And now we are at it again.
The people who made and sprayed DDT were not evil. Who wouldn’t want to get rid of mosquitoes? They weren’t evil, but they just believed that they could control things. They believed they could make things better than they are; that they could always fix what got broken; never considering that some of the things they were breaking had taken a million years or so to make.
As tragic and awful as the oil spill is, the use of dispersants could prove worse in the long term. You can at least argue that the first mistake, the spill itself, was an accident, an accident born of arrogance and greed and oversight, but still an accident. The second mistake grew out of opposites: conscious decision and panic. A friend who works with the BP administrators in Mobile told me that during those first weeks everyone’s eyes were wide from fear. Fear has quickly led to a desperate need for the illusion of control.
I don’t claim to know what Corexit or other dispersants will do, how exactly they will infiltrate and affect fish and birds. But I know that good science is born of skepticism, and that those who confidently claim that they do know are exhibiting the thinking of little boys. By this I mean a rambunctious, occasionally effective, headstrong, and insistent way of being. I mean a demented can-do philosophy that wants wants wants and so will find a way to get. I mean a way of being that most of us, boys and girls, eventually grow out of, a way that can actually lead to the building of some pretty neat-o things, but that also leads to pouring boiling water on ants. If you think I am exaggerating, if you think that this isn’t the kind of thinking running rampant down here, then consider this: last week a number of people started discussing the possibility of detonating a nuclear bomb to plug up the well.4
But forget nuclear weapons. Who needs them when you have Corexit? How do little boys deal with things they break? Sometimes they hide them. You break a lamp and don’t want Ma to see it so you put it in the closet. The ocean floor is now the closet. If the Gulf is our national sacrifice zone, then the ocean floor, where life starts and where the dispersants are sinking, will be the Gulf’s own double-secret sacrifice zone. Talk about sweeping something under a rug.
To a lot of fairly knowledgeable people, the spraying of dispersants seem as much a disguise as a solution. “A magic trick,” Ryan called it. And a good one. “Out of sight, out of mind” could be our national motto. We put so much energy into pretending, into avoiding, into not seeing what is. And what are dispersants if not a way to hide reality? A way to make a problem appear to be gone. In this regard they are an embodiment of both our belief in the importance of appearances and our own unwillingness to acknowledge oil—both oil in general and oil in the Gulf specifically—and its consequences. In other words the perfect solution, from a poetic if not practical point of view, for a society that doesn’t want to face its own reality.
The problem is that it’s hard to sweep things under the rug in nature. Things insist on being part of other things. Ospreys know this. What DDT taught is that the invisible can kill, and all our denials and disguises and PR moves don’t make a thing any less lethal.
Luckily my trip so far has been filled not just with osprey ideas, but with actual ospreys. On that first night in Fort Pickens, I camped next to a forest of dead trees. The trees, killed by the salt from Hurricane Ivan, twisted up into the sky like mushroom stems. The hurricane had created perfect homes for ospreys, leafless branches allowing panoramic views of the dunes and water. In their crowns sat many great shaggy nests.
On the beach beyond the dead forest I watched a single osprey as it hunted. It hovered above the crashing waves, its black and white wings semaphore flashing. I first came to bird-watching as a sports fan, craving contact, and that day didn’t disappoint. Soon enough the osprey dove, pulling its wings into a W shape and hurtling toward the water. Ospreys don’t twist and plop into the water like pelicans, or dart down in the manner of terns. They dive.
As it happened, the bird missed on the first attempt. 0 for 1. It shook off in the air like a wet dog, shivering, and then tried again, but pulled up at the last minute, as if it were all a feint.
“No fish.”
I said this out loud without thinking about the larger repercussions of my simple caveman sentence. But. What if there really were no fish? I knew that this particular bird needed three or four a day, more when feeding a family.
Later that evening at sunset, I drove into the Fort Pickens picnic area and found a spectacular nest. The picnic area had become mission control for the cleanup efforts, and the birds now shared their habitat with trucks and Dumpsters and fluorescent-vested workers and dozens of Porta-Potties and hundreds of all-terrain vehicles. Still it was the perfect place to end the day, and not just because the nest was one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen, a nestled cup of sticks in the upper branches of a dead live oak. Three young ospreys—immatures, identifiable by both their size and checkered wings—perched around and on the nest, illuminated by the last shafting rays of sun. They let out high-pitched warning cries that told me not to come any closer.
Then I heard another sound that took a minute to recognize. The osprey cries were mixing with a different sort of music: the backward beeping of trucks. On the far side of the parking lot, air-conditioning blew through ducts into a huge billowing tent and men in Hazmat suits walked in and out. It looked like a scene out of Spielberg: the military trying to keep the discovery of the alien autopsy under wraps. But what might have been too clichéd for a movie was the fact that above it all the ospreys nested, the whole scene watched over by birds that had come back from the dead.
UP IN THE AIR
Today the weather cooperates. The helicopter arrives, landing on Ryan’s lawn at eight in the morning, splattering shadows outward. I run toward it, hunched down and sensibly worried, like any beginning helicopter passenger, about decapitation. While I’ve never been in a helicopter before, Brian and his coworker on the Cousteau team, Nathan, are old pros, having been out to the rig not long after it first blew. I, on the other hand, am like a little kid, clutching my disposable camera and notebook as we lift off. The blades spray wind and light across the grass below. A wavering turkey vulture flaps away from the noise. The lodge shrinks as we rise, and I see that my first impression—this land as a fragile strip between waters—was correct. Brian points down at a cop car hiding behind a tree. As we fly south toward Venice where we stop to refuel, it’s hard not to notice how much oil is being used to help clean up the spilled oil: helicopters are coming and going constantly from the pads. Once we are back in the air Brian points out the window toward a larger Black Hawk helicopter carrying a sandbag west over to one of the threatened islands. The huge bag hangs and sways below it on cables like a spider’s egg sac.
Thirty percent of domestic U.S. oil production now comes from the Gulf, and in the headlong rush to drill deeper and find more, that production has increased 34 percent just since 2009.5 If this began as a little boy mess, it has bloomed into an emergency that, according to the little boys, only they can fix. And so now helicopters fly all day long trying to save us from the oil, burning thousands of gallons of gas in the process. Everywhere you look you have ships, cars, trucks, planes, and copters charging every which way to protect us.
But for the moment I give irony a rest. What overwhelms the ironic, swamps it actually, is the landscape. It was one thing for Ryan to say that 14 percent of the country’s coastal wetlands span out from the road near his home, it is another to actually see them. We fly south but can’t outrun