Voices from the Flats – The Heartbreak of an Early Spring Day
Bill Sherwonit has been a freelance nature writer since 1992. His most recent book, “Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness” is now available HERE. For nearly a quarter-century, Bill has written extensively about wild lands and wildlife. Though he continues to journey into the wilderness each year, he has also paid increasing attention to the wild nature of his home landscape: Anchorage. He is the author of 12 books about Alaska, including three books about Denali, two about the Iditarod, and others about the Brooks Range and the necessity of wilderness, his evolving relationship with wild nature, Alaska’s bears and state parks.
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The Heartbreak of an Early Spring Day
by Bill Sherwonit
I didn’t realize how hard the Gulf of Mexico oil spill had hit me until I called my sweetheart, Helene, this morning.
“Hi, how are you doing?” she asked in greeting.
“I’m kind of low,” I hesitantly replied, caught off guard by a voice that began to crack, by tears pooling in my eyes.
Helene and I then talked about the spill, simply the latest in a long string of indignities and greater harms we humans have done to the wild Earth, but awful nonetheless. Unlike the subtler scourge of global warming, this clearly is a here-and-now catastrophe of unimaginable scale and worsening by the minute. Like me, Helene has been saddened and outraged by both the spill and what seems to be an insufficient and – until the last day or two – overly restrained response to it, not only by BP but also the government and the media.
Since our phone conversation, I’ve been thinking about why this spill has hit me so hard. Partly it’s because I still clearly remember the Exxon Valdez spill; I saw first-hand some of an oil spill’s devastation, then for years tracked its lingering effects on Prince William Sound and both its human and wildlife communities. It’s like having an old injury, largely healed, but still possible to re-damage. And now it has been.
I also recall a conversation I had last week with a friend, the first to tell me that an oil rig had exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. We intuitively knew it had to be an awful thing. But we consoled ourselves that maybe, in the bigger picture, something like this would end the insanity of increased offshore oil exploration along much of America’s coast, including Arctic Alaska. It turns out the spill has exceeded our worse imaginings; even if it puts additional offshore drilling on hold, as President Obama has promised, how many lives are going to be destroyed or otherwise ruined along the way?
I’m outraged by what seems to be the casual response, the apparent indifference, shown by both the government and media in the days following the blowout. After the initial shock and media coverage of the explosion and loss of human life, it seemed the dangers to the gulf itself and neighboring coastline were underreported, underplayed. For several days the story was relegated to the inside pages of our own Anchorage Daily News, which would seem to have a great and natural interest in reporting such a disaster, given Alaska’s own history. Perhaps convinced by industry “experts” that the spread of oil was not an immediate threat to the Gulf Coast, the federal government too seemed to hold back, rather than do everything in its power to stop or at least slow the oil’s spread through the gulf and eventually toward land. Residents of Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states have good reason to again feel betrayed by their government, by those who are supposed to be watchdogs and regulators and responders.
But more than anything I’m saddened. We Americans – like people everywhere, I suppose – have such short memories. Didn’t the Exxon Valdez clearly show it only takes one spill to do incredible, long-lasting damage? But we forget and so Americans in recent years have grown more supportive of increased oil exploration, both onshore and off. Many of us “naysayers” to such exploration and development have argued that it’s only a matter of time before another “accident” occurs. But of course we’re shouted down as unpatriotic alarmists and obstructionists.
I’m saddened too that our president and his administration have supported increased offshore development, perhaps seduced by oil industry arguments that new know-how and technologies would prevent the very thing that is now damaging Louisiana’s shores and all manner of life forms.
I’m also – and perhaps especially – saddened by the timing of this spill, which couldn’t be worse from an ecological perspective. The Gulf Coast is being oiled during the season of rebirth and renewal, of breeding and rearing. It’s a time, as one biologist noted, when birds flock to the Gulf Coast. It’s normally a time of plenty, too, for local fishermen. But now those who harvest shrimp and oysters and other seafood are on the edge of despair, if not already sinking into it. You can feel the sense of impending loss, of lives disrupted and maybe wrecked for a long time to come.
All of this is happening at a time when my own life and spirit have been brightened and enlivened by the gradual greening of our landscape here in Anchorage and the arrival of migratory birds to our shores and forests and neighborhoods. On a woodland walk just yesterday, I noticed the leafing out of elderberry and wild rose, the sprouting forms and opening leaves of cow parsnip and baneberry and tiny ferns, of forget-me-nots and Jacob’s ladder and tall fireweed, the stalks of horsetails, to name a sampling. Last week along the Coastal Trail, I listened to the cacophony made by thousands of waterfowl, including hundreds of snow geese and hundreds more Canada geese, whose voices mixed with the mewing of gulls and the primordial roarking of sandhill cranes. And this morning I listened with delight to the sweet warbled songs of a robin and the screeching calls of a merlin.
How wonderful and spirit-lifting this season is. And yet how awfully horrible it has become, both along another large stretch of fragile and biologically rich American coastline and within us who live far from the catastrophe but know the wrenching suffering of what’s happening right now, in this season of new life.
Thank you, Bill.
L’Shalom.
