The Tarball Chronicles. David Gessner
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but the dispersants. I was out on an island the other day and hundreds of small clams were rolling in with the surf, all of them covered in tarballs. The dispersants have sunk the oil out of sight of the cameras, but it’s down near the bottom of the ocean, at the base of the food chain. This is just the start of the death we’re going to be seeing in the future. The fisheries were already dying. This could be the deathblow.”
I have heard this before tonight, but never put so bluntly. While no one knows how the chemical dispersants will affect the Gulf ’s food chain, everyone is anxious. The original mixture BP proposed using on the spill—Corexit 9527—was deemed too toxic by the EPA. When they demanded that the company change to a less toxic product, BP simply switched to another version of the same chemical compound, Corexit 9500. Both versions of the chemical are manufactured by BP and neither are legal in England. At this point, over a million gallons of the stuff has been dumped in the Gulf.2 The fact that the EPA did not even attempt to enforce its own ruling says worlds about what is happening here. The immediate effect of the chemical is to first disperse the oil, and then to sink it to the ocean floor. This makes short-term sense to anyone, like BP, who wants to tamp down immediate panic about the spill, since it means that less oil will be washing up on beaches in a region that depends on tourism more than any other industry. The goal is to not have this look like the Exxon Valdez, which is to say the immediate goal is focused on appearances.
“It’s like a kind of magic trick that BP is trying to pull off,” Ryan says. “A sleight of hand, out of sight out of mind. It’s good PR if people don’t see the oil.” Whether it’s good for anything else is a question he leaves unanswered.
After a dessert of blueberry pie, we retire to the overstuffed couch and turn on the Weather Channel. Ryan sprawls out on the big pillows and then asks me what I found on the beaches of Florida and Alabama. I tell him and then he asks for an overall impression.
“Everyone’s got their hand in the till,” I say after a minute. “That’s what I’ve come to believe. Everyone’s a part of it.”
“I’m not,” he snaps.
I’m afraid I’ve offended him, but it turns out Ryan Lambert is not easy to offend. He is smiling now. His reply was not defensive. He was simply stating a fact.
After a while the others head to their rooms or to the various high-top tables around the big room’s rim, and Ryan and I stay up late talking. To an outsider we might seem an unlikely pair; and it quickly becomes clear that in many ways we are at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. As simplistic as it may be, he’s the perfect stereotype for the hunting enthusiast, salt-of-the-earth conservative, and I, the natureloving, college professor liberal. And yet we both possess an underrated quality often ignored in the televised and shrill national debates: a sense of humor. More importantly, it turns out we have birds in common.
Over the last fifteen years or so, my life has gotten tangled up with birds, and specifically a particular species of bird called ospreys. I spent an entire year on the marshes of Cape Cod observing them, and another migrating with the birds down the East Coast to Cuba and Venezuela. Majestic birds with six-foot wingspans and black raccoon masks, ospreys get their living by making high dives into the water for fish. When I heard the Gulf was filling with oil my first thought was: the ospreys will be diving right down into it.
Ryan is a bird lover, too, though of a slightly different sort. While I watch birds through binoculars, he likes to shoot them.
“The only difference between conservationists and environmentalists,” he says, “is that we eat our way through nature.”
Ducks, not ospreys, are his obsession, but we are both worried about the fall migration. As Ryan sinks deeper into the couch, he describes the spectacle of millions of waterfowl sweeping down through the marshes of Louisiana. He is a tough guy, and you have to remember that what he wants to do with these birds is kill them, but his voice softens when he talks about the coming migration.
“This estuary is the richest in the nation and the majority of the waterfowl in the United States will come through here. They come through in great waves. In late August the blue-winged teal will come through. They feed on the bottom where the oil is. They are a beautiful bird, meticulous, too, with never a feather out of place. When they preen they will spread the oily mousse all over them and when they get oiled up they can’t regulate their body temperatures and then they can’t fly. They will not be easy to find and clean. You can’t catch a duck the way you can a pelican. They’re elusive and can get deep in the grasses or underwater. You won’t be able to catch them. Not the scaup and redheads and canvasbacks. The numbers of these birds are down already. And now they will be living out in the oil.”
At one point I excuse myself and run into my room. I dig into my bag and find the book I’m looking for, a compendium on migration by Scott Weidensaul called Living on the Wind. Returning to the couch, I read out loud a sentence that I underlined just yesterday: “Migration depends upon links—food, safe havens, quiet roost sites, clean water, and a host of other resources, strung out in due measure and regular occurrence along routes that may cross thousands of miles. But we are breaking those links with abandon.”3
He doesn’t say anything at first and I’m afraid I seem ridiculous—a liberal, book-quoting caricature—compared to my manly host. But he doesn’t laugh at me. He nods and seems to chew over what I have read.
“There is no bigger haven than this delta,” he says. “Think what we’re destroying. Millions of acres of wetlands. If we lose this we lose everything.”
Millions of other birds, not just blue-winged teal and ospreys but a hundred other species, will pour down this central corridor as they make their arduous journeys from points north to Central and South America. Migration is always a gambit: everything has to go right. It is a time of both stress and opportunity, but in this strange and oily year, I worry that the former will overwhelm the latter.
It’s late by the time Ryan heads back to his house, which is just a few hundred yards from the lodge. Holly and a couple of the others are still working on their computers, but I keep to myself, nursing a beer and chewing over my talk with Ryan.
I think of the thousands of ospreys that will be heading this way soon, when the weather changes. Ospreys have become no less than a way of organizing how I think about the world. A lot of nature lovers pay lip service to trying to imagine the world beyond the human—the biocentric as opposed to the anthropocentric—but by getting to know one animal well, I have, almost despite myself, done just that. My thinking, more specifically, has become ospreycentric. The birds are the one thing in the universe I pick up and find everything hitched to.
And so, when I think about the millions-plus gallons of chemical dispersants being dumped in the Gulf, my mind keeps returning to ospreys. We don’t yet know what the long-term results of Corexit 9500 will be on fish and birds, and we may not truly know for years, but we know that both the oil and the chemicals are already deep in the water column and may soon pervade the food chain. If this happens it will not be the first time ospreys have been impacted by human tinkering. In fact, if the birds were aware of what was happening in these waters, they would no doubt be thinking the osprey equivalent of “Jeez, not again.” This is a species, after all, that was all but eradicated by chemicals in the recent past.
It was from learning about DDT and ospreys that I first came to understand the concept of interconnectivity. The story begins in