In memory of Gabriel García Márquez, March 6, 1927-April 17, 2014.
In September of 2009, the BP corporation dug the deepest oil well in
history. The 35,055-foot deep Tiber prospect, 300 miles off the Texas
coast, promised six billion barrels: one of the largest oil fields ever
discovered in the country. So of course, they kept looking for more:
They moved their massive drilling rig named
Deepwater Horizon fifty miles south of the Louisiana coastline, to a prospect called
Macondo, named after the setting of the famous book
100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez.
On April 20, 2010, as they began to seal the well, something went
wrong: a mix of oil and gas escaped, rushing up through earth and water,
blowing up the
Deepwater Horizon, and killing eleven workers,
whose bodies were never recovered. Over the next eighty seven days, the
whole world watched as over 200 million gallons of oil erupted from the
ocean floor into the Gulf of Mexico.
It was the largest oil spill in history – more than ten times the
size of the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska. The images of animals
covered in oil began to haunt our screens again, and the scale of death
was so great it still seems impossible to quantify – estimates of the
number of birds killed within the first hundred days ranges between
100,000 and one million. But the real nightmare was offshore, as
riptides and hired hands collected thousands of animal carcasses into
“death gyres”. Riki Ott explains:
“Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen managed to get the
only footage of what I came to call the ‘death gyres.’ the rip currents
that collected dead animals offshore. The Incident Command – BP and the
US Coast Guard – kept the media 1,500 feet up in the air so the press
couldn’t really capture the situation there. The animal carcasses were
corralled, taken out to sea, and dumped at night, according to fishermen
who were involved with so-called ‘Night-time Operations.’ Offshore
workers reported ‘thousands of dolphins, birds too numerous to count,
sea turtles too numerous to count,’ and even whales in the death gyres.”
(Earth at Risk, Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet, edited by Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith, p. 49)
Five years later, what can we say? If hindsight is 20-20 then
presumably we can learn from our mistakes. How did it happen? Was it
BP’s fault? Or is there a bigger picture to blame? Five years later, the
common sense of this tragedy has yet to dawn, as if the oil has clogged
our hearts and minds along with our oceans and beaches. Like the
pioneers of Márquez’s Macondo, searching for a way through the swamp, we
seem lost, desperately hacking our way through nature and through our
own nature. And the past, like the path, seems to always be disappearing
behind us.
“…and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the
monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad.
The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient
memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before
original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their
machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. . . . They
could not return because the strip that they were opening as they went
along would soon close up with a new vegetation that almost seemed to
grow before their eyes.” (Márquez, p. 11-12)
How did it Happen?
“The main thing is not to lose our bearings.” (Márquez, p. 12)
Whodunit? What was the crime scene, and who are the criminals? What
murder weapon spawned gyres of death? Five years later, we must look
through the tangled jungle of events which have grown up behind us, and
remember how we got here. Michael Klare’s insightful blow-by-blow of the
events leading up to the accident is worth revisiting.
“When BP first deployed the rig at the Macondo prospect
in January 2010, it set a target date of March 7 for completion of that
well. However, due to a series of geological obstacles and technical
mishaps, drilling was not completed until April 19, producing a cost
overrun on the project of approximately $58 million. It is not
surprising, then, that BP’s site managers felt particular pressure to
seal the well and move the Deepwater Horizon, to its next scheduled
location. In their rush, the site managers made several last-minute
decisions. . . . When preparing for the final cementing that would
prevent natural gas from leaking into the wellbore, for instance, they
decided to use only six “centralizers” to position the well’s steel
casing, whereas the original design had called for twenty-one
centralizers. They also went ahead with the sealing of the well even
though several ‘negative-pressure’ tests suggested a dangerous buildup
of gas in the wellbore. . . . the desire to complete the job swiftly and
move the expensive drillship to its next assignment certainly
contributed to the disaster.” (The Race for What’s Left, The global scramble for the world’s last resources, Klare, p. 47-8)
One way to solve this crime is to blame the workers – the crime scene
is the workplace, and the murder weapon is the botched job. They failed
to follow industry regulations; using less than half of the recommended
number of centralizers, and ignoring the test results indicating a
dangerous buildup of gas. But this explanation is not sufficient, and
hides another suspect. If the workers pulled the trigger, who gave the
order?
