As conditions worsen in the Gulf, I’ve been reading articles that will transport me to coastal Louisiana, where I lived for eight years. I’m looking for voices that explain actuality, voices that are already beginning to memorialize lifestyles once tied to water and land, now tied to environmental disaster.
In a June 2 New York Times article, Casi Callaway, executive director of the conservation group Mobile Baykeeper, told about 50 volunteers that their “job is to document what we have here that’s beautiful. BP will have to make it right.”
Callaway’s advice is ahead of the game; with other disasters, the literature often comes out after the event, after that place has been destroyed. Post-disaster accounts of Exxon Valdez, New Orleans, Hiroshima rely on memory to tell the story, which can make for good memoir material. But in this case, it’s important that observers document moments before they get trapped and changed and romanticized by our subconscious. Or worse, by poor reporting.
The process of collecting hands-on data before it’s gone is called “groundtruthing” — an environmental practice that relies on experiential, current, qualitative and quantitative data, not only to document how things are, but how our past has changed our present, and how the future will continue to change it. Groundtruthing gets at the complex realities that exist at ground zero. It’s a sort of real live test site for what we’ll have lost and retained post-disaster.
Last summer, I visited a remote wilderness area in Alaska with a team of scientists to see what the process of “groundtruthing” actually looks like, and it’s very similar to what people are doing right now on the Gulf of Mexico’s coast. You walk. You observe. You jot down notes. You plot occurrences on a GPS, and you send samples of invasive species (in this case, oil) to a lab. In Alaska, evidence of manmade destruction showed up as scabs of brown in lush mountainside land. Old growth, grandfatherly trees had been cut by industrial-scale logging outfits, leaving scars that will take thousands of years to heal. In Louisiana, the evidence fits in your hands: oil-slicked pelicans, debris churned up into balls of tar. Beyond pointing blame, groundtruthing makes sure we don’t forget the details.
By stark contrast, BP seems to be making little effort to take responsibility by documenting actuality. On their website, I clicked on “Gulf of Mexico Response” and then “Reports from the Gulf.” Here, one can read BP reporter Paula Kolmar, who is supposedly “meeting the people most immediately affected by the oil spill.”
The first article by Kolmar turns tragedy into the travelogue of a woman who’s never been to an oil spill and is excited to be making personal discoveries. “Ballet at sea” waxes poetic about the cleanup effort as a “choreography” of “skimming perfectionists to stop any oil from potentially getting close to Alabama’s coast.” Kolmar recounts that “Hot, humid conditions intensified by bright sunlight in a cloudless sky were actually made pleasant by the salty sea breezes topped off with lots of sunscreen.”
From the looks of their words and their website (complete with a photo carousel of heroic-looking men at work and helicopters pitched at dramatic angles over the coast), BP hasn’t learned the language of apology yet. Nor has it learned to listen to the voices that it will need to repay.
When I was in New Orleans the first weekend of May, we ate local oysters on the half-shell and could still smell the Confederate jasmine lining St. Charles. But now, my friend Ashley, who lives Uptown, says you can smell the thick sting of oil in the air. The oyster beds have been closed. Oil continues to gather between sugar cane stands. Shrimpers in Grand Isle idle at the local bar because they don’t have enough money for gas.
BP’s Kolmar says that “Seeing [the spill] real-time, up close, eyes-on is, oddly, an inspiration to shake off the weariness.” Last weekend from his ivory tower, British Petroleum Chief Tony Hayward apologized to reporters for saying that that he’d like to have his life back.
Thanks for the “effort,” BP, but I’ll be looking for people who write about what’s actually happening to their real lives. I’ll be looking on the ground for the truth.
Megan Nix () of Denver can be reached at thenixionary@gmail.com.
