It's Stunning

So...
over nearly a century, an estimated 20-30 million gallons of oil has leaked into the water and soil of Greenpoint in Brooklyn, NY. The story got some mounting attention in 2007, as lawsuits are prepared to combat inaction on the part of Exxon and five other companies involved in an enormous toxic waste situation. Read here here here and hear here.

A report this month from the Environmental Protection Agency suggested that the Newtown spill may be twice as large as first believed — some 30 million gallons, nearly three times the size of the Alaska spill. It has polluted the 4-mile strip of waterway and some 55 residential and commercial acres around it, gathering in subsurface reservoirs, mixing with groundwater, creating toxic vapors and and seeping, slowly but inexorably, into the creek. One major concern is the reported leakage of chemical vapor into homes.

Vapors into the homes... arsenic - lead... we have no idea what this means -- has meant to families to children over the years. What effect on families - family histories... could toxic fumes cause toxic behavior? Physical illness? Mental illness...

I've just returned home from a week in Brooklyn, and somehow it seems even closer -- Greenpoint, according to NPR is still home to Polish immigrants -- which is what it was 60 years ago, when the bulk of the spill occurred; which is what it was 60 years ago when my father and his brother Al were playing bloody knuckles and my grandmother and Ellie were standing on the stoop gossiping while the fresh kilbasi boiled inside... when we drank the water...

The spill, originally several times the size of the Exxon Valdez oil leak, resulted from an accident in the 1950s and lay undiscovered until 1978. In notices of intent to sue that were sent to the five companies, Andrew M. Cuomo, the state attorney general, said that so much oil had leaked into the creek that some samples of its sediment, when dried and weighed, were nearly one-tenth oil.

The notices also disclosed that an internal study by one of the companies found nearly 100 different pollutants in the creek water or sediment, including benzene, arsenic and lead.

Of course, the timing is... not for the Polish immigrants. Brooklyn is gentrifying. Already the brick row house my family sold a few decades ago for about $60,000 would be worth probably ten time that; imagine if it wasn't nestled in toxic waste...

“The Brooklyn-Queens waterfront has the potential to be New York’s Gold Coast, with sparkling towers, schools, parks and libraries,” said Eric Gioia, a City Council member whose Queens district abuts the creek. “Cleaning Newtown Creek is critical to that vision.”

Still the ability to ignore is amazing. On the NPR story, a carpet cleaner got Exxon to pay for a fan to ventilate his work area because the smell of oil was so strong.

"with the fans running we don't smell them [the fumes] -- with the fans running, I think they stay underground."

I love the language of that. With the fans running the fumes stay underground.

Brooklyn is home to the biggest oil disaster in this country. I read about this in October, and I've been trying to figure out how to make sense of it since then -- to put into some sort of context...

maybe there simply is none.

When I was about 12 the house across the street from my grandmother's burned to the ground. I wasn't allowed out on the stoop, but I stood at the window and watched it go up -- later I took a picture which is still hanging on my wall --

and the flames swallowed up what had been. And there were rumors of intent -- murmors of intent and neglect and what a pity

and we all stood and watched -- and the fire trucks came late -- and everything was destroyed.

For The Birds

A new study is looking at long-term effects of oil spills, as monitored through birds.

"Seagull blood shows promise for monitoring pollutants from oil spills," according to a new study from the American Chemical Society. Following seagulls months and years after oil spills, a group of scientists is marking the rise in pollutants in the birds' blood. Among other things, these pollutants (Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) are known to cause cancer and damage DNA. I dont' think I knew DNA could be damaged...

While oil spills quickly kill large numbers of seabirds and other animals, scientists do not fully understand the non-lethal biological effects of these spills, the Spanish researchers say.

The article in the ACM journal opened with that canary in a coal mine metaphor, again. Since I first wrote about that phrase last fall, I've seen it come up over and over again. Language travels through society like birds -- flocking and gathering and crying through the air.

This new study is crucial, of course. We look at things in such a short term perspective, we forget to look out, into the future and the past for understanding.

At the same time, while I think this will certainly prove an important study, there seems something so off with the way we look at and talk about these things. The birds -- the birds are not dying to show us when we are killing ourselves... we are killing the birds!


Photo from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council.

When the Cosco Busa cargo ship spilled 58,000 gallons of oil off San Francisco bay two months ago, within a week over 1,500 birds were dead or dying from the effects. While I have been familiar with photos of oil covered birds for decades, I didn't really know what the actual effects were -- I guess I thought the birds would then suffocate. I still imagine that's part of it -- but more. They lose their waterproofing. (Another irony...) They become incapable of faring cold and water. Listen to rescue workers discuss the scene on NPR here.

It is an overwhelming disconnect -- this one between us and the life -- the earth life -- we are part of. The overwhelming disconnect. As ever, when I feel that drowning in the person-ness we live in, I turn to poems.


Eagle Poem

by Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear;

Can’t know except in moments

Steadly growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we

Were born, and die soon within a

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.

Joy Harjo, “Eagle Poem” from In Mad Love and War. Copyright �© 1990 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.
From the Poetry Foundation Website.

My Emissions

http://cartoonbox.slate.com/hottopic/?image=0&topicid=161

Today a very simple sentence came to me via a very convoluted route.
In college, taking a break from the candlelight dinners of Smith College, I lived for a few months with 3 brilliant scientists, all getting their PhDs from Harvard.
Yesterday I heard one of them on NPR talking about ... it all.
Dr. Andrew Dessler -- I loved when he first put that title on his answering machine - it was new then, bold, and all he had worked for -- I still think it sounds sexy.
He's from Texas -- works in climate. He's back there now, with his beautiful family and said when I reported
"it's a warm fall here,"
"get used to it."
I wrote him -- "where should I look?" He sent me a tip. A website it will take me some time to get the hang of.
http://www.theoildrum.com/
But this morning, their first post was by an actuary who was recently solicited by the American Petroleum Institute to spend some time on an oil rig. She's written extensively on oil and consumption -- one article I saw was for the Wall Street Journal -- a pillar of reporting not known for it's liberal nature.

Gail the Actuary has this to say of solutions in her handout, "Another Inconvenient Truth:"

Is there an easy solution?
-- No, not really.
-- Conservation is a partial solution.
-- Alternative fuels (solar, wind, biofuels, geothermal) are likely to provide some help.
-- New technology like battery-operated cars are likely to be too little, too late.
-- We may need to unwind globalization; go back to simpler life styles, technologies that worked before.

It made me think -- it's so easy to get caught up in what we don't like about what's going on -- overwhelmed by an oil spill a day.
But there are things I simply can't imagine life without...
I would mourn my kids not meeting their grandfather.
I would mourn saffron.
I just loved hearing Andy's voice, sounding exactly the same 20 years later.
I would mourn beaches I've felt on my skin -- Elat, Big Sur, Capri.
My beaches.
Cixous says, when we own a thing we begin to kill it off... if this is true, is there power there, too? My oil spill, my emissions, my hole in the ozone.




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