As Klare explains, the workers were in a rush. It was the BP site
managers – their cost overrun, their “pressure to seal the well and
move,” and the “desire to complete the job swiftly,” which created the
conditions in which the oil workers made their fateful decisions. So is
BP the murderer? Is the crime scene the BP board room?
Sinking of Deepwater Horizon Platform. Photo: US Coast Guard.
Inside BP
At the dawn of the 21st century, BP had a tabloid affair with
alternative energy. John Browne, its CEO from 1995 to 2007 re-branded
the company, from “British Petroleum” to “Beyond Petroleum”, and urged
its shareholders and broader public “to look beyond oil and gas to fuels
which can be produced locally and which do not threaten the
sustainability of the world’s climate.” In 2008, Browne was replaced by
Tony Hayward, whose more sober vision re-branded the company simply
“BP”, and clarified that “the energy of the future will be more than
oil, but oil will still be a major part of it.” In 2010 he closed BP’s
“alternative energy office.” (Klare, p. 41
)
Perhaps the public relations team from that office had all been moved
to the Gulf Coast, where it has been working overtime since 2010. This
has included classroom visits with “hands-on” experiments, substituting
cocoa for oil and dish soap for chemical dispersant, to win young hearts
and minds to the efficacy of BP’s cleanup efforts.
[1] According to the company, the case is closed. A
recently released report from BP
concluded: “BP has seen no data to suggest a significant long-term
population-level impact to any species.” In fact, “BP is claiming that
wildlife in the Gulf is thriving and more abundant since the disaster.”
(Jensen and Keith, p. 61) In a
recent press conference,
BP’s executive vice president for response and environmental
restoration in the region Laura Folse said “I personally have no concern
about oil washing in from the offshore to the shoreline.”
BP is
preparing for the punchline,
because currently pending in court is the case which will decide how
much money BP has to pay in damages for the disaster. While BP is a
giant – listed by Fortune magazine as the fourth largest publicly held
company in the world – some on Wall Street have expressed fear that the
court’s decision could kill the company. This panic began almost
immediately after the spill, and BP began to sell off assets all over
the world, in Colombia, Egypt, the US, Canada and Argentina. (Klare, p.
215, 216)
But according to forensic accounting expert Ian Ratner who
testified recently
on the case, BP “actually, has a better balance sheet today than it had
before the spill.” Despite around $40 billion in oil spill liabilities,
the company is financially better off than before the disaster. What’s
more, they are back at the scene of the crime: “We expect to be back and
actively drilling during the second half of the year,” said BP Chief
Financial Offcer Byron Grote in April 2011. And he kept his promise:
like Colonel Buendía in Márquez’s novel, BP gives orders for execution
but is isolated and naive about to the results:
“Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”
(Márquez, p. 171) BP seems both all-powerful and powerless, returning
to the scene of the crime like a dog unto its vomit, at the mercy of
some god or godlessness which demands more drilling.
There is more than meets the eye in this case. Is BP the only culprit
on trial? If the workers pulled the trigger, and BP gave the order, who
put the gun in its hand? And who made the gun? There is an African
saying that “if you want to get at the root of the murder, you have to
look for the blacksmith who made the machete.” (
Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe, p. 159)
The World System
“That was perhaps the only mystery that was never cleared
up in Macondo. . . . A trickle of blood came out under the door,
crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a
straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed
over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the
right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house,
went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the
walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room,
made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch
with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair
as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the
pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to
crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.” (Márquez, p. 135)
What was the blacksmith that built and blew the
Deepwater Horizon?
