Well-Oiled Machine

After a reportedly intense meeting with BP that lasted four days, President Obama announced yesterday that the oil giant would set aside (at least) $20 billion for the victims of the Gulf Coast oil spill. At this point, of course, we have a vague if ascertainable idea of the meaning of the word "victims" in this case.

Certainly, those who have lost their jobs and livelihoods as fishermen and shrimpers, probably for the rest of their lives, will be counted among them.

And we might as well also extend that arm to embrace the roughly 20,000 oil service workers who are (momentarily) unemployed or relocated as Obama figures out this whole off-shore drilling thing.

We can probably count as victims the coastal residents whose scenic backyard wetland landscapes will be desolate and black by August.

But consider the following. I took a class of seven-year-olds to see a collection of Joan Mitchell paintings at the Newcomb Art Center at Tulane. Her work is abstract and chaotic, depicting mostly environmental images in splashes of color and wild, uncontrolled lines. They're enormous paintings, taking up entire walls and multiple canvases per image. The curator of the exhibit asked my class what they thought about when they saw the largest piece in the museum. Only one girl raised her hand, and she said, "I see lots and lots of water, and an alligator who is dying, and there's black oil underneath the water, and it's coming to the top." Does BP pay that seven-year-old girl, who will never know another version of the wetlands she grew up loving?

And maybe it's just me, but it seems the most immediately tragic thing about the newspapers these days is the unending collection of photographs, from every press in the country, of the collapsed bodies of birds, crushed and suffocated by clumpy black crude. Now. How do you pay reparations to a pelican?

However, $20 billion is something. Twenty billion dollars suggests that great beasts take great falls, and we must keep that in mind whenever we allow uncontrolled power to go unchecked. In a very well-written editorial this morning, the New York Times commented,

Given the size of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, we suspect that $20 billion may not be enough to compensate all of the people whose lives and futures have been derailed by the spill. But it’s a good start.

Yes. A good start. BP has begun to address the needs of the "small people" (in what is sure to become an infamous comment, BP Chairman Cal-Henric Svanberg said yesterday, "People say that large oil companies don't care about the small people. But we care. We care about the small people."). Now it is time for BP to start addressing the environmental implications of this spill with far more profound aggression.

The $20 billion they have promised to the (assumed) human victims of the spill should be matched to combat with renewed zeal the impending environmental catastrophe that has only just begun to wreak its havoc. More workers, more boom, more blockades, more research, more land to protect more relocated animals -- all are needed in the upcoming days of much, much more surfacing oil. BP's pockets aren't empty yet, after all.

On a separate, but related note, the New York Times should be congratulated for finally running a front page story on similar spills in other parts of the world. The article spells out horror stories from the Niger Delta, Gio Creek, and Akwa Ibom (among other third-world worlds), about spills far worse than this that continue to gush and poison the lives of native people decades after they took place:

Perhaps no place on earth has been as battered by oil [than Nigeria], experts say, leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a few weeks ago, they say, that a burst pipe belonging to Royal Dutch Shell in the mangroves was finally shut after flowing for two months: now nothing living moves in a black-and-brown world once teeming with shrimp and crab.

None of this will come as a surprise to the oil-savvy few who have long controlled these parts of the globe. And it makes sense to them that the Gulf Coast oil spill is such a tremendous snafu. It's simple: American lives are simply worth more, and so more attention should be paid to them. But for the rest of us, who have existed in relative ignorance (or at least intermitted passivity) of the enormous impact our hunger for oil has on the earth we love, a veil has been lifted. As we watch our own lives crumble, it grows impossible not to think of those whose lives have been crumbling for decades, just to keep the fat cats comfortable.