Unless a day comes when we can get by without the jobs, goods, and wealth corporations create, we must not shirk our political responsibility to protect ourselves and the places we call home from their inherent excesses. This means we cannot afford the luxury of living apolitical lives and being ignorant about what these industries are doing. Overall it means pulling our heads out of the trough, standing up, and taking the measure of the systematic injustices and increasingly outlandish and world-threatening industrial activities going on around us.
The lesson of the Deepwater Horizon spill is that vigilant democratic oversight and strict regulation is the necessary burden of the polities that host extractive industries. Many newly developed democracies do not have the political capital and institutional stability to enforce such oversight, and communities are falling victim to ecological violence for this reason all around the world. The U.S. has no such excuse. Here we suffer primarily from a pseudo-patriotic discourse cynically linking corporate entitlement to individual liberty. To corporations this shameful myth is a giant “KICK ME” sign on America's back.
The legislation currently working its way through the U.S. Congress is a start. But the unpopular truth is that the enforcement of reasonable constraints on offshore oil drilling will mean that certain oil reserves will be simply off-limits because it is impossible or impractical to get at them safely. It has become painfully clear that those under a mile of ocean should be among the off-limits reserves. Whatever series of violations may have led up to the spill, the spill itself was an accident, and it is impossible to eliminate the possibility of further accidents. Rand Paul's recent statement is exactly right as far as it goes: “accidents happen.” Who hasn't messed up at work once or twice? But if a slip-up at work means a whole region's way of life and means of living can be destroyed, your work must immediately stop. If this is what a deep water drilling accident looks like, if what has transpired over the last three months is even a possible scenario, then deep-water drilling is simply not OK.
Of course a few jobs stand to be lost, and already those who are out of work due to the temporary moratorium on deep-water drilling are crying foul. But if we must choose between a few jobs extracting the finite reserves of oil from under the Gulf and the many jobs harvesting the Gulf's renewable stocks of fish, then we must choose in favor of the latter. The jobs of the past, in this case, are the jobs of the future. Oil extraction in the Gulf is not going to stop altogether even if deep-water drilling is halted. The question is, will an apathetic public and a cowed leadership tell the millions on the Gulf coast to just take their hush money and wait on the next spill? Or could this be the disaster that finally begins a political movement in this country to stand up and defend the heretofore taken-for-granted right to basic ecological security?
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Jake Greear is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
