Bonnie S. Berkowitz writes in the Washington Post - In Louisiana, damage from the oil spill can be deceiving.
"I talked to the reporter and photographer who said they shot an oil-smothered marsh that has been replayed endlessly on TV for more than a week. They said the image was found in one small, grass cove they passed while on a media boat tour of the area. Everyone aboard shot it, including CNN, and they hadn't seen anything else that came close to such obvious damage since.
More dramatic for me, actually, was what I didn't see in the marshes: life. No crabs, no fish, no birds wading or flying overhead. Not even any bugs, and that wasn't only because I had slathered on Deep Woods Off insect repellant. Thousands of plankton and baby shrimp may have been dead right before my eyes, but I couldn't see them. Even the tar balls that litter the beach look like pebbles, innocent and natural, until someone tells you there are no pebbles on that beach."
Elisabeth Rosenthal writes in the New York Times, A Spill Afar: Should It Matter?. "A network of decades-old pipes and oil extraction equipment in the [Niger] delta has been plagued by serious leaks and spills. “More oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico,” he writes."
"The Niger Delta supplies 40 percent of all of the crude oil imported by the United States imports. Companies that drill in the area include Shell and Exxon. Here in the United States, people express outrage at BP’s actions in the gulf and demand that the oil giant behave responsibly in our waters. But should they also insist that oil companies behave well in the developing countries where their oil comes from?"
And here's an animation on Canadian oil that's imported into the US and it's effect on Canada.
H2oil animated sequences from Dale Hayward on Vimeo.
2 comments:
The girls and I watched Jackie Chan's "The Spy Next Door" today (stay with me here). Yes, this is likely NOT a movie on your list, but bear in mind I'm watching with a 9- and a 6-year-old. Anyways, the bad guy is out to rid the world of oil, presumably (I only paid attention during the martial arts scenes) so that there could be higher demand for his own sources of oil. He had invented a bacteria that fed on petroleum. One drop of the bacteria into a drum of oil that was spilled on the floor, and in seconds the oil disappeared as the bacteria fed on it then quickly died when the food source dried up.
Hmm....that could be very useful right about now.
Kevin Costner will save us.
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