See the blot grow in this Times-Picayune graphic.
See a live-updated map (created by Tulane students) of reports of oil sightings.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
"This is nauseating."
I read the latest on where the oil is coming ashore, and scrolled through the comments made (primarily) by locals. Some simply vent their anger at BP, some suggest proper retribution for their mistakes, some complain about the wider problem of an "oil addiction," and some scorn hope out of hopelessness. The latter speak with cynicism, trying their best to make a joke of something of which they are terrified, but their best efforts cannot lighten the long shadow thrown by the news that only gets worse.
The estimate of the size of the spill increases, the solutions that are in place (like chemical dispersants) take harsh criticism, and all the while the oil continues to gush. One of the commenters corrected the name "spill"--"It's an unlimited oil volcano!"--to the approbation of his fellow commenters, but even that small victory of language cannot stop the disaster it so effectively describes.
Underwater, the oil was an unseen disaster. Some knew what it truly entailed--what trouble that ecosystem saw--but while the visible oil floated harmlessly on the surface, far out in the Gulf, the miles of booms and fleets of skimmers and great concrete contrivances seemed noble and maybe even hopeful. The enemy may have been burning the fields, but they had not yet breached the wall. Upon landfall, the tide of opinion has changed. The best efforts at containment now look futile, the fleets pitiful, the booms flimsy. The war seems lost.
The beginning of the Ode to Man, which starts at line 332 in Sophocles' Antigone, uses the word deinos to describe man, a word which spans two English meanings, both wonderful and terrible, best captured in the idea of "awe." (I have altered David Grene's translation, below, to make use of that instead of "wonder," as he renders it.)
"Many are those things which inspire awe,
none is more awful than man.
This it is that crosses the sea
with the south winds storming and the waves swelling
breaking around him in roaring surf.
He it is who wears away
the Earth, oldest of gods, immortal, unwearied,
as the plows wind across her from year to year
when he works her with the breed that comes from horses..."
The scariest thing about British Petroleum's oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is the way our own powers have turned on us. The finest technology history has ever seen allowed man in his greatest strength to tap the resources of the earth, not just below the soil of fertile fields, but thousands of feet below the sea, where his own meager body could never go alone. What beautiful might! But now, what we opened with our strength we cannot close again, what we created we cannot destroy.
It has been a full month since we lost control of the power we had formerly harnessed. But only when the oil washed ashore on the mainland, did the wonderful become terrible.
The estimate of the size of the spill increases, the solutions that are in place (like chemical dispersants) take harsh criticism, and all the while the oil continues to gush. One of the commenters corrected the name "spill"--"It's an unlimited oil volcano!"--to the approbation of his fellow commenters, but even that small victory of language cannot stop the disaster it so effectively describes.
Underwater, the oil was an unseen disaster. Some knew what it truly entailed--what trouble that ecosystem saw--but while the visible oil floated harmlessly on the surface, far out in the Gulf, the miles of booms and fleets of skimmers and great concrete contrivances seemed noble and maybe even hopeful. The enemy may have been burning the fields, but they had not yet breached the wall. Upon landfall, the tide of opinion has changed. The best efforts at containment now look futile, the fleets pitiful, the booms flimsy. The war seems lost.
The beginning of the Ode to Man, which starts at line 332 in Sophocles' Antigone, uses the word deinos to describe man, a word which spans two English meanings, both wonderful and terrible, best captured in the idea of "awe." (I have altered David Grene's translation, below, to make use of that instead of "wonder," as he renders it.)
"Many are those things which inspire awe,
none is more awful than man.
This it is that crosses the sea
with the south winds storming and the waves swelling
breaking around him in roaring surf.
He it is who wears away
the Earth, oldest of gods, immortal, unwearied,
as the plows wind across her from year to year
when he works her with the breed that comes from horses..."
The scariest thing about British Petroleum's oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is the way our own powers have turned on us. The finest technology history has ever seen allowed man in his greatest strength to tap the resources of the earth, not just below the soil of fertile fields, but thousands of feet below the sea, where his own meager body could never go alone. What beautiful might! But now, what we opened with our strength we cannot close again, what we created we cannot destroy.
It has been a full month since we lost control of the power we had formerly harnessed. But only when the oil washed ashore on the mainland, did the wonderful become terrible.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Well,
It's here. And although it's been wreaking unseen havoc beneath the brown surface of the Gulf (which is an extension of that part of the world that can feel very distant to us land-dwellers), the story really gets depressing now. This is pretty much what that story will be until a miracle occurs:
"Everything that that blanket of oil is covering today will die," he said. "All of the bugs that the fish come in to eat, all of the critters in the marsh will die. And that marsh will die. There's no way to clean it up."
"Everything that that blanket of oil is covering today will die," he said. "All of the bugs that the fish come in to eat, all of the critters in the marsh will die. And that marsh will die. There's no way to clean it up."
Thursday, May 6, 2010
They're Lifting the Box Now
Thursday night: The AP has a man on board the ship carrying the "containment box" for the oil leak, who reports that, despite delays on Thursday night due to rising fumes in the hot, windless evening, the work of lowering it has gotten underway.
