This occurred yesterday afternoon at the Tate Modern Art Gallery in London. Rev Billy and his "church" have been developing this kind of protest against various abuses of consumerism for the last five years or so. Combining street theatre with the discourse and imagery of gospel revivalist preaching and song, they encourage people to think about what our consumption is doing to our ecosystems, society and souls.
I would love to hear what people think of this as a form of creative protest. Is it effective? Distracting? Humourous? Counterproductive?
Oil'd from Chris Harmon on Vimeo.
It is easy to imagine a group of five things. Most of us can picture ten or twenty. Even hundreds can be grasped via parts of our everyday experience. But we're intuitively poor at very large numbers. Infographics like this help to fill in gaps in our imagination with comparisons we can put some kind of handle on.
An informative and illuminating interview with Carl Safina, founder of the Blue Ocean Institute on the state of the oceans, whether overfishing or carbon pollution is a greater threat, why the BP Gulf spill wasn't as bad as many thought, the value of compassion, why conservation is more important than animal rights, the true cost of coal, the internality of "externalities", why consumerism is unnatural and why he still has hope.
Eric ponders Animality and the Word of God: where to draw the boundaries between human and non-human animals and what the theological import of that relationship is. He also posts one of my favourite T. S. Eliot poems, which happens to be relevant to the discussion.
Dana offers a a case study in scientific integrity. Though this is his first foray into the Guardian, I've read quite a bit of Dana's writing and he knows what he's talking about (he's also now posted a further analysis of the replies to his Guardian piece). RealClimate recently published a piece with a similar theme but taking an example from a very different field.
Richard wonders whether individual action is pointless, given the scale of the challenges we face. His answer: our actions may not make a difference, but our example might. An excellent paper going into much more detail on the inadequacy of merely personal lifestyle changes can be found here.
H/T Chris Taylor.
"There is no underestimating the scale and pace of change that happened during the war. Coal use dropped by a quarter, general consumption fell by 16%, car use dropped 95%. Sacrifices were made, but as people ate less and often ate better, levels of health and fitness rose accordingly. Infant mortality and the suicide rate fell, and spending on entertainment was one of the few areas that grew."
Human error and cost-cutting played a crucial role in the disastrous BP Gulf crisis earlier this year. More details are here, including the five human errors that combined to make a mechanical failure catastrophic.
The narrative of greedy oil companies shirking their responsibilities for the sake of maximising profit is once again decisively illustrated. By law, corporations are responsible first to their shareholders, and this means that any well-functioning company will do all it can to maximise profits. If this involves risk to the common good, passing off costs onto third parties (externalities) or even undermining the stability of society, then as long as such actions can be hidden or spun away, they will be done for the sake of profit. Companies that break the law and hide their mistakes are only following the logic of the system that created them.
While the precise contribution of anthropocentric climate change to Pakistan's devastating floods continues to be debated, they were indeed made worse by human actions. And the toll continues to rise. You can give online here (or in many other places).
Nature: Not all disruptions associated with climate change involve things getter hotter. A recent anomalous cold snap in Bolivia has contributed to what is possibly the largest short-term ecological disaster in its history.
George Monbiot says he has no sympathy for investors burned by the BP share price crisis (BP shares have been haemorrhaging value almost as fast as, well, you know what). They were warned about the dangers many times, he says.
"Call me a hard-hearted bastard, but I'm finding it difficult to summon up the sympathy demanded by the institutional investors now threatening to sue BP. They claim that the company inflated its share price by misrepresenting its safety record. I don't know whether this is true, but I do know that the investors did all they could not to find out. They have just been presented with the bill for the years they spent shouting down anyone who questioned the company.
"They might not have been warned by BP, but they were warned repeatedly by environmental groups and ethical investment funds. Every year, at BP's annual general meetings, they were invited to ask the firm to provide more information about the environmental and social risks it was taking. Every year they voted instead for BP to keep them in the dark."
Personally, I wonder whether his argument doesn't go far enough. Those who have seen their shares or pensions losing value ought to actually be thankful that limited liability shareholding means that the most they can lose is the value of their shares. As partial owners of the company, they are not held responsible (beyond a certain point) for its actions, yet it was partially their failure in putting profits ahead of all other considerations that lead to the current mess.