Like the mystery of Macondo in Márquez’s story, the trail of blood
climbs and descends, turns corners and crosses paths, taking us from the
work place, to the board room, to the stock exchange, and from there it
seems to flow into the ocean of normal every-day modern life. As Lamar
McKay, chairman and president of BP America said, “the deepwater is
indispensable to the world’s energy future.” (Klare, p. 69) The trail
doesn’t go cold, it goes everywhere. Like the war of Colonel Buendía,
our search for justice in the death gyres seems to get stuck in a
stalemate of business as usual:
“’Everything normal, Colonel.’ And normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war.” (Márquez, p. 171)
In the early 2000s, the deep sea drilling industry boomed. All the
big oil corporations competed to dig the deepest wells, at depths and
conditions that boggle the imagination – deeper than Mt. Everest is
tall, under thousands of feet of water (and pressure). These projects
out-compete space exploration in the audacity of their engineering and
in their cost: Shell built a rig called
Mars that was three
times more expensive than the Mars Pathfinder mission, with arguably
more complex technology. (Klare, p. 44) While their locations are
industry secrets – no one knows how many or where they all are – they
are everywhere, from the Falkland Islands to the Arctic Circle, from
South America to West Africa.
A 2010 report by energy expert Michael Smith estimated that big oil
would spend $387 billion on offshore drilling between 2010 and 2014 –
33% more than over the previous five years – building 20,000 offshore
wells in ever deeper waters. (Klare, p. 44-45) The
Deepwater Horizon
explosion, which came nineteen days after President Obama announced
plans for more offshore drilling, did little or nothing to change the
plan. Three days after the explosion, with Macondo still gushing, a
White House spokesperson assured that increase in offshore drilling
would continue, promising that it would be done “safely, securely, and
without harm to the environment.” (Klare, p. 51)
Before
Deepwater Horizon, regulations on the industry had
been lax. In the United States, the Interior Department’s Mineral
Management Service (MMS) took a hands-off approach to the industry,
never, for instance, setting any criteria for minimum-pressure tests,
which had such fateful consequences in the Gulf. (Klare, p. 50) After a
six month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf after the disaster, oil
companies began to lobby the courts to being reissuing permits. A new
set of safety rules was established, and by April 2011, one year after
the disaster, deep drilling in the Gulf, by BP and others, was back
online. (Klare, p. 52) Everything normal, Colonel.
This is the normalcy of the infinite war on mother earth: While the
fallout of the disaster continues to inflict irreparable damage to the
Gulf, the industry which created the crisis is allowed to resume the
activity which created it. And the same agencies that failed to regulate
the industry before are being trusted to do it right this time. How can
this be?
The answer can be found by following the money, like the trickle of
blood in Macondo, from the scene of the crime, and out into the
world-system. In an energy analysis report from several years ago, it
was predicted that due to declining reserves of conventional oil,
offshore oil output would contribute 35 percent of global supplies by
2020. By 2015, the report continued, deep-offshore fields would be “the
only
source of growth to power the world’s expanding economy. . . . Any
energy firm that intends to continue being involved in the production of
hydrocarbons must, therefore, establish a significant presence in the
major deepwater drilling zones.” (Klare, p. 45)
In other words, the industry is too big to fail – even if does fail.
Big oil cannot be too strictly regulated or restricted – or punished.
Their alibi is the world-system; the modern way of life.
This logic was recently re-asserted
by Justice Department attorney Steve O’Rourke in the buildup to the
court case that will decide BP’s punishment, who said that the penalty
“has to be high enough that companies of this size won’t let a spill
like this ever happen again. But, again, not so high as to be ruinous to
their operation.” In the great state of Louisiana, individuals who
murder get capital punishment, but corporations who murder get
rehabilitation. Questioned about whether the company would attempt to
drill at Macondo again, BP senior vice president Kent Wells responded
that “there is a good reservoir there,” and there was no reason to rule
it out, because if BP didn’t, someone else would. (Klare, p. 52)
And so BP and the Gulf and all of us have come full circle, back to
the scene of the crime. As death approaches for Márquez’s Ursula
Buendía, so does the realization for all of us:
“time was not passing. . . . it was turning in a circle.”
