The Gulf Oil Spill: Up Close and Personal

BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has unleashed a wave of outrage – in classrooms and around office water coolers, at dinner tables and at demonstrations – the likes of which we haven’t seen since Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caught fire 40 years ago.

The images coming out of the worst ecological accident in U.S. history are horrifying – blackened marshlands and beaches, dead or dying wildlife coated with oil. But the disaster’s effects are still removed from daily life in most of the country, beyond the 40-50 percent rise in the cost of seafood. 

To get a sense of what life is really like along the Gulf these days, I went down to Louisiana for two days. Once there, I discovered that both the scale of the spill and the inadequacy of the response exceeded my worst fears.

Flying over the site of the destroyed Deepwater Horizon rig and broken wellhead, the air smelled strongly from a toxic brew of crude oil and dispersants. A nightmarish pillar of fire licked at the sky as leaking natural gas was burned off, while patches of oil could be seen in every direction – dark ribbons of the stuff snaking out toward the horizon.

Local people spoke of their frustration and anger. Fishermen, whose livelihoods have been stolen by BP’s recklessness, are desperate. But they are also concerned that a moratorium on offshore drilling will further damage their region’s economy.

I saw scene after unforgettable scene of a fragile ecosystem in crisis, all of it just so bad, so wrong. The terns and gulls that sat on oil-soaked booms became for me a symbol of the Gulf’s devastation. The booms were supposed to protect their fragile island marshes but, having been blown or washed ashore, no longer protected anything. Then there was the lone shrimp trawler, aimlessly circling off the coast, dragging an already saturated gauze-like boom behind it.

When I returned home, my throat burning and my head foggy from the air I had been breathing, I sat down with my wife, Fran, and our 13-year-old daughter, Nicole, to watch on our television the photos and video I had shot.

As images of blackened wetlands, dolphins frolicking in a boat’s oily wake and Brown Pelicans trying to pick oil off their backs flashed across the screen, Nicole suddenly put a slow, sweet version of “Over The Rainbow,” taken from the season finale of the television show “Glee,” on the stereo. 

Watching the horrific pictures and listening to the hopeful song, I choked up. And then that resolve kicked in: I wanted everyone to see and feel what our nation’s addiction to oil had done to the Gulf.

As a result, EDF asked for and received permission from Fox Networks Entertainment to use “Over the Rainbow” as the accompaniment to a video of images shot by Yuki Kokubo and Patrick Brown of EDF (and a few of mine as well). My hope is that it will inspire everyone who sees it to do what they can to make sure this can never happen again. 

As President Obama has said, we need to take into account the full cost of our nation’s addiction to fossil fuels – the environmental costs, national security costs, and the true economic costs across all business sectors – and make every effort to pass clean energy legislation.

For the Gulf’s sake, and for our children’s.

For more information on the Gulf crisis please visit www.edf.org/oilspill

David Yarnold is Executive Director of Environmental Defense Fund. To contact him, visit www.edf.org