Did you know that the 1953 Iranian coup orchestrated by the CIA and UK intelligence against prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh was conducted largely in order to protect the oil interests of the company that is today called BP?
Now of course, all this can't be laid at the feet of BP. Successive governments, both western and middle eastern, have played far more significant roles, as have various other groups and influences. Furthermore, I am no expert in twentieth-century history and realise that some of the material above is disputed. Nonetheless, it is important to connect some of the dots that lead from our oil-hungry way of life to historical and contemporary political instability and violence.
"On Meet the Press recently, energy and climate czar Carol Browner said the Gulf spill is 'probably the biggest environmental disaster the country has ever faced.' In a speech this week, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson called the spill 'the largest environmental disaster in American history.'
"Both were eager to show how seriously the Administration is taking this disaster – and both were wrong. America is in the middle of several environmental disasters whose impacts affect not only the Gulf Coast, but all our coasts and everything in between.
"One of the crises, of course, is global climate change – the insidious self-afflicted tragedy whose adverse impacts already are underway, some to be felt for the next 1,000 years according to government researchers.
"Another is freshwater supplies. After surveying water officials around the country in 2003, the General Accounting Office reported that 36 states were expecting shortages of fresh water by 2013, even without drought. Some experts say those shortages are already underway with adverse consequences for energy production, agriculture and peace between neighbors. As the Economist recently noted in a special section on water, we can find substitutes for oil but there is no substitute for water.
"The casualty list goes on: ocean acidification, nitrogen loading, the destruction of wetlands, forests falling to fires and bugs, the decline in soil fertility due to mono-agriculture, the loss of biodiversity, all with very real consequences for our economy, safety and health."
The BP oil gusher (it is not an oil spill, which implies a finite container spilling out) is indeed a terrible disaster and will continue for many weeks or months yet. But it is not going to end the world. It will continue to be a very major problem for the Gulf of Mexico, especially the southern states of the US.
Yet as this quote points out, it is neither the only nor the greatest ecological disaster in the US, let alone the world. We just don't hear as much about the others because they don't have sexy pictures of birds covered in oil, occur on timescales of years or decades rather than weeks or months, and because they cannot be easily blamed on a single company or individual.
Although these other disasters might not make as many headlines, this doesn't mean they are smaller or less important. I have previously attempted to list some of the many ecological and resource challenges facing the world (not just the US). It is tempting to pick one of these and decide that it is the most crucial and minimise the others in order to make more political elbow-room for one's favourite cause, but that is ultimately short-sighted. We need to face them all. They may not be equally threatening, but black-and-white thinking that assumes that for one to be taken seriously, the others can or must be ignored is itself one of the great dangers we face.
Indeed, one of the second order problems is that so many of these threats are interrelated. Biodiversity loss is multiplied by climate change. Deforestation contributes to carbon dioxide levels. Peak oil will tempt us to exploit non-conventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands, accelerating the loss of boreal forests. Decline of fish stocks increases pressure on agriculture and soil degradation. Monocultural agriculture creates nitrogen runoff and creates oceanic dead zones. And so on and so on.
Let us not lose the wood for the trees. These connections are crucial to understand so that we don't push down a bump in the carpet only to have it reappear elsewhere. Any response requires joined up thinking that can see patterns and relations. So many of these problems have underlying causes in the rapid growth of human activity associated with the globalisation of industrialism and its evil twin, consumerism. Until we face the roots of these issues, we are merely trying to treat the symptoms, often in ways that could ultimately worsen the prognosis.
BP have started a new and riskier technique to stem the flow of oil from 1.5 km under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Called a "top kill", it basically involves pumping mud at high pressure into the hole to try to weigh down the oil pushing up. Although it has been used successfully on many wells before, it has never been done at this depth (there has never been a problem of this magnitude at this depth before). BP are giving it a 60-70% chance of success. What is not often mentioned is that there is also a chance it could make things worse. It may be a couple of days before it is clear which is the case.
