What Will be The Lessons Learned?
by digby
As we await word about whether or not the most recent attempt to cap the well was successful, it’s sobering to realize that the Gulf gusher is the worst oil disaster in history. They can’t even guess how bad the devastation will eventually be, but the estimates keep going up and by the look of things, this is going to be a dead zone for some time to come.
The other day I wrote a piece contemplating the fact that we may not be able to “fix” this and what that means psychologically. I personally suspect it will mean more cynicism, more apathy, more loathing for elite institutions, particularly government. But that’s just me. David Roberts at Grist, obviously horrified by the disaster, nonetheless has hope that it will have a different effect:
Once we know that accidents can be catastrophic and irreversible, it becomes clear that there is no margin of error. We’re operating a brittle system, unable to contain failure and unable to recover from it. Consider how deepwater drilling will look in that new light.
The thing is, we’re already operating in those circumstances in a thousand different ways — it’s just that the risks and the damages tend to be distributed and obscured from view. They’re not thrust in our face like they are in the Gulf. We don’t get back the land we destroy by mining. We don’t get back the species lost from deforestation and development. We don’t get back islands lost to rising seas. We don’t get back the coral lost to bleaching or the marine food chains lost to nitrogen runoff. Once we lose the climatic conditions in which our species evolved, we won’t get them back either.
We’re doing damage as big as the Gulf oil spill every day, and there’s no fixing it. Humanity has grown in power, wealth, and appetite to the point that there is no more margin of error anywhere. We’re on a knife’s edge, facing the very real possibility that for our children, all the world may be one big Gulf of Mexico, inexorably and irreversibly deteriorating.
Perhaps if the public gets a clear taste of this, they’ll step back and contemplate whether the kind of energy we use is really as “cheap” as it looks. Maybe they’ll stop thinking about how to drill better and start thinking about how to avoid drilling altogether. Because some mistakes just can’t be undone.
This is, of course, the only sane response. But that’s certainly no guarantee. As a good number of people retreat into dark age superstition or adolescent Randian free market fantasies in the face of this breakdown of all of our elite institutions, it’s equally possible that we’ll go the other way. This should be the proverbial wake up call of wake up calls, but I don’t know if it will be. There’s so much going on, so many crises, that I don’t know if people are capable of absorbing it all.
Strong leadership could make the difference, but it’s hard to know just what that means either. The Bush style macho “decider” pose was laughable and Obama’s dry technocratic style which relies on “experts” isn’t getting us anywhere. So, maybe individuals just have to figure this out for themselves.
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