By Jake Greear
For three months Americans have watched an ecological disaster unfold in the Gulf of Mexico in excruciating slow motion. A mixture of outrage, fear, suspicion, helplessness, and uncertainty has naturally led to a lot of scapegoating. The public and many media figures have alternately heaped scorn on President Obama, Mr. Hayward, and even Admiral Allen. And the same ire has been directed toward the less personified entities of BP, “the administration,” and occasionally Haliburton. No doubt there is enough blame to go around, but to concentrate on specific instances of incompetence and negligence is to miss the point.
The spill shows that we have a problem, but the solution is not more competent, less selfish, or less neglectful people at the heads of corporations and governments. In fact, when it comes to extractive industries, a really good corporate executive—one who selflessly, boldly, and competently pursues the interests of the shareholders—is often the worst thing that could happen to the communities that have the misfortune of living in the vicinity of coal or oil reserves. A good executive will find inventive ways around the rules, count on forgiveness rather than permission, take chances, and stop at nothing. We do not need better people. We do not need a more truly repentant Tony Hayward or a more righteously angry president. We need to institute structures of more vigilant and robust democratic control over extractive industries.
Even putting aside the dangers of fossil fuel consumption at the planetary scale, oil and coal companies particularly have an inherent tendency to ecological violence. Asking who is at fault for this fact itself does not get us very far. Should we be angry at the engineers who have taken over three months to stop the mile-deep spill? They have probably handled this unprecedented task as well as anyone could. Anger directed toward the executives who chose to drill under a mile of ocean knowing a mistake could devastate an entire region is more justified, but we should remember that they were acting exactly as executives have always acted and will always act. Yes, they treated a whole region and the lives it supports as expendable. But who stood by and allowed them to do it?
BP must be held accountable, but as citizens living amid the activities of an advanced industrial economy we must also blame ourselves. It is incumbent upon citizens in a democracy to constrain corporations because in spite of any rhetoric to the contrary they will not constrain themselves. Even if the people that make up corporations are decent, the logic that mobilizes corporate commercial activity is and always will be ethically narrow, economically short-sighted, and ecologically blind. Corporations are not people, much less citizens. They are organizations that powerfully mobilize certain human desires—the desire for wealth, or the desire to apply one’s abilities as part of a team to solve interesting problems, or the desire for cheap goods—while they demobilize other desires and motivations—love of place, the desire to pass on a way of life to the next generation, pride in one’s work as a participation in the world, or the desire to work toward the public good as a member of a larger community. Corporations are useful, but they are incorrigible. To expect a corporation to be a good citizen is as nonsensical as it is to admonish one for ecological exploitation.
Unless a day comes when we can get by without the jobs, goods, and wealth corporations create, we must not shirk our political responsibility to protect ourselves and the places we call home from their inherent excesses. This means we cannot afford the luxury of living apolitical lives and being ignorant about what these industries are doing. Overall it means pulling our heads out of the trough, standing up, and taking the measure of the systematic injustices and increasingly outlandish and world-threatening industrial activities going on around us.
The lesson of the Deepwater Horizon spill is that vigilant democratic oversight and strict regulation is the necessary burden of the polities that host extractive industries. Many newly developed democracies do not have the political capital and institutional stability to enforce such oversight, and communities are falling victim to ecological violence for this reason all around the world. The U.S. has no such excuse. Here we suffer primarily from a pseudo-patriotic discourse cynically linking corporate entitlement to individual liberty. To corporations this shameful myth is a giant “KICK ME” sign on America’s back.
The legislation currently working its way through the U.S. Congress is a start. But the unpopular truth is that the enforcement of reasonable constraints on offshore oil drilling will mean that certain oil reserves will be simply off-limits because it is impossible or impractical to get at them safely. It has become painfully clear that those under a mile of ocean should be among the off-limits reserves. Whatever series of violations may have led up to the spill, the spill itself was an accident, and it is impossible to eliminate the possibility of further accidents. Rand Paul’s recent statement is exactly right as far as it goes: “accidents happen.” Who hasn’t messed up at work once or twice? But if a slip-up at work means a whole region’s way of life and means of living can be destroyed, your work must immediately stop. If this is what a deep water drilling accident looks like, if what has transpired over the last three months is even a possible scenario, then deep-water drilling is simply not OK.
Of course a few jobs stand to be lost, and already those who are out of work due to the temporary moratorium on deep-water drilling are crying foul. But if we must choose between a few jobs extracting the finite reserves of oil from under the Gulf and the many jobs harvesting the Gulf’s renewable stocks of fish, then we must choose in favor of the latter. The jobs of the past, in this case, are the jobs of the future. Oil extraction in the Gulf is not going to stop altogether even if deep-water drilling is halted. The question is, will an apathetic public and a cowed leadership tell the millions on the Gulf coast to just take their hush money and wait on the next spill? Or could this be the disaster that finally begins a political movement in this country to stand up and defend the heretofore taken-for-granted right to basic ecological security?
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Jake Greear is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
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