the cleanup as a whole do more harm than good? The question is unanswerable without defining good. It benefited Exxon and its competitive corporate-government paradigm. Cleaning eliminated most visible evidence of oil. The effort took so long world attention turned to other issues and anger faded. A diminished Prince William Sound became the new baseline for the next generation of people. Today the spill has passed into history and Exxon still rules the world. Good also, perhaps, from the point of view of human users of the beaches, since the cleanup may have hastened the time when they felt safe eating clams, fish, and seals again. Cleaning probably shortened the the time active contamination affected some species. But if good is defined as the total health of the ecosystem, it’s probably that much less cleaning would have been better. Oil would have been dispersed anyway, more slowly but without the cleanup’s many environmental costs. And more of the visible black asphalt would have remained, biologically inert but a powerful warning about the costs companies like Exxon impose on our shared birthright. Cleaning removed the evidence, but not the damage.

BP has used more than 1.8 million gallons of dispersant.

“…Kindhearted television viewers were instead dealt the ahppy ending of seeing treated animals released, as if cured, rather than images of terminally disabled otters being euthanized. By denying them the truth, the Fish and Wildlife Service compounded the harm of the oil spill.”

BP allows a lot of media access, but it’s the kind of media they want. At the rehabilitation center, reporters can watch oiled birds getting clean. They can’t see them dead (see photo; that’s a crime scene and apparently not media worthy).

Exxon sent checks to vessel owners who had volunteered in the clean up. An average boat chartered for $3,000 a day, almost all profit, since expenses were paid separately by Exxon. As the boats stayed out for weeks and month, often with hardly anything to do, life-changing sums of money accumulated; owners of big boats, or of more than one, became spillionaires.

Yep. This is true, too.

Note: the Center for American Progress also has some excellent posts that compare the two oil spills and analyze how Exxon managed to make money and avoid punishment after their spill.

Exxon oil estimated to have spilled into Prince William Sound: 11 million gallons
BP oil estimated to have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico: 172 million gallons

So when we talk about how BP’s Oil Spill Bill Could Dwarf Exxon’s Valdez Tab we should remember that BP’s oil spill also dwarfed Exxon’s. And is the assertion that the tab is bigger even true? Well, in nominal and real terms, yes.

Cost of the Exxon clean up: $2 billion (1989 dollars) or $3.58 billion (2010 dollars)*
Cost of the BP clean up: $6.1 billion (2010 dollars)

But if we standardize for size of the spill, BP’s tab is far too low. Given that the BP spill is more than 15 times larger than the Exxon spill, we should also assume they should spend 15 times more on cleanup than Exxon did, or around $53.7 billion dollars — $47.6 billion more than BP has spent.

*Assumes $1.00 in 1989 has the same buying power as $1.79 in 2010

Josiah & Kejeaun, Jennings, LA

Don Houghton, New Orleans, LA

Joshua Carter, Clayton, TX

John Smith, New Orleans, LA

Zack Vincent, Brent Smith, & Robby Khader, New Orleans, LA

Many people are certainly angry at BP. The Facebook Boycott BP page had 350,000 followers in early June and is now up to 825,000 people. BPGlobalPR, an adbusting on Twitter, has more than 186,000 followers. In New Orleans, there were many anti-BP t-shirts. British people we met in New Orleans were hiding their accent. William Wilson from Lincoln, England said this:

Soon after the spill, BP began strategizing about a major ad campaign to convince the public that BP “will get this done” and “make it right”. They have invested more than $50 million in their message. Down in the Gulf there is also a lot of media access to the places BP would like media to be. Is all this communication paying off?

A look at BP stock shows that their share price was up even before the cap was in place:

Do people hate BP? Yes. Does it matter? It must. Most CEOs believe that corporate brand reputation outranks financial performance as the most important measure of a company’s success. But this ideal is not necessarily mirrored by investors, particularly the batch of people (and there are many) who have recently invested in BP. To them, the potential of profit trumps public sentiment.

This is a red state with a lot of blue problems and Capt. Holmes has the self-sufficiency and paradoxical politics common down here in Louisiana. He built his getaway in Grand Bayou Village (pictured below), which essentially floats on salt marsh mud, using salvaged materials. He voted Obama but likes a lot of what Palin says. He wants to see more renewable energy. He forgot his pistol on our trip. He chain smokes and eats off the land. He loves Louisiana and the bayou. Seeing it through his eyes, it was impossible not to. He was also the only one of us willing to suck helium off the balloon for the sake of a laugh.

Holmes and others are worried about the effects of the spill on the salt marshes. From an abstract of a 2004 paper* on the effects of the Spanish oil spill on salt marsh soils, “oil pollution altered both chemical and physical soil properties, aggregating soil particles in plaques, lowering porosity, and increasing resistance to penetration and hydrophobicity.” The wetlands in the Mississippi River Delta already had it rough due to oil development in the area and pollution from upstream. Katrina didn’t help, either. Wetlands in the region have been receding by about 24 square miles a year and this makes Holmes and others on the bayou terrified for the wildlife, the fishing, and their homes.

But why bother mapping it? There are many reasons, as Kris Ansin, an MPH student at Tulane who is helping coordinate the mapping effort, pointed out. The imagery has finer resolution than even classified satellites, although many groups are doing aerial photography that will be used in litigation. The project is also a way of decentralizing the mapping process, of empowering communities/citizens to work together to produce their own images and to give them the skills to do it anytime, anywhere. You can use a kite or a balloon (the availability of helium can impede the balloon’s use) and a pretty basic camera secured in the top of a two liter soda bottle. We trained earlier this week outside the New Orleans Art Museum with a kite but wound up using a balloon on the bayou because there was little wind. I look forward to sharing the map from our trip, which should take a few weeks to process (in the meantime, check out our grassroots mapping set on Flickr). With very little funding, the project has supported about 50 mapping trips (see some of the data here). They have a gallery of neat images on Flickr, too.

