of dead grasses from the oil. This is where the caramel goo first rolled in.
But it is also still a miraculous landscape, full of fish and birds and gators (like the one we saw after lifting off from refueling). Ryan said that 14 percent of the continental coastal wetlands fan off of Route 23, but the area we are flying over now makes up closer to 40 percent. It is green and vast, wavering like a mirage below us, and for centuries it has received the gift of nutrients offered up by the great surging river. I have to laugh to think that just a week ago I would have told you that this was a second-rate coast. There is nothing second-rate about it, other than the way we have treated it.
The United States consumes 40 percent of the world’s oil. About 70 percent of that is for transportation, mostly for our cars. I am not here to wag fingers: I, too, drive a car and live in a car society. We are a hungry people. I, too, am hungry. We are hungry not just for oil but for the ease it brings, and, as creatures of habit, we have become habituated to this easy, oily way of life.10
Oil has often been called an addiction. Just as surely as a junkie’s life leads to degradation and crime, I can see spilled on the beaches below me the results of our addiction. Here is our degradation and here are our crimes, spread over these beaches and in these waters. We debate scientific theories in our culture. You may choose not to believe that the world will warm, and while your beliefs have little to do with what the world does, you have a right to them. But what I am seeing below me is not theory. Here, in this place, there is no disbelieving or believing. Here it is right in front of you and in your face.
What good does it do to self-flagellate? Oil in and of itself, far from being “bad,” is almost miraculous in its composition and effectiveness. Oil is the “solar energy” that environmentalists like me have long cried for. Solar energy from eons ago, energy sucked in and stored by plants, now long dead, that has been squeezed by earth and time, energy that we ignite to power our cars and cities and lives. And not only is oil “natural” and miraculous, it was also, for a while, a terrifically good idea. It powered things cheaply and well. One of the reasons we are having a hard time turning to alternatives is corporate resistance, but another is that it’s hard to find something nearly as effective. Who would have guessed that old fossilized trees and plants could do so much so well?
To think about oil clearly we need to clear our minds of guilt and blame. Who would have known, even fifty years ago, where all this would lead? Who would have known that it would lead to wars where our young people would die? Who would have believed that we would be capable of warming our own planet and of melting our ice caps? And who would have imagined to what extent the addiction would grow, to the point where all the oil that has spilled below, the millions and millions of gallons, would only be enough to power our country for six hours?11 If these ideas seem too numbing, then consider a more everyday disaster. Who would have known that this substance, celebrated when it came spouting out of wells over a century ago, would have led to what is possibly the most nightmarish, if quotidian, of human miseries? I am talking, of course, about commuting.
For all this, the time for oil is passing. Not for any moral or philosophical reasons, but for practical ones. There simply isn’t enough to keep going. And the little that is left is hidden in places like the Macondo site down below me, places where drilling involves great risk. Do we want to rip the world apart to get those last drops? That is part of what we are talking about when we talk about sacrifice. We will gain oil. What will we lose?
The oil companies know how they would answer that question. And yet this industry, as monolithic and scary as it may seem at the moment, will topple to its knees soon enough. You can hear the industry’s death rattle if you listen closely. The corporations will not go easily, just like the railroad barons. But there is no denying the fact that no matter how deep they dig or how much of the earth they soil, there is only so much left. So what do we do next? And when will we start doing it?
As we head back toward Venice and Buras the pilot points at a giant oil skimmer that he claims is capable of sinking itself. It looks gray and unwieldy, like a battleship, and it is hard to picture it dipping down into the water.
“Kevin Costner just met with the BP bigwigs over in Port Fourchon,” the pilot says. “He’s got a ship that separates oil and water that his company developed. It’s going on the water today.”
Which of course makes sense, since the sinking land and rising water below are essentially Waterworld. I find myself smiling despite the grimness. It’s a common condition down here. If you are in the business of collecting small ironic tidbits then this is the right place for you. Take the fact that the day the rig toppled into the sea, two days after the explosions, was April 22, or as it is also known, Earth Day. 12 Or try this one on for size: President Obama announced that he was opening up more United States waters to offshore drilling, a decision that would benefit BP first and foremost, twenty days before Deepwater blew.13
The president let the press know this on March 31 but he missed a golden opportunity.14 Had he only waited several more hours, he could have made his announcement on April Fools’ Day.
THE CASE AGAINST STRAIGHT LINES
When we get back to the lodge I want nothing more than a nap. This will not be happening. The lodge hums, a nest of activity. The Ocean Doctor, aka David Guggenheim, has arrived. David is a scientist and radio personality who has traveled the world reporting on the state of the coasts, and today he is joined by an NBC Nightly News cameraman who circles him like a pilot fish. The cameraman, fresh off of a stint in Baghdad, another war-torn region, is South African and his words sound thick and garbled. (“He has a funny accent,” Ryan says in full-on Creole singsong.) Guggenheim’s brother, Alan, has also come along and we say hello as Holly and Ryan try to organize the afternoon’s expedition.
In the midst of the chaos I get a phone call. At the end of my trip out on the water with Captain Sal, we came upon a row of fish camps. Through the rain I stared out at the dilapidated shacks that lined the canal about a mile from the marina. They appeared fragile, permeable even, built as they were on a watery foundation. They were unabashedly ramshackle, pieces of plywood nailed here, a screen door thrown up there, rickety docks jutting out like the tray on a toddler’s high chair. I decided I needed to find a way to spend a night out in one of them. They reminded me of other modest coastal dwellings I had known, and they were right out on the frontlines of the oil. I ended up talking with a woman named Leona, who ran the Myrtle Grove Marina store. She told me to call Anthony, a sixteen-year-old local kid who liked to hang out at the marina and whose parents owned one of the fish camps. I got his outgoing message, a loud and blaring country song, and wasn’t sure I’d gotten through.
“Hallo,” he says now. “Are you the guy who wants to go out to camp?”
I am, I tell him, and he says that he could maybe get me out there tonight. I explain that I will already be out on the water for most of the afternoon and am not exactly sure when I’ll get back.
“That’s okay,” he says in a rushed musical mumble. “I’ll get the place ready. I don’t mind waiting.”
I hang up and within minutes we are driving two cars and towing two boats across the road to the local boat launch, not three hundred yards from the lodge. The plan is to head out on the Gulf in the Cousteau pontoon boat and Ryan’s single-console fishing boat. Brian and Nathan take the pontoon boat, a Zodiac VI,
