By Jake Greear
For three months Americans have watched an ecological disaster unfold in the Gulf of Mexico in excruciating slow motion. A mixture of outrage, fear, suspicion, helplessness, and uncertainty has naturally led to a lot of scapegoating. The public and many media figures have alternately heaped scorn on President Obama, Mr. Hayward, and even Admiral Allen. And the same ire has been directed toward the less personified entities of BP, “the administration,” and occasionally Haliburton. No doubt there is enough blame to go around, but to concentrate on specific instances of incompetence and negligence is to miss the point.
The spill shows that we have a problem, but the solution is not more competent, less selfish, or less neglectful people at the heads of corporations and governments. In fact, when it comes to extractive industries, a really good corporate executive—one who selflessly, boldly, and competently pursues the interests of the shareholders—is often the worst thing that could happen to the communities that have the misfortune of living in the vicinity of coal or oil reserves. A good executive will find inventive ways around the rules, count on forgiveness rather than permission, take chances, and stop at nothing. We do not need better people. We do not need a more truly repentant Tony Hayward or a more righteously angry president. We need to institute structures of more vigilant and robust democratic control over extractive industries.
Even putting aside the dangers of fossil fuel consumption at the planetary scale, oil and coal companies particularly have an inherent tendency to ecological violence. Asking who is at fault for this fact itself does not get us very far. Should we be angry at the engineers who have taken over three months to stop the mile-deep spill? They have probably handled this unprecedented task as well as anyone could. Anger directed toward the executives who chose to drill under a mile of ocean knowing a mistake could devastate an entire region is more justified, but we should remember that they were acting exactly as executives have always acted and will always act. Yes, they treated a whole region and the lives it supports as expendable. But who stood by and allowed them to do it?
BP must be held accountable, but as citizens living amid the activities of an advanced industrial economy we must also blame ourselves. It is incumbent upon citizens in a democracy to constrain corporations because in spite of any rhetoric to the contrary they will not constrain themselves. Even if the people that make up corporations are decent, the logic that mobilizes corporate commercial activity is and always will be ethically narrow, economically short-sighted, and ecologically blind. Corporations are not people, much less citizens. They are organizations that powerfully mobilize certain human desires—the desire for wealth, or the desire to apply one's abilities as part of a team to solve interesting problems, or the desire for cheap goods—while they demobilize other desires and motivations—love of place, the desire to pass on a way of life to the next generation, pride in one's work as a participation in the world, or the desire to work toward the public good as a member of a larger community. Corporations are useful, but they are incorrigible. To expect a corporation to be a good citizen is as nonsensical as it is to admonish one for ecological exploitation.
