My 2-year-old son, who is smart and beautiful, loves animals. When he's reading a book about animals or seeing a nature show on TV or playing with his little plastic monkeys, cows and zebras, animals get his full attention. If an animal is extinct, like the dinosaurs he loves so much, he doesn't hold that against them.
Last night I had trouble getting him to bed because we'd just read "Yurtle the Turtle" and he wanted to pretend he was a turtle by snapping his lips together and pulling his pajama shirt halfway over his head.
When he saw footage of oil-bathed pelicans on the news, his verdict was to the point. "Mommy, poor animals!" It was both an exclamation and a question. It was alarming to see an animal so clearly in distress, and the note of question in his small voice seemed to ask, "Why and how did this happen?"
For my part, I am willing to take a share of responsibility for that bird and all the other animals like it that may die as a result of this disaster. And I'd like to explain why.
My central idea here is that perhaps an outrageous demand for a finite, hard-to-get resource creates a reckless scramble to come up with a supply of it.
To acknowledge this is not to absolve BP or any of the other companies that were involved, and it is surely an inadequate excuse for the lack of oversight on the part of government agencies tasked with preventing such accidents.
Obviously, companies should not conduct themselves the way BP and the others did. And because they did, they should have been stopped by the government. But neither happened.
The argument usually goes that of course BP is a corporation concerned only with profits, so it's only natural for them to take the lion's share of the blame.
But I ask you, why would they be out there in the first place, digging at such great depts with such apparently shaky equipment at the risk of their own employee's lives if there weren't a demand for the product they were after that matched the severity of such actions?
The simple fact of the matter is, that rig and that well would never have been there at all if we weren't demanding such large and such cheap quantities of oil. Does this excuse their dangerous scramble? No. But it certainly helps me understand why they'd do it.
I encourage you to take a look at this graphic to get a grasp on the true insanity of the situation. They dug a well into a reserve of oil that is deeper than the depths at which the Titanic currently rests. Is that not insanity? Yet it was profitable for them to engage in such insanity, in part, because we made it so.
The insanity of the situation, the insanity of our demand, makes this insane and dangerous behavior almost rational, from the perspective of a company like BP. And if it weren't BP out there breaking laws and endangering lives in their reckless pursuit of oil and oil profits, it would likely be some other company who didn't want to be edged out of the market for not taking things far enough. Just so they could get the edge on the market and beat their somewhat-less-reckless competition.
They're not doing it for fun, or because they're jerks. They're doing it because our actions are demanding it. We are demanding more oil than can safely be brought to us, and we probably have been for some time now. The amount of demand is such that a disaster like this one may have been inevitable on a long time scale, even if this one specifically could have been prevented.
I can understand how this would be an unpleasant or even unbearable thought, but I also don't see how those of us who contribute to the demand can deny it.
So what's going to make this insane behavior seem like the insanity that it really is? Well, more government regulation would be a start. As it sits right now, BP or a company like it can make billions and billions more by breaking the law than they ever could by paying attention to things like environmental and worker safety. Bluntly, it pays to be reckless -- even when disaster strikes.
To take steps back toward sanity, it also makes sense to reign in our crazy demand for oil. As much as we're able to, we need to take those steps. You've all heard them: Driving less, carpooling, using public transportation, bicycling for short trips, buying hybrid or electric cars if possible. These seem insignificant, but every person who makes these decisions also makes a dent.
Someone once asked me why I was placing any burden at all on gasoline consumers for this disaster. If a lumber company started a massive forest fire through their own negligence, would I blame ordinary, paper-using Americans for the disaster?
Well, the entire structure of the American economy and way of life does not center on cheap paper the way it does on cheap petroleum. Quite the opposite. With technological advancements, we've created an increasingly paperless society. Some of us with office jobs can go a whole day at work scarcely ever touching a sheet of paper. Yet to get to that same job, we must burn a little gas every day.
We got there with paper, but we're not there on oil yet, simply put.
Basically I don't understand the rejection of this idea. We are all complicit. The question is only one of degree. Unless you're someone who's never consumed any gasoline. I'm not. So I share in some of the responsibility. And I take responsibility. Every single day in the choices that I make.
This does not mean I'm taking BP's share and the government's share of responsibility off their respective shoulders. I simply can't deny my own, and I won't.