(Márquez, p409) As big oil races ever faster and ever deeper, time
somehow seems to stand still. The rush put on the workers is the rush
put on the managers, is the rush put on the CEOs, is the rush put on the
shareholders, is the same rush put again upon the workers. And in this
“race for what’s left,” as Michael Klare calls it, we are left standing
still, watching death approaching, as the drilling rigs, like monster
space-age vultures, circle Macondo once again.
We must ask again, and answer again, to keep our bearings, and to
clear a path to the truth: Is the crime scene the workplace, or is it
the board room? The stock exchange, or the gas station down the street?
Like the trickle of blood weaving through the town of Macondo, the
evidence leads everywhere; back to normal modern life. The crime scene
is everywhere. The murder weapon is the world-system. The criminal and
the culprit is deepwater capitalism.
Deepwater capitalism is a terminal stage in the global metastasis of a
social cancer we call the economy. Capitalism has gone to deep water,
as it has gone to the hearts of mountains and into the depths of the
earth. Offshore oil drilling is but one horseman, in a world-wide
apocalypse of extreme resource extraction. The others are fracking, tar
sands, and mountaintop removal. If imperialism is the highest stage of
capitalism, then today’s resource extraction apocalypse reveals the
highest stage of imperialism – genocide and extinction.
Captain Ahab from
Moby Dick, the insane captain of a whaling ship – distant ancestors of today’s offshore oil rigs – speaks for the system:
“all my means are sane, my object and my motive mad.”
(Melville, p. 177) With sane means and mad motives, Captain Ahab is
both a model and a metaphor for today’s economy, whose command will sink
civilization. It is the immense power without direction, the normal
infinite war, the gravity at the center of a world-wide death gyre.
BP’s Gulf oil spill. Photo: NOAA.
Conclusions
At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a
sign that said ‘Macondo’ and another larger one on the main street that
said ‘God exists’.” (Márquez, p. 49)
Five years later we owe it to ourselves and to the world to come to
some conclusions. It may take millions of years for the ecosystems of
the Gulf to recover, but in the meantime we must recover our hearts and
our minds from a modernity in which such disasters are normal aspects of
every-day life. We must come to some conclusions about this
world-system, and about the generations of people who will live and die
on the front lines of an infinite struggle against an infinite war.
Regardless of the severity of the punishment BP receives, the fact
that it is back at the scene of the crime, drilling, gives us an
indication of the real scale of the problem. If BP is a psychopathic
recidivist criminal, it is not alone. The global economy which depends
on this kind of extreme resource extraction, which gives corporations
like BP orders and alibis, and which bends executive, legislative and
judicial power to its needs, is on the move, and it will strike again.
Bhopal, Macondo, Fukushima – the beat will go on until we pull the
emergency break. Michael Klare writes in conclusion to his comprehensive
global survey of our doomsday terrain: “As the race for what’s left
gains momentum, this sort of predatory behavior will become more
frequent and more brutal. . . . Only if we abandon the race altogether .
. . . can we hope to avoid calamity on a global scale.” (Klare, p. 218
and 210)
To abandon the race: This is the conclusion to which we must come. It
will, however, require much more of us than the reformist measures
Klare proposes – increasing efficiency, developing alternative energies,
and supporting “green” versus “brown” capital. These will only buy
Captain Ahab more time. It’s time for mutiny. It’s time for
the emergency break. It’s time for revolution.
Conclusions on the local level in the Gulf are more difficult. Big
picture political conclusions will not bring back the fish and the
birds, will not restore livelihoods and dreams swept away by poisoned
waters. In a region that the federal government has all but abandoned,
the future is wholly in the hands of the common people of the Gulf
coast.