Ansin was also in the GIS course that was setting up an Ushahidi platform (meaning ‘testimony’ in Swahili; it was first designed to map incidents of violence in Kenya, after the election fall out in 2008 and I wonder if it would be a good way to track llegal fishing reports on the high seas or elsewhere) where citizens could report oil accidents to the LA Bucket Brigade. Although the map was meant to track refinery incidents, it went live the same day the Deepwater Horizong platform exploded.

*Andrade et al. Effect of the Prestige Oil Spill on Salt Marsh Soils on the Coast of Galicia (Northwestern Spain) Journal of Environmental Quality 33:2103-2110 (2004).

Last Wednesday, I saw an email from SEED editor Adam Bly, which everyone knows about by now, in which he defended SEED’s decision to allow PepsiCo a platform to voice their wisdom and science of nutrition. I figured PepsiCo’s Food Frontiers was actually a new frontier of blogwashing. I also figured Adam was fighting a losing battle when his justification to add PepsiCo included the fact they make Quaker Oatmeal. A few clicks and I realized people were justifiably unhappy. Because I was down here in the Gulf just preparing to post a series of pieces on the oil spill, I had my own self-obsessed worries that I would have to make a quick migration (which, after seeing all the oiled birds, seemed almost apt) out of principle and solidarity. Then, something happened.

The people spoke. And, more important, SEED listened. In the afternoon, Adam sent another email saying that SEED would do a better job in flagging the blog as a corporate blog. This job was not good enough. The next morning (less than 24 hours later) Adam sent another email saying that PepsiCo’s Food Frontier blog was cancelled.

In my own mind, I viewed the cancellation as a coup. Yes, I also agree with Abel Pharmboy that everything could have been done better from the start. But Adam’s reversal of his decision could not have come easily and was something profoundly democratic — in a similar vein to what happened on my.barackobama.com after President Obama changed his vote on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (in that case, the people did not get their way, but they also were not silenced; for more on this point, listen to this talk by Clay Shirky). Perhaps feeling the power of social media, Adam even opened his own blog.

And yet I continue to see this mass exodus from scienceblogs. I don’t know if this is for the best (i.e., some people are using PepsiCo as a way out of something they wanted out of anyway). Or, rather, if I am missing something. But my main concern is that the system is punishing someone/an institution that ultimately (and quickly) gave in to the system. That doesn’t seem fair. It certainly doesn’t seem compassionate.

Unless I am missing something, I believe we should all stay. And those who have left should come back. Changing one’s mind is the best proof you still have one.

There were plenty of people opposed to the use of Corexit and one woman rightfully demanded to know why it was banned in Europe but still legal in the U.S. (read more about this issue on the ProPublica blog). There were accusations that the President was doing nothing and that everything should be left to the locals. There was another woman who pinned most of her argument on the psychological trauma children experience during disasters. There were boys who calmly asked us to stop driving and to contextualize this spill in terms of neoliberalism. There were cries that we needed to allow scientists more access (that was interesting).

I wondered what William Faulkner, that celebrated southern writer who once lived just up street from the protest (his home is now a quaint bookstore), would have said. One line of his comes to mind: A man’s moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

As you can see, birds are hit hardest (or most often discovered). So we headed to the International Bird Rescue’s Buras, LA operation, where they take many of the oiled pelicans, gulls, and terns.

Most of the birds spend 2-3 weeks in recovery and they spend the first week very stressed out due to all the human handling. Because of the stress, the Bird Rescue Center often let the bird rest 5 days or so before they begin the cleaning process. Then the oiled birds get washed with Dawn dish soap, hosed with water, and treated with tender care by a team of vet techs. I asked Bruce Miller with U.S. Fish & Wildlife whether he thought these birds were getting better health care than many Americans and responded diplomatically, saying he leaves ideologies at the door and does his job, which is to save these birds. (The people at the Buras facility could not give an estimated price per bird but it cost an estimated $15,000 per marine bird for the 627 birds released after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill).

The brown pelicans (pictured here) have a strong likelihood if survivorship if they can be rescued and cleaned. Their delisting from the U.S. Endangered Species List last November positioned them to be an icon of success of banning DDT and protecting bird habitat. However, the Gulf oil spill is impacting their numbers (an estimated 16,000 nesting pairs along the Louisiana coast) and their nesting sites, which has sparked talks of a relisting. The gulls have also been doing well at the rescue center but not the terns, who are picky eaters and more sensitive to stress.

When asked what made this spill different, Mark Russell of IBRRC said, “it’s everywhere”. I asked about what would happen with the incoming migratory birds. “We don’t even want to talk about them,” Russell said.

A lot of people want to volunteer. It’s important to realize that BP is obligated to pay for the clean-up so they have hired a gang of recently graduated vet techs. In terms of donations, it’s better, Russell said, to give to local wildlife rehabilitation centers that work on these issues year round and don’t get high profile exposure.

Outside, the pelicans were looking freshly laundered. There was a reason for this: the Dawn soap also stripped them of their natural oils and so they were in a holding pen until their sleeker look came back. Once they regained their natural waterproofing, they would be transported to a state park in Georgia or Florida perhaps, with hopes that the oil wouldn’t reach them again or vice versa. This was another thing that made this spill different. There is just more oil coming, which makes it impossible to release the birds into the same habitat where they were found.