Sylvia Earle on the Gulf Disaster and Saving the Seas (Podcast)

TreeHugger: What do you see as some of the main impacts on the natural life of the Gulf of Mexico that we're going to see over the years to come?

Earle: There's precedent to be able to anticipate some of what will be evident. In the Persian Gulf, in the Exxon-Valdez spill, in the Ixtoc spills, these are mega-spills that had clear and obvious damage up front. And the same question was on everybody's mind: OK, what's the future going to be. And now they're telling the same kind of story: "No problem. The ocean is big, it's resilient. Creatures come and go anyway. Nature will restore and all of that."

And it is true, fortunately; nature is resilient. And another piece of good news is that it's not just a contained bowl of water. The Gulf has fresh water flowing in from the Caribbean that will help bring in new larvae of many creatures that will have been depleted by this mega-spill.

And over time, the toxic effects of the oil will be diminished. Some bacteria enjoy a nice oil dinner, and those that do will be favored. There will be a bloom of them. Those that don't will die, or certainly be reduced. There are winners and losers in an event like this.

Additionally, this spill took place in an area that is now identified as one of the two places in the North Atlantic Ocean where Bluefin tuna spawn. (And of course it's not just Bluefins. This happened during the time when Bonita and other fish were doing their thing to make more fish.) But contact with either the oil, the dispersants, or the two together (that double-deadly combination) was a setback, especially near the surface where the little eggs tend to gather.

When I was chief scientist at NOAA in early '90s I was told that Bluefin tuna, according to the fishermen and records, had been depleted by 90%. I was stunned. I said, "What are we trying to do, exterminate them?" Because if we are, we're doing a great job. We've only got 10% more to go.

So that's one factor. Another is the turtles. Going back to the beginning of the 20th century, the number of turtles has dropped by more than 90%. And of course the birds that have been affected. The pelicans, the beautiful brown pelicans, became so close to being eliminated back in the '70s because of DDT and other pesticides. Their shells were thin, and the youngsters never matured.

But because we changed our ways and DDT was banned, threatened birds began to come back. They were fully protected, and it looked like good news for the state bird of Louisiana, the bird beloved by many in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere in the country.

But this was a terrible a blow. It struck the young, it struck the old. Birds got caught in that oily mess. And yes, there were a few good news stories there, a lot of efforts by volunteers to clean them up and restore them. Some were taken elsewhere so they wouldn't get right back into the oil again.

But that meant a breaking up of the social structure. It's like having your family shipped somewhere far away, and you never know where because there's plague going on. You save their lives, but you don't save the integrity of the system, of the connections that these creatures have with one another.

Some people say, "Oh, they're just birds. You're talking as if they have some sort of social behavior and structure." Well, yes. They do.

The dolphins, the whales, all these creatures that have been punished, killed, and a bite has been taken out of their population. More than that, a bite has been taken out of their social history. These creatures live, some of them, as long as we do. Some whales live longer than people tend to live.

The sad thing is that many of them have been around during times that preceded the whole business of oil spills. Turtles may live to be 80 or more, some sharks are very long-lived, and of course dolphins and whales are as well. Some fish can be 100 years old or more.

They may recognize that the world has changed during the time that they've been around. Just as I certainly realize that the world has changed. But I have some idea of why it's changed. They don't. And even if they knew why it's changed, they don't know what to do about it.

We do have actions we can take. We do know what to do about it. What is baffling to me is that with all of great technology that has been brought to bear, we still face disasters like this one. It is just stunning, the engineering insights, the science and technology that underpins offshore oil and gas extraction. It includes some of the most sophisticated, highest-end intellectual capacity that humans have brought to any problem. How do you find, tap, extract, and bring to the surface safely these fossil fuels? It is staggering, what's involved.

So I salute this whole operation for the skill that it takes to make it happen. But not to know what to do if something goes wrong? No one thought it could go wrong. The blowout preventers do exactly what they're supposed to do, prevent blowouts time and time and time again. They're so reliable that I think a kind of complacency set in.
Most of the focus was on dealing with spills that happen at the surface, but even there, a lot of the oil was at the surface, ultimately, and still they're resorting to these decades-old solutions of putting up booms that allow the oil to spill right over them with the slightest little breeze. That hasn't advanced at all.

Dispersants are not the answer. You want something that does exactly the contrary. You want something that will gather up the oil so that you can take it out of the ocean. Contain it--don't let it get away. But not only was it getting away, it was helped in its escape by these dispersants that enabled the oil to travel much further and wider and deeper, to stay underwater, and have a greater impact.

From the standpoint of those who have the liability for this, I guess it's a good technique because it means people don't see it. They don't care about it. They don't understand what the real cost is to the creatures that actually make up the ocean, the water column itself.