You’ll notice a new background image here at LowGenius.Net today.
This image is an artistically-altered photograph taken around July 10, 2010, in the freshwater marsh area of Plaquemines Paris, Louisiana.
As the side-caption on the graphic says, the little white things aren’t weeds or leaves or seaweed. None of them are.
They’re dead fish.
Thousand and thousands and thousands of dead fish.
These fish were killed by some combination of crude oil, methane, and Corexit dispersant.
I am not a scientist. I did not sample or test the water to determine what contaminants were most prevalent. However, I am completely confident that one or more of these three substances caused these fish, and the thousands more out of range of the camera, to die en masse.
This photo, and some others, was provided to me directly by the man who took them, one P.J. Hahn. I tracked him down with the help of a few intermediary people after seeing these images posted in an album on the “Boycott BP” Facebook group founded by “Bayou Lee” Perkins and being struck hard by them. P.J. graciously gave me permission to use his photos on my request.
I should also point out that P.J. is the Director of Coastal Zone Management in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.
I’m no scientist, but when a man with those credentials says to the world (I’m paraphrasing here, not quoting), “I’ve pictures of these fish that have been killed by this oil leak and the attendant other toxins in the water,” my inclination is to give him broad benefit of doubt.
I also want to point out that any intellectual property rights attached to these images, including any copyright or mechanical license related to the modified image used as a background on this site, remains with Mr. Hahn unless he tells you otherwise. Please don’t ask me for permission to use the images; I can’t give it to you. And please don’t steal the images; that’s a classless move in the best of circumstances.
As a man who grew up with my avid sport fisherman father on both the “small” lakes of southwestern Michigan and on Lake Michigan itself where I would head out with my dad trawling for Coho and Chinook, or fishing for lake perch off the piers at the Black River inlet, or just hanging out and indulging my growing interest as a young man in bikini-clad young ladies on the beautiful white-sand beaches of the eastern Lake Michigan shore, I have an appreciate of the water, and the lives and lifestyles that go with it, that knows no bounds.
The path of my life has taken me away from South Haven for many years, and I haven’t been in so much as a canoe in longer than I’d care to admit. But the smell of the water, the feeling of the air, and the taste of fresh-caught fish that you’ve lured, landed, cleaned, and cooked yourself have never left my blood, and when I was recently able to return to the pier at the North Beach to take a look at my old place and record some videos, I was moved to say – and I meant it – that stretch of the world is as holy and sacred to me as Mecca ever was to any Muslim, or Jerusalem to any Jew, or Bethlehem to any Christian.
That is where my heart lives.
Robert Heinlein, the science fiction author, once wrote “It is impossible for a man to love his wife wholeheartedly without loving all women somewhat. I suppose that the converse must be true of women.” Well, I’ve been single for the greater part of the last fifteen years, so I can’t really say as I know from women…but I know love, and I have to think that it is impossible for a man to love the water where he grew up without loving all water somewhat.
The incalculable and horrific wound in the Gulf of Mexico is not an “accident,” nor is it the “fault” of the government or Halliburton or even BP, per se, although each of those entities have their responsibility and price to pay, including the immediate causal influence of British Petroleum and Halliburton as their contractors who drilled and failed to properly cap the well that blew out, and the secondary omitting influence of weak regulation, especially as practice by the United States Minerals and Management service under the deregulating oversight of the Bush administration.
But it’s easy to point fingers.
What is harder is to face our own responsibility.
Each of us – every man, woman, and child in any place developed enough for you to be reading this, and plenty of places that aren’t, including a few generations of now-deceased participants in the Industrial Revolution – hold responsibility here.
We are responsible because we have been hearing for a half-century and more that we need to reduce our dependence on oil and petrochemicals, and yet we have failed to do so.
We are responsible because we have chosen to mitigate that need and play games of convenience with it, moving it from “reducing our dependence on oil” to “reducing our dependence on foreign oil” to “reducing the cost of gasoline at the pump so we can use more oil because screw it we’re the richest country on earth and we got a right.”
We never had that right. We had a privilege, and we abused it.
We have now not only lost that privilege, we have ushered in the dawn of a new era in human history when nobody will have that privilege.
The warnings are clear; the reality is no longer deniable even though many of us continue trying, and will continue trying right up until the moment we choke to death on methane and benzene vapors. The oil era is ending, and the faster we can cut the cord and move on, the better.
It’s simply not possible to cut off the use of oil hard and fast, even though that’s the best possible scenario. I accept that, and I think any thinking person does.
It is, however, possible to eliminate the use of a vast majority of petrochemicals, especially fuels and lubricating oils, in a much shorter time frame than we’ve commonly been led to believe.
If you listen carefully to the objections, they nearly all come down to two essentials: “it costs too much,” and “It’s too inconvenient.”
With all due respect and with equal assumption of the burden, to hell with your costs and convenience.
If we don’t get it together soon, the costs will be moot and the inconvenience ultimate – just imagine how tough it’s going to be to get a good table at Hatfield’s, imagine how inconvenient it’s going to be to find parts for your Escalade, when YOU ARE DEAD.
The important things you can do:
First and foremost, do everything in your power to reduce and ultimately eliminated your personal consumption of petrochemicals. This doesn’t just mean boycotting a particular group of brands of fuel – although I fully support the BP Boycott and frankly hope that the only thing left of BP five years from now is a bad reputation – and it even just mean moving to a more fuel-efficient vehicles and driving less.
It means exerting every single bit of influence we can as consumers on every single supplier and vendor and provider of everything we use, from computer keyboards to plastic bags, to influence them to change their materials, and it means refusing steadfastly to continue buying products and services from those organizations who refuse to make a clear, public, and immediate effort to reduce and ultimately eliminate their use of petrochemicals in every possible – not convenient, not cheap, not easy, but possible – context, as soon as it can be done, and that means starting today.
We must be willing to take the hit to our costs and our convenience. Look, I’m human too, and if I had an air conditioner in my car I’d want to run it too when it’s 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside in the shade. But you don’t have to run it all the time. Many of us don’t even have to drive all the time. I’m fortunate enough right now to be in a situation where I literally have not had to start my car in so long that the battery has died from lack of use. If you’re a stay-at-home parent in a suburb, talk to your friends in the neighborhood about car pooling and ride sharing to grocery and other shopping centers, even leisure time. Use local bulletin boards, phone trees, Google calendars or any one of thousand of other free online tools to work together to find ways that you can turn two and three and four single-person trips into one multi-person trip. That includes learning to be both more considerate and more tolerant of those with whom you share your resources. This won’t work if you are so self-important that you’ve just GOT to yap for another ten minutes while three of your neighbors are waiting for you. THAT kind of thinking is the path to extinction.
The same thinking can be applied if you’re a college student or a steel worker; a college professor or a waitress; a street sweeper or a sweepstakes coordinator. We’ve all had the tools and know-how at hand for years and even decades to do this.
What we haven’t had is the will.
Now is the time. Here is the place. This is the reason. You know the way.
Let’s get to work.
Because you know what’s going to be really inconvenient and expensive?
When every one of those dead fish is matched by a dead human being killed by the same things: apathy, greed, ignorance, laziness, and selfishness.