While we're waiting, here are two interesting things to check out. Read more
Deepwater Horizon: overview of a catastrophe
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on 20th April, killing eleven workers and injuring seventeen more. The well which it had been drilling was in water over 1.5km deep and descended another few kilometres into the sea floor into an oil field estimated to contain about 50 million barrels of oil (enough to supply the world's needs for less than a day, by the way). After the explosion, oil started gushing from the well into the deep waters of the Gulf and has continued to do so until today, over one month later.
After initially claiming that the oil slick on the surface was just from the sunken rig and not from the well, BP then offered an first estimate that about 1,000 barrels a day were leaking. This was revised up to 5,000 barrels a few days later by NOAA (National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration) and has remained the official government estimate. Scientists analysing the size of the visible spill on the surface put the figure at around 20-25,000 barrels a day, though this ignored the significant amounts of dispersant that BP was pumping into the oil as it exited the well (causing much of the oil to never make it to the surface) and the enormous oil slicks, some 10 km long, floating well below the surface.
Critics of BP started to point out numerous problems in their response, including their use of inferior and more toxic dispersants purchased from a company linked to BP (they have recently been ordered to find a less toxic alternative, having already employed 3 million litres of the stuff) and perhaps of greater concern, a pattern of trying to hide or minimise the extent of the problem. Under pressure, BP finally released some video footage of the underwater oil eruption, from which independent scientists estimated the flow rate at up to 70,000 barrels per day. More pressure from Senators lead to BP posting more videos, from which it has been estimated that it may be closer to 100,000 barrels per day, of which BP have now managed to siphon off up to about 5,000 barrels per day via a pipe they have managed to thread down the gushing hole. That is, it appears that the disaster is one hundred times greater than they first admitted. It is already the largest oil contamination in US waters and is moving up the charts towards the largest in the world. About one fifth of the waters in the Gulf are now off-limits to fishing and some of the oil has been caught in the Loop Current, pulling it towards Florida and the lower eastern states.
Tony Hayward, CEO of BP has been quoted calling the 38,000 square kilometres of visible surface spill "a drop in the ocean" when compared to the enormous volume of water in the Gulf. Despite numerous apparent serious breaches of safety protocol and a history of pollution infractions from the rig, he has called the disaster "unforseeable" and "inconceivable" and assured people that the environmental damage is likely to be "very, very modest".
This is not an oil leak, which sounds slow, nor an oil spill, which implies that the oil is pouring from a tank of a given size. This is an ongoing underwater oil gusher, filling an olympic swimming pool every four hours or so. Although efforts to stem the flow are ongoing, ultimately, it may not be stopped until a relief well is drilled, which is likely take a few months. Many commentators are beginning to suggest this may turn out to be the largest environmental catastrophe in US history.
Our dying oceans
However, this is just one of a number of deeply troubling problems facing the world's oceans, and despite potentially affecting the Gulf of Mexico for years to come, its effects are dwarfed in both scale and long term impact by a range of other threats to ocean life: acidification (from carbon dioxide), plastic pollution - including a floating garbage patch possibly larger than Australia, dead zones from agricultural run-off (the oil pollution is likely to exacerbate this problem in the Gulf of Mexico), warming causing coral bleaching, thermal stratification and other changes in marine life, indiscriminately destructive fishing techniques (trawling and dredging) and overfishing, global fish catch peaked in the 1980's and on current trends all commercial fish stocks will likely be depleted (unprofitable or extinct) in the next few decades.
For the authors of holy scripture, the ocean was a terrifying chaos, filled with monsters and a symbol of destruction. The vision of the new heavens and new earth in Revelation 21 includes the telling phrase "and the sea was no more", indicating an end to chaos and destruction.
But today, the picture is reversed. Our oceans are threatened and dying. It is we who are the chaotic (or perhaps all too systematic) destroyer.
Byron is a husband, and father of two small children. He keeps worms, bees and a compost pile, with a small garden to justify them.
In his spare time, he is an ecological ethicist, author, activist, speaker, assistant minister and postgraduate student.
Posts
