You have to read this, ripped from abqjournal.com:
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Our Greed Speaks Louder Than Brown Pelicans
By Amy D. Estelle
Albuquerque resident
I am sad beyond belief today.
The photo of an oil-coated brown pelican gasping for air on the front page of Friday’s Albuquerque Journal brought home the abstraction of the Gulf oil spill.
My heart broke again.
This is surely not the only magnificent species that will pay the price of no-holds-barred offshore drilling. I have heard similar reports of other birds, dolphins and fish.
But brown pelicans are a favorite of mine. Their ungainly prehistoric appearance on land is matched by their ability to glide in graceful unison inches above the surf and to dive like arrows shot into the sea to gulp a fish swimming just beneath the surface.
Thirty years ago on the coast of Georgia I had an experience with a brown pelican that Gulf coast residents may now unfortunately share: an immature pelican died in my arms.
It wasn’t oil, but a sudden cold spell that doomed the bird’s already impaired immune system.
An island resident phoned the environmental education center where I worked to report that a brown pelican had landed in their backyard and was unable to fly. A colleague and I drove over to pick up the bird.
The veterinarian did what he could and sent us back to the environmental education center with instructions to hold the hypothermic bird close to my body and once we arrived to put it in a small warm room. Just as we drove through the center’s gate, the bird stretched its long neck and took its last breath.
I am not ashamed to say that I cried then and I cried today.
There is nothing ordinary about a brown pelican. With a wingspan of nearly seven feet, it looks like it descended directly from a pterodactyl.
Right now in the height of the breeding season, a striking stripe of Hershey-bar-brown feathers outlined in white cloak the bird’s neck and a pastel sunny yellow tops the head. The iris is a pale blue, and the tip of the beak yellow-orange.
No time would be a good time for an oil spill, but with eggs or hatchlings in the nest, the death rate will be compounded.
After surviving the widely used pesticide DDT, a comeback which took nearly half a century, the brown pelican, newly removed from the federal endangered species list, faces a 21st century nemesis: corporate power and a timid — if not corporate-owned — U.S. Congress.
Why do the United States and the United Kingdom not require the same fail-safe measures for offshore oil wells that Norway has successfully mandated for decades?
An excerpt from Joe Conason’s article at Salon.com makes clear that there is an alternative arrangement:
"What makes Norway so different from the United States — and much more likely to install the most protective energy technology — is that the Norwegian state can impose public values on oil producers without fighting off lobbyists and crooked politicians, because it owns and controls the resources. Rather than Halliburton-style corporate management controlling the government and blocking environmental improvement, Norway’s system works the other way around. It isn’t perfect, as any Nordic environmentalist will ardently explain, but the results are considerably better than ours."
No one knows for sure the impact the BP oil spill will have on the long-term fate of the brown pelicans in the Gulf. Like the fate of the commercial and sport fishing industries, the tourism industry, and the human families who live, work, and play on these shores, the future is as opaque as the Gulf water.
What I know, living in the New Mexico desert, is that these fibers of life are intertwined. As the brown pelican survives or dies, so will the human families dependent on the Gulf ecosystem.
But there is a more disturbing message in the photograph the Journal published, and it sickens me to face it and to hear it: A silent scream. A demand for justice.
As Henry Beston in 1925 wrote so poignantly and radically in "The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod," our relationships with animals are international:
"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."
This time the travail was preventable: Deregulation, lack of government oversight, powerful lobbyists and corporate greed — there is more than enough blame to go around.
The BP-TransOcean-Haliburton Gulf oil spill is an unprovoked and entirely preventable attack on another nation, one who has no seat at the U.N.
Who will speak for the brown pelicans if you and I do not? Who will hear its silent call to act if you and I do not?
This is our Silent Spring. This is our time to respond.
ABQJOURNAL OPINION/GUEST_COLUMNS: Our Greed Speaks Louder Than Brown Pelicans
