May 21, 2010
The Marshlands
The BP oil spill has finally hit Louisiana’s coastal marshlands. The above photo was taken during Gov. Bobby Jindal’s recent tour of the eco-disaster.
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comments:
- Joel Bernstein: I know right?
- Rick Neece: Being nice is a dainty way to put it.
- Rick Neece: Hey Cristopher? Who cried “uncle” first, at the end of your ten-year stand-off? To quote my...
- Michael Smith: Ours is the kitchen.
- Amy Mabli: That’s what happens when you give the dogs the bed.
- Deron Bauman: Sweet Jesus.
- Michael Smith: Don’t we all.
- Pam: I have a story coming out soon in a ‘little mag’, Chicago Quarterly Review. An old friend recently...
- Pam: And I thought, somedays, that my work was meaningless…
- Pam: I remember Eggleston at the Art Institute in Chicago a couple years ago. He was elegantly dressed in a dark suit...
- Christopher Walken: Hey Clusterflockers, Realize y’all are hurting. I’ve been a really close friend of my...
- Marco: This works pretty well in mobile, more so in iOS
- Michael Smith: It was not the intent of management to imply all sissies are “namby pamby”. Management was...
- Rick Neece: I take umbrage with the term “namby pamby.” Some sissies are fierce.
- Carole Corlew: Shelia. Happy no big deal day. I would start your very own post but this phone is in semi rebellion.
Bobby wants less government.
Yes, I seem to remember quite a bit of breast-beating regarding federal stimulus dollars. And something about volcano monitoring.
This entire oil spill is really just BP, as a person, excercising its right to free speech. And, under the provisions of the 1st amendment, BP’s actions are protected as the oil is just BP’s way of expressing a very common sentiment, “fuck the planet.”
“Bobby wants less government.” That’s a follow up to the Descendents’ “Milo goes to College.”
Did you know BP stands for British Petroleum? I think this is 1776 payback time.
“Oh yeah, we’ll plug that right up. After you return control of the colonies to Her Majesty!”
“You guys thought throwing TEA in the water was funny…”
Everybody jockeying for position (I’ve done it too)–but the magnitude of this catastrophe will soon negate distance from the facts in a way that will generate a belated perspective. The phrase food chain means so little to people who think the source of food is refrigerators. When I see marshes steeping in oil, I think of the fecund bio-mass the place represents–trillions of creatures interacting–now suddenly doomed, dying at this moment. We should be listening to the scream such vast destruction makes, but we are too busy with governments, industry, and angry gods to listen for such a sound.
I agree Daryl. The worst part of the coverage has been the environmental groups who talk about the impact on birds, and how narrowminded it is to think that this wont affect our food sources.
The chemical dispersants (which the government finally told them to stop using) were especially worrysome, all over the ocean floor and in fish… We might not know for years what this will do to our bodies.
I did hear a woman on the radio talking about the impact this is going to have on our aquatic food sources and one of the things she said that seemed so right on to me was that we’re just as likely to make shit worse trying to clean the oil out of the water (specifically the marshes). These are, she said, very fragile ecosystems, it’s true, and so far our, get the oil out of the water (off the plants and animals) solutions aren’t very gentle (she spoke of power washing and sand bars – that will likely alter the ecosystem in equally destructive ways).
The punch line, and depressing fact, is that there really isn’t much we can do once the oil gets to these places except watch and wait and hope the life in these marshes is resilient.
It got me thinking that a lot of what we want to do, and the reason we focus on birds, is brush the oil under the rug, hide the mess. You can’t see chemical dispersants, so use those. You can’t see altered marsh currents, build sandbars.
Shit. This is depressing.
Those fucking republicans!
Yes. I like seafood, but will be suspicious of much of it now–and that has to be a view many will take up. I guess I am pained by all of it, though–from the birds down to the microscopic creatures the fish eat that the birds eat, and up from there to the people who have made lives for themselves for many generations on boats in the gulf. In the end I think there is a value there that is larger than we are. A fishing industry ruined because a storm destroys all the boats in one thing, but an industry ruined because we suffocated and poisoned all the “fish” is another. Vonnegut once described humans as a virus the Earth is trying to shake off. I think we are doing a pretty good job of limiting our future presence here.
“we are this planet’s kidney stones
In the process of getting passed…”