I spoke to my friendly fisherman landlord today about the "unprecedented mess," as he called it. He told me they shut down both sides of the river to fishing traffic today, to avoid contaminated catches, etc. Only a small percentage of the boats and crews that volunteered to help with the cleanup have been asked to help, he said, by BP or whoever is handling the situation (in name only, since no one is handling the situation), so I wonder what the banks of the gulf and delta thoroughfares look like today, lined with men helplessly searching the horizon for the creeping stain whose march they cannot stop.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting a few blocks north of the river in my stifling room, reading the latest news on the oil. It's like watching a bomb explode really, really slowly.
My landlord also said he declined to volunteer, partly because of what had been told him about the excess of volunteers, and partly because he heard that the particular crude filling the gulf can penetrate fiberglass, which forms the hull of his own vessel. It wouldn't cause it to sink, but it would leave a permanent red stain. I wonder, though, if the small craft helping to lay the booms in the path of the oily devil will wear red stains for years to come as marks of suffering and experience.
We talked more than just oil, though. He also mentioned that he has a daughter in Nashville, where she and everyone else is appalled at the lack of coverage, in favor of the Gulf Coast emergency and the Times Square bomber. If you haven't, read something about that other mess. Here's the saddest piece I've read about it.
I hope the box drops successfully. If it tears a bigger hole in the pipe, I'll be awfully sad.
I spoke to my friendly fisherman landlord today about the "unprecedented mess," as he called it. He told me they shut down both sides of the river to fishing traffic today, to avoid contaminated catches, etc. Only a small percentage of the boats and crews that volunteered to help with the cleanup have been asked to help, he said, by BP or whoever is handling the situation (in name only, since no one is handling the situation), so I wonder what the banks of the gulf and delta thoroughfares look like today, lined with men helplessly searching the horizon for the creeping stain whose march they cannot stop.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting a few blocks north of the river in my stifling room, reading the latest news on the oil. It's like watching a bomb explode really, really slowly.
My landlord also said he declined to volunteer, partly because of what had been told him about the excess of volunteers, and partly because he heard that the particular crude filling the gulf can penetrate fiberglass, which forms the hull of his own vessel. It wouldn't cause it to sink, but it would leave a permanent red stain. I wonder, though, if the small craft helping to lay the booms in the path of the oily devil will wear red stains for years to come as marks of suffering and experience.
We talked more than just oil, though. He also mentioned that he has a daughter in Nashville, where she and everyone else is appalled at the lack of coverage, in favor of the Gulf Coast emergency and the Times Square bomber. If you haven't, read something about that other mess. Here's the saddest piece I've read about it.
I hope the box drops successfully. If it tears a bigger hole in the pipe, I'll be awfully sad.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
A Goddamn Mess
I'm sure you've all been reading about the growing oil disaster in the Gulf that has Katrina survivors reading Job. For the simplest explanation I've seen of what happened, see Al-Jazeera's explanation.
But I just read a piece in the Times about it, and I'd like to add a little analysis that comes by way of my Skepticism class.
The article asks the question, overblown fears and blames aside, how bad is this, actually? "As one expert put it, this is the first inning of a nine-inning game." In short, I'm worried because the baseball season is 162 games long.
The article ends with this quote: "“The gulf is tremendously resilient,” said Dr. Dokken, the marine biologist. “But we’ve always got to ask ourselves how long can we keep heaping these insults on the gulf and having it bounce back. As a scientist, I have to say I just don’t know.”" I wish science and philosophy would take that kind of ignorance more seriously. Contemporary philosophers have worked hard to step around the so-called "skeptical problematic," which a lot of you would probably say is a fine thing today, especially when you read some of the wacky ways in which that problem has been re-presented in the literature. A la The Matrix, are we actually brains in vats, whose world is being generated by stimuli from a giant computer? I'm not kidding: the Brain-in-a-vat example of skepticism is so common that it has been abbreviated to BIV.
But the problem is really not as silly as that. It's modern form was renewed (from the ancient Pyrrhonians and others) by Rene Descartes, who wondered simply how he could tell, at any given moment, that he was not dreaming. The movie Waking Life has given us the answer, right? Try to work the lights in your dream, etc. That's not the worry. The worry is that this world that we come back to after we wake up from other, less sensible dreams every morning, could itself be a dream, which wouldn't be a problem except that causality would not be assured. But, in fact, this illustrates a nice point, which is that causality is in fact not assured. The last time you let go of an object with weight in midair, what happened? It fell to the floor, right? How do you know it will do that again next time? If there is a .001% chance that some other event (a bird snatches it, let's say) might radically interrupt your predicted outcome, was it a sure bet last time you guessed? That's an extreme example, and one might argue that a bird snatching up a falling object does not prove gravity wrong (which is fine, but it still doesn't hit the floor). There is another example I will borrow from the literature. You are at a party. Someone says, Do you know if Soandso is going to be at this party? You call Soandso to ask, and he says he's on his way out the door, and you have no reason to suspect he's drunk or lying or anything like that. You tell Someone, Yes, I know Soandso will be here. But then Soandso is struck with a meteorite on his way over, and never arrives. Did you have knowledge when you said you did? You were predicting the future, and though no one in the neighborhood had ever been struck by a meteorite before, and meteorite strikes the world over are very rare, nevertheless Soandso was struck by a meteorite when you said he wouldn't be. Certain philosophers want to certify your claim to knowledge, absolving you of responsibility for chance because the probability of the alternative outcome was so slim. Certain other philosophers are more stringent in their certifications for knowledge, but they are derided professionally because, it is said, their position ends in skepticism, from which no progress can be made.
