These two disasters do have several things in common.  First, both occur in industries that have terrible reputations for corruption, dangerous cost-cutting, cover-ups, lax regulatory enforcement.  In the case of the BP oil spill, the criminal negligence of BP and its sub-contractors along with both the corruption and incompetence of the government agencies charged with protecting the public and the environment directly led to deaths of the oil-rig workers and the destruction of the environment.  It remains to be seen whether there was any malfeasance on the part of TEPCO and the Japanese government that led to the current crisis.  As is now being reported, however, both the Japanese government and TEPCO have a history of scandals and cover-ups.  When our own Nuclear Regulatory Commission accuses its Japanese counterpart of having a too-cozy relationship with an industry they license and regulate, you know it’s bad.

The other thing they have in common is that no matter how each crisis was initiated, natural causes or human malfeasance, they each resulted in impromptu and frantic research project to avert, or at least minimize the scope of the disaster.  We are a week into this current crisis and we still have no idea what the end looks like and every day the possible outcomes put forth by experts become bleaker and bleaker.  Brave, doomed workers at the site continue to improvise, but despite their efforts the situation continues to go from bad to worse.  The entire worldwide nuclear industry is navigating in uncharted territory.  Hindsight may tell us that the possibility of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake followed by a tsunami was something that should have been considered, but beyond that, nobody seems to have asked the question, “What do we do if the primary and backup cooling systems fail?” or, “What will happen if the primary and backup cooling systems fail?”  We are now in a situation where an entirely new way to cool down a reactor core must be invented.  Immediately.

Imagine that famous scene in the Apollo 13 where a team of engineers improvise a jerry-rigged solution to replace the carbon dioxide scrubbers on the broken spaceship, only instead of three volunteer lives at stake, it’s tens of thousands who didn’t volunteer for anything.

During the BP oil spill, engineers needed to figure out how to plug up a gushing oil well a mile beneath the surface of the ocean.  It had never been done before.  It wasn’t as if there was a shelf one could go to and grab a deep sea oil gusher cap, it had to be designed and manufactured to order while the crisis, along with the oil plume, was in full bloom.   The first cap didn’t work, so another one was designed and built.  At any point during the crisis, no one was sure anything they did was going to work.

That sounds a lot like what’s now going on in Japan.

In both of these two disasters, no matter what the initial cause, there was a failure (or an unwillingness) at the very beginning to imagine a worse-case scenario and what its solution might be.  And so, what we like to believe is a “routine” operation – drilling for oil or running a power plant – becomes a high-risk engineering research project.

In the case of Japan, there are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives at risk, and land that could be rendered poisonous for decades.  In any human endeavor, there is a risk-benefit analysis to be done; nothing can ever be totally risk free.  The unusual set of circumstances that led to this crisis were certainly low in probability, but the risk of a failure that jeopardizes so many people (and future Japanese generations) and requires a solution that lives beyond our current understanding and ability to manage that is too great to ignore.

Our current technological civilization is driven by energy and the demand for it continues to grow.  Fossil fuels are a finite resource – we are consuming them much faster than the earth creates them – and our continued use of them threatens our habitat.  Unless we want our legacy to be nothing more than a larger version of those mysterious statues on Easter Island, left behind by a society that  both destroyed its environment and depleted its supply of energy through deforestation (see the book reference below), we need to find a clean renewable sources of energy.

It may very well be that nuclear energy is the short term stop-gap solution as the world’s oil reserves become depleted and the environmental impact of burning oil becomes untenable.  If that’s the case, then we’ve got face some music.  First, we must get serious about developing alternative technologies.  Second, we must efficiently use what we have.  That means modern, efficient power grids and yes, saying goodbye to 100 watt incandescent light-bulbs.

Finally, we must recognize when we are pushing the envelope.  The 104 nuclear power plants in The United States, are not ordinary, everyday operations employing known fully understood technologies like steel mills, sewage treatment plants, or bus stations.  Like deep sea oil rigs and spaceships, they are high risk experiments.  If we are going to use them at all, we need to manage them as high risk experiments, no matter what the cost.  The cost of failure is simply too high to ask anyone to bear.

Chernobyl Baby’ Explains Life In A Fallout Zone

See larger image Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition (Paperback) By (author) Jared Diamond List Price: $18.00 USD New From: $7.99 In Stock Used from: $5.30 In Stock Release date January 4, 2011.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

George Carlin first got my attention when I was a teenager in the 1970’s.  By that time, Carlin had transformed himself from a tradition old world “show-biz” style performer into a spokesman for the counter-culture.  Gone was the clean-shaven face, the suit and tie, in was the long hair and beard, the t-shirt and jeans.  He was best known for his “Seven Dirty Words” routine which ended up in a Supreme Court case, but underlying all of his comedy was a philosophical approach and a devotion to language that has never been matched.

In his later years, his hippy-esque (and pot influenced) approach was gradually replaced by an increasingly angry social criticism.  No one was exempt from his sharp wit.  But his sense of irony and his love of language never left him.  He had elevated stand-up comedy to an art form.

In this monologue from his later, post hippy period, Carlin displays his brilliance.  He starts out seeming to rage against environmentalists, but then turns the argument against itself.  He uses language as masterfully as any great poet and is extremely conscious of cadence.

