Lessons From The Exxon Valdez Prove That BP's Gulf Spill Will Be Far Worse. Make Sure We Pass This History On To Our Children

Like a scene from the Normandy Invasion isn't it?

Left: Cleaning up after the Exxon Valdez spill, a catastrophe that doesn't receive much air time these days but in some ways a far worse disaster than 911. But why would they whip up anger for this, the enemy is much more clearly a domestic one?

The collapse of Stalinism was not the only major event of 1989. What up until now was the largest oil spill in history occurred when the Exxon Valdez oil tanker rammed a reef off the Alaskan coast. It was later claimed that the captain was drunk.

The Exxon Valdez spill has been dwarfed by the spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the sinking of BP’s Deep Water Horizon rig. The Valdez spill has been estimated at about 11 million gallons. At an estimated  205.8 million gallons the Gulf spill is much much worse.

Serving its corporate masters, the US government paints a very optimistic picture of the Gulf in the aftermath of the catastrophe, claiming that about 75% of the spill has been manually removed or broken down by nature. These figures remind me of the incredible accuracy they attribute to their weapons of mass destruction, you know, the ones that blow up guests at weddings in Afghanistan. The death of Pat Tillman, Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or lack thereof, are other examples of government information at its best.

But some scientists dispute the Obama administration’s glowing reports. It seems painfully obvious that we have no idea how much oil was spilled and it is most likely much higher than claimed, scientists also point out that the dispersants used are also environmental contaminants. The effects of these ecological catastrophes will not be fully known for years and will last for centuries. The effects of the BP spill on the Bluefin Tuna that spawn in the Gulf in April will also not be known for some time. A group of people from Louisiana went to Alaska recently and what they discovered can give us a small glimpse of the destruction that these market driven catastrophe’s leave in their wake.

The Washington Post published an account of the visit and what the folks from the Gulf found there. The much smaller Valdez spill changed a community forever and not for the better. It destroyed the lives of fishermen and the lives of indigenous villages not to mention the wildlife. The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council has masses of information on the spill and its aftermath. Twenty years ago the Alaskan government wrote that, “…the human and natural losses were immense-to fisheries, subsistence livelihoods, tourism, wildlife. The most important loss for many who will never visit Prince William Sound was the aesthetic sense that something sacred in the relatively unspoiled land and waters of Alaska had been defiled.” One can only speculate as to how bad it is now.

The Post article gives us some idea, describing how the life of one fisherman was affected: “Platt was 28 when the spill happened. Now he is pushing 50 and has no health insurance, no retirement fund and three sons whom he can't help pay for college. "I am no better off than that 20-some-year-old kid," he says. Platt's undoing didn't come the year of the spill or even the year after it. Herring, a fish the natives call "the grass of the ocean," was still abundant in 1990 when Platt bought a herring fishing permit for about $230,000. No one knew then that the herring were dying. Or that once they were gone, they wouldn't soon come back.

Well isn’t America just the best country in the world. A man works 25 years and ends up with no health care, no retirement and his children have to borrow from moneylenders if they want a decent education. Why doesn’t he just pull himself up by his bootstraps like George Bush and Warren Buffet have done?

Another fisherman describes his observations:
In 1990, he says, they began behaving oddly. Instead of laying their eggs in a row, the herring would leave them in pyramids or in stacks. A year later, they started reabsorbing their eggs. "We were freaking out because they weren't spawning," Renner says. In 1992, he noticed lesions, evidence that disease had taken hold of their population.

"And then they died," Renner says. "So we quit herring fishing, and that was devastating to this town."

I always thought that you don’t necessarily need a PhD in marine biology to figure out that sea life is affected by pollution; 25 years fishing in the ocean for a living teaches us a thing or two.

The Spill Council estimates that 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, 22 killer whales, and billions of salmon and herring eggs were lost in the Exxon disaster although it is really impossible to tell. Apparently, some of the affected have been restored except the Herring population but I do not believe that things can be put back to normal.

The Exxon Valdez spill also destroyed the delicate balance that existed in the communities of native Alaskans also. The Post article describes it:

"The food is what I remember the most," says Meadow Dermer, who was 9 at the time of the spill. Before 1989, she and other children would play on the beach, picking salmonberries from bushes, prying gumboot chitons from rocks and digging clams. But after the spill, she says, she was no longer allowed to walk the beach, let alone eat what she found.

"We couldn't eat the deer, because they ate the oiled seaweed," Dermer says.

"And we couldn't eat seal, because they were swimming in it.

To compensate for the loss of such staples, Exxon started shipping in processed food. Suddenly Dermer was aware of Twinkies and Spam and Cheetos. She tried beef for the first time at age 10.

"That was the year I started to gain a whole bunch of weight," Dermer says."

There will no doubt be more obesity and death connected to Exxon’s new dietary practices.

In the recent class action settlement suit, Exxon was ordered to pay about $1 billion in damages and interest which is far below the $5 billion asked. Typical of the boss, they dragged it out, going through the courts like Union leaders do when worker’s rights are violated so that before the case was settled, 6000 plaintiffs died.

As far as the Gulf spill is concerned, the government’s claim that most of the oil has gone is conscious deception. The government is the government of the “people” but which “people” is the important issue here. The US government, as it did in Alaska, and as it is doing with BP, is defending a global corporation and more importantly, the capitalist system itself and the capitalist class that govern it. Exxon simply had a bad apple, a drunk in charge of an oil tanker, although they refused to charge him for that. BP had an incompetent guy in charge of the Gulf operations so they sent him packing off to Siberia with a guaranteed $1 million a year retirement package. Even when it comes to clean up after these disasters, the money is scarce, “Recognizing that funding for future restoration is limited..” the Spill Council says, “…the Council’s efforts are now focused on making an organized and strategic transition to a modest program.”

We should think long and hard about this so called reality. “Funding is limited”, “modest program.” These terms are not used when it comes to the trillions US capitalism spends on its predatory wars.

The destruction of the environment is an area that the left in particular has not given sufficient attention to, fortunately that is changing as I think, as others do, that the issue of the environment may well be the most important issue workers must take up in our struggle for a better world, after all, if we can’t eat or breathe, a job is not much help. . Capitalism cannot protect the environment, cannot produce the necessities of life ---food, energy, power, housing---in harmony with nature because the object of capitalist production is profit, the area of production that produces this profit is incidental. Profit, and the accumulation of wealth, for the owners of the production process, will always trump safety, the environment and human welfare, even their own.

While the planet will long outlast the economic system we call capitalism, its ability to provide our needs, what we require to live a decent, secure existence is finite. Capitalism even at the present cannot feed most of the world’s people, cannot provide for us a secure life that will allow us to develop our human potential. It will destroy life on this planet as we know it unless we consciously abolish it and replace it with a system of production based on human needs that is in harmony with nature.

Reading the Washington Post article I felt both sadness and anger. But as Joe Hill, who hopefully will one day be more familiar to our youth than a sports or TV personality said:

"Don’t Mourn, Organize. “