Beautifully written. I lived in Seward the year of the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound. What turned me against believing anything that the oil companies said, was to find full page ads in the Anchorage Times about 1) how they voluntarily started using double hulled tankers (yeah right, it became law and it has still not been complied with, and 2) how well the Sound was recovering. This was the same year as the spill mind you, and not much was recovering at all yet. Liar liar pants on fire! That’s my big problem – no matter what they say, or say they do – you cannot absolutely, not at all, not one bit, trust them to tell the truth. It’s why the Republicans like them, and run them, and believe in them, because they are all about grandiose, lying purely for profit.
Very well said!
Most of the oil will never be cleaned up. Not that we didn’t already know that.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0430/Experts-Most-of-Gulf-of-Mexico-oil-spill-won-t-be-cleaned-up
Thanks for a great article.
it’s a freakin nightmare
Now that the SCOTUS has given these corporations “personhood” status under the Constitution, I want to see them held “personally” and criminally liable for damages. But, of course that will never happen. Even if large financial damages are awarded, they’ll just keep running it through the courts with their batteries of high paid lawyers until they find a sympathetic judge who reduces the penalty to a pittance. And then we will be left to deal with the years and years of damage to the environment and peoples’ lives in the Gulf Coast communities.
Conservatives love to bleat about government give-aways to poor people and the entitlement welfare mentality of those who receive public assistance.The unsaid reality is that we – the people – have been subsidizing big oil since the very beginning. They have never paid more than a fraction of the true cost of developing petroleum energy reserves. And yet they complain that subsidies to develop alternative energy sources (solar, wind, etc) place them in a position of unfair disadvantage. THAT is the biggest entitlement mentality around. They’ve been getting unrecognized government subsidies for so long, they don’t think they can live without them.
Recognition of corporate ‘personhood’ my a**. It’s high time we, the people, remembered that regulations of corporate behavior are essential to protect ourselves against pure, unbridled greed. The tea baggers talk about taking our country back – from the blacks, the gay, the Democrats, from OTHER. In reality we need to take it back from the bottomless pockets of the multinational corporations and their corporatist Republican lap dogs in Congress.
While I’m a long way from adopting the wingnut notion that this is “Obama’s Katrina”, I am disappointed with the government’s willingness to accept BP’s “We’ve got it under control” for almost a week before it switched to “Oh God it’s a feckin catastrophe.”
I don’t think that the actual government response would have been much different — you put out the booms, you drop the dispersants — but it would have been nice just once to see a reaction like “Under control? Prove that”, since everyone with supra-algal mentality knows that the first reaction of any corporation to a possible problem is “No sweat, we’ve got it under control”.
It’s a sad, sad situation. I suspect that it’s gonna kill the Delta wetlands, which haven’t been in the greatest shape in recent years, anyhow. And then we’re deep into side-effects.
Ach, now I’m getting depressed. Think again. There is still a lot of Earth left. Concentrate on preserving what remains; only remember what is lost.
You NAILED it!
NOW…what can we DO about righting all that is wrong?
We’ve made a start.
But, there’s got to be a way to TRULY harness the power of this SERIES of TUBES to take back the rightness – the reality and the humanity – that the greedy have so blindly and – WRONGLY – taken away.
Let’s keep chinking away at those bricks in the wall…
You NAILED it!
NOW…what can we DO about righting all that is wrong?
We’ve made a start.
But, there’s got to be a way to TRULY harness the power of this SERIES of TUBES to take back the rightness – the reality and the humanity – that the greedy have so blindly and – WRONGLY – taken away.
Let’s keep chinking away at those bricks in the wall…
Thank you Mr. Sherwonit- for a poignant article. – Even though the government under Obama’s administration did not hard knuckle the oil companies at the beginning of the spill, I know that President Obama will learn the “lesson” (unlike Bush) and ramp up America’s plans for alternative energy development and stop offshore drilling. Remember President Obama lives somewhat in a “sheltered” world and doesn’t necessarily know things right away.
I can’t add anymore other than to say thank you for this article.
Please allow me to rage for a moment or two.
Those stupid clucks that chant drill baby drill are a bunch of whinney losers who ain’t seen nothing all their pea brained life.
I urge all you drill baby drill clacking clucks to pick up your oil laced fat arses and hike on down to Louisana to clean up beaches. Don’t forget to bring some baby wipes for your snotty dirty brown noses.
Your drill baby drill chant is just plain stoooooopid. And you look like fools without a clue. Nevermind that it sounds like your sucking up to big oil corporate ick.
Quyana for letting me rant.
Nice piece of writing by the way. I haven’t been able to watch news reports of the gulf ’spill’ and maybe now I can stomach it. This piece says that someone else feels the horror of a spill. Today, my visions are way back in Prince William Sound and the trees. I used to live there. My life was a good one. My little family was happy and healthy. But when I see news reports of the oil slicks in the gulf, I swear I can smell North Slope crude sloshing along Prine William Sounds shores. And the horror of looking up at branches of trees and realizing they are shinny with oil, is a memory that just won’t go away. (the wind had picked up a few days after the Exxon Valdez spill and frothed up the crude. It made bubbles and they floated up, popping in the trees and leaving behind their shiny icky film.
I always enjoy reading articles from this man. His words put such clear pictures in my mind of his stories/tales. (though the use of the word cacophony brings to mind the bone-chilling speeches of Ms. Palin)
Excellent piece, Bill. Enjoyed your book this winter about Anchorage wilderness also.
Yes, the sadness is crushing.