Further Reading:

See larger image Silent Spring (Paperback) By (author) Rachel Carson List Price: $14.95 USD New From: $3.70 In Stock Used from: $1.99 In Stock

See larger image Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition (Paperback) By (author) Jared Diamond List Price: $18.00 USD New From: $7.99 In Stock Used from: $5.30 In Stock Release date January 4, 2011.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.”  So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.

-Genesis 1:20-22

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.  And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.”

-Genesis 1:27-29

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Although BP has said that all is going as planned with operation “Top Kill,” nothing will be conclusively known about its success until sometime Sunday.    While most articles about this environmental catastrophe refer to this as a spill, that word hardly describes what has happened and what continues to happen.  The word spill implies that there is some finite amount involved, however large it may be.  The Exxon Valdez spilled its contents into Prince William Sound twenty-one years ago.  There was a finite amount of oil onboard and the flow eventually stopped.  When the flow of oil from the Deepwater Horizon well is finally stopped, we can call it a spill.  Until then, it should be called what it is: an endless eruption.

The status reports issued by various sources since BP began pumping drilling mud into the well in an attempt to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  First there were reports that all was going as planned.  Then there were reports that the operation had been suspended sixteen hours before.  Then there were reports that the operation was resumed and again, everything is going as planned.  Since not one single thing about this drilling operation seems to have gone as planned since the very beginning, taking BP’s word, or the President’s for that matter, about what is happening requires a moon-sized grain of salt.

That this has been going on for over a month with one attempt after another to stop the flow or contain the damage failing is proof that we have inflicted damage to the environment far beyond our ability to control what happens to the gulf and to ourselves.

In 1951, Rachel Carson published the The Sea Around Us. The book sold over 250,000 copies in 1951 and went on to win the National Book Award in 1952. The Sea Around Us and the books that followed, especially her 1964 masterpiece, Silent Spring, became pillars of the modern environmental movement.

As I watch the streaming video documenting our supreme recklessness with Nature, I remember back to about 1970, when Earth Day made environmentalism cool, when my grandmother gave to me her book-of-the-month club editions of both those books.  I read them both that summer at my grandparents cottage on the north shore of Long Island.  That was years before mysterious plume of brown algae entered into the Long Island Sound and nearly obliterated the local scallop industry, and even more years before a second mysterious plume entered the sound again just as the scallops were recovering, delivering the final knockout punch to a way of life for generations (or centuries if you count the Native Americans who lived there before we did).

Carson was a gifted communicator and was able to teach science in very simple terms for non-scientists to understand.  Her writing style was beautiful and poetic.  In the very first section of The Sea Around Us, entitled “Mother Sea,” she describes the formation of the earth, its oceans, and the live upon it in a way that is scientific and at the same time as spiritual as any creation myth.  In her version of “Let there be light,” she describes the development of the food chain that binds us to our planet and to every other living thing:

All the while, the cloud cover was thinning, the darkness of the nights alternating more and more perceptibly with the palely illumined days, and finally the sun for the first time shone through upon the sea. By then, some of the living things that floated in the sea must have developed chlorophyll.  Now, in the sunlight, they were able to take the carbon dioxide of the air and the water of the sea and from these elements build the organic substances they needed.  So the first true plants came into being.  A group of organisms unable to produce chlorophyll arose, and found that they could live by devouring the plants.  These were the first animals, and from that day to this every animal in the world has followed the habit acquired in ancient seas, and, directly or through intricate food chains, has been dependent for food and life on plants.

When the oil gushing from this well is finally staunched, next week, next month or next year, where will we be?  What will we have learned?  How badly will we have damaged our only home?  We can already see where the oil has come ashore the destruction of the coastal wetlands along the gulf.  The local economies will be suffering for generations.  Beyond just that, however, are the massive plumes of oil deep beneath the surface.  Ironically, they may have been formed by the highly toxic dispersants that have been used, and continue to be used, by BP to prevent the oil from floating to the surface where they can be seen.  It’s the ultimate cover-up.  It doesn’t seem to have save the coastline from what may be irreparable damage and the long term effects to the health of the ocean, and with it, the food-chain and us.  The dispersants may very well have made it impossible for the oil to ever be removed.

This is all clearly the result of a powerful  industry aided by a regulatory system that is at best, impotent, and at worst, massively corrupted.  Fundamentally, the problem goes deeper than that.  The people of Louisiana are facing the destruction of their seafood industry.  Louisiana, long known for its shrimp, and its oysters, and its crawfish, is also long known for its even larger dependence on the oil business, and has long pretended that those two industries aren’t in conflict with one another.

The effects of these miles-long plumes of undersea oil are as of yet unknown and it may take years to determine.  They may live on for years, travelling around the world in ocean currents, leaving behind dead zones.

How many more times must this happen?  How much of our human habitat must we destroy? Where’s the tipping point?

See larger image The Sea Around Us, Special Edition (Paperback) By (author) Rachel Carson List Price: $19.99 USD New From: $6.15 In Stock Used from: $1.49 In Stock

See larger image Silent Spring (Paperback) By (author) Rachel Carson List Price: $14.95 USD New From: $3.70 In Stock Used from: $1.99 In Stock

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.