[2]
It is an immense burden for any people, let alone those who are still
recovering, ten years later, from Hurricane Katrina, and who live
trapped between “
cancer alley” and
rising ocean levels, with the
ground literally sinking under their feet.
Thus the struggles of the people of the Gulf symbolize for the entire
world a last stand for meaning, in a civilization on the brink of
oblivion:
“It was the last that remained of a past whose
annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of
annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but
never ending its ending.” (Márquez, p409) After them, the flood.
Like children, many of us are afraid of the dark. We hide from the
creeping annihilation even as it seeps ever closer to home. We close off
our hearts to the horror, and mute our minds before the madness, even
as it consumes us and enlists our complicity. As John W. Tunnell,
witness for BP,
recently testified,
“The images of those dead birds that were oiled, like pelicans, stick
in people’s minds more, and so it’s easy to get emotionally involved in
those things. . . . you have to step back and critically and
unemotionally, objectively to look at what’s going on.”
While BP’s witnesses, as personifications of capital, would have us
immerse ourselves in the infamous “icy waters of egotistical
calculation,” some people in the Gulf prefigure a different path to the
truth. A documentary titled
My Louisiana Love
chronicles the story of Monique Verdin, a young Native American woman
in search of love and life amidst death and indifference: “I want to
keep living on our land, but I’m inheriting a dying delta.” She sets out
fearlessly into a landscape of annihilation with an open heart, an open
mind, and open hands, and in her story there is a universal story.
It is a story of salvation blossoming next to damnation, a story
which promises like Holderin that “where danger threatens, that which
saves from it also grows.” Like jewelweed growing next to poison ivy,
like women’s liberation in Rojava alongside to the patriarchal crusade
of ISIS, like God next to Macondo: There is hope here, perhaps the only
kind of hope that is real in a world where everything is at least partly
toxic, where dioxin swirls in breast milk, and death gyres spiral in
the oceanic cradle of life. It is a story that slumbers in a world
consumed with cynicism, a world awash in the icy waters of ego. But like
the people of Macondo, we await only
the right magnet to re-ignite our wonder. As the gypsy proclaimed,
“things have a life of their own. . . . It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.” (Márquez, p. 2)
Quincy Saul is the author of Truth and Dare: A Comic Book Curriculum for the End and the Beginning of the World, and the co-editor of Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz. He is a musician and a co-founder of Ecosocialist Horizons.
REFERENCES
100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006
The Race for What’s Left, The global scramble for the world’s last resources, by Michael T. Klare, Metopolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, NY, 2012
Earth at Risk, Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet, edited by Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith, Flashpoint Press, 2012
Anthills of the Savannah, by Chinua Achebe, Anchor Book, 1998
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, St. Botolph Society, 1892
“Suffering a Sea Change
,” by Joel Kovel, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Volume 21, Issue 3, September 2010
Notes.
[1]
“NOAA and BP teamed up to visit eighth-grade classrooms in the Gulf to
show children how to safely clean up an oil spill. They spilled cocoa
powder in a little aquarium to mimic an oil spill – cocoa powder, right?
Yummy. They sprinkled in Dawn dish soap to ‘disperse’ the oil. ‘See
children? Dispersant works to clean up the oil, and we’re going to save
the world. It’s OK.’ (Riki Ott, in Jensen and Keith, p52) Chemical
dispersants can best be described with the poem by Gerard Manley
Hopkins, “where we, even where we mean to mend her, we end her”: the
toxicity of chemical dispersants – arguably more dangerous than the oil
they purport to clean up – has been
analyzed and documented by many organizations.
[2]
“It really is all up to us. In the Gulf, it didn’t take people twenty
years like with the Exxon Valdez spill to realize the federal government
was not in control of the situation; it took them two months.” -Riki
Ott (Jensen and Keith, p52)
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