The jammed sewer of American oil production pouring into the gulf is surely tragedy and spectacle enough for anyone. One more essay on the subject is unlikely to add an iota to your understanding, pain, outrage, or sick amusement, and I would not so try your late and distracted patience. No, gentle browser, I write to you today with an important idea...an idea which I know others will read, understand, and lit by the spark of this understanding, spin from the burning pitch of insight into the world.
Today’s New York Times carried an article on oil spills in Nigeria. Now, this is not news, really. But there was one small item which, as I ate my biscuit and reflected on how downright distracting I can find the pain of others, caught my eye.
"now nothing living moves in a black-and-brown world"
Why, that’s sort of like a completely different planet, I thought. Is everything really dead, when the oil runs and runs? And then it hit me – the insight which I know you will all appreciate, share, and strive to bring into the world.
The Nigerians have been to the new planet first, they have seen the future!. We should immediately set up the facilities and epidemiological agencies necessary to study and learn from them. I mean, consider. As the population continues to grow asymptotically and oil supplies become ever more heroic feats of chemical and geological engineering...eventually much of the United States may be just like this. The Nigerians, of course, are not actual people. This is why we don’t read about this sort of thing except after they get really mad, because brown people only make squeaky noises and must make them really, really loudly. In this non-Americans are very much like mice. But Nigerians are closer to people than mice, or any of the other readily available experimental alternatives, and we can learn about our future from them.
I propose we immediately set up study zones in Nigeria. We can name them after American tax brackets. Or, since we’ve become fond of color coding, a range from blue and green – say, a nice, bright aqua – to shiny black. We can use the aqua Nigerians – a control group of ten or eleven (more expense would be superflous and unnecessary!) – to determine what kind of complications will occur for future Americans. They should get billions of dollars, really good medical care, and everything they want in life. For the tarry group – a few thousand more – we can provide very basic medical care, some range of modern medicine, and stable income, housing, and communities. To provide medical results which will be useful to future Americans, we should let this group cycle frequently, generating a long, slowly degrading curve into the general population. For these last, we will have a deep and true picture of not only the complications of environmental catastrophe on generations, but a complex interactive model of how developing stressors on the organism interact with toxicity!
Some of you, sensibly wary of yet more spending by the government, might think that perhaps Nigeria does not need our help in achieving such a miraculously informative social organization, that we have paid at the pump for it and private industry has provided it and so it reflects a triumph of the market, complete without further intervention or disturbance. And, to some degree, you would be correct. But please consider – as you ponder the matter – that only half the equation is in place! It is not enough to generate the data. We must, like foresters, harvest the bounty of information as well. We have most certainly paid for it with every tank! I propose we give this noble endeavor the efforts of community, and bring to it the spirit and generosity of America’s oil consuming public.