A final example. Someone determines that it will be profitable to drill for oil at the bottom of the sea, because even though there is a chance that the mile-long pipe carrying oil to the surface might rupture and failsafe mechanisms might not kick in, allowing oil to devastate both the undersea environment and the shoreline livelihoods of humans, there's really not much of a chance that that will happen. Then, lo and behold, it does happen. Was it knowledge that led to such risks, or just really good guessing?
Experts know until they don't.
Skepticism is a real problem, even to people who don't want to admit it into their philosophical systems.
Greek philosophy, by the way, had honest ways of going forward with inquiry without sidestepping skepticism. And the Greeks also had Poseidon to scare them away from such high-risk high-profits.
[I have separate arguments, if you're interested in really losing faith in fortune-tellers, that questions how good the guessing really is--maybe we're just guessing about how good is our guessing.]
But I just read a piece in the Times about it, and I'd like to add a little analysis that comes by way of my Skepticism class.
The article asks the question, overblown fears and blames aside, how bad is this, actually? "As one expert put it, this is the first inning of a nine-inning game." In short, I'm worried because the baseball season is 162 games long.
The article ends with this quote: "“The gulf is tremendously resilient,” said Dr. Dokken, the marine biologist. “But we’ve always got to ask ourselves how long can we keep heaping these insults on the gulf and having it bounce back. As a scientist, I have to say I just don’t know.”" I wish science and philosophy would take that kind of ignorance more seriously. Contemporary philosophers have worked hard to step around the so-called "skeptical problematic," which a lot of you would probably say is a fine thing today, especially when you read some of the wacky ways in which that problem has been re-presented in the literature. A la The Matrix, are we actually brains in vats, whose world is being generated by stimuli from a giant computer? I'm not kidding: the Brain-in-a-vat example of skepticism is so common that it has been abbreviated to BIV.
But the problem is really not as silly as that. It's modern form was renewed (from the ancient Pyrrhonians and others) by Rene Descartes, who wondered simply how he could tell, at any given moment, that he was not dreaming. The movie Waking Life has given us the answer, right? Try to work the lights in your dream, etc. That's not the worry. The worry is that this world that we come back to after we wake up from other, less sensible dreams every morning, could itself be a dream, which wouldn't be a problem except that causality would not be assured. But, in fact, this illustrates a nice point, which is that causality is in fact not assured. The last time you let go of an object with weight in midair, what happened? It fell to the floor, right? How do you know it will do that again next time? If there is a .001% chance that some other event (a bird snatches it, let's say) might radically interrupt your predicted outcome, was it a sure bet last time you guessed? That's an extreme example, and one might argue that a bird snatching up a falling object does not prove gravity wrong (which is fine, but it still doesn't hit the floor). There is another example I will borrow from the literature. You are at a party. Someone says, Do you know if Soandso is going to be at this party? You call Soandso to ask, and he says he's on his way out the door, and you have no reason to suspect he's drunk or lying or anything like that. You tell Someone, Yes, I know Soandso will be here. But then Soandso is struck with a meteorite on his way over, and never arrives. Did you have knowledge when you said you did? You were predicting the future, and though no one in the neighborhood had ever been struck by a meteorite before, and meteorite strikes the world over are very rare, nevertheless Soandso was struck by a meteorite when you said he wouldn't be. Certain philosophers want to certify your claim to knowledge, absolving you of responsibility for chance because the probability of the alternative outcome was so slim. Certain other philosophers are more stringent in their certifications for knowledge, but they are derided professionally because, it is said, their position ends in skepticism, from which no progress can be made.
A final example. Someone determines that it will be profitable to drill for oil at the bottom of the sea, because even though there is a chance that the mile-long pipe carrying oil to the surface might rupture and failsafe mechanisms might not kick in, allowing oil to devastate both the undersea environment and the shoreline livelihoods of humans, there's really not much of a chance that that will happen. Then, lo and behold, it does happen. Was it knowledge that led to such risks, or just really good guessing?
Experts know until they don't.
Skepticism is a real problem, even to people who don't want to admit it into their philosophical systems.
Greek philosophy, by the way, had honest ways of going forward with inquiry without sidestepping skepticism. And the Greeks also had Poseidon to scare them away from such high-risk high-profits.
[I have separate arguments, if you're interested in really losing faith in fortune-tellers, that questions how good the guessing really is--maybe we're just guessing about how good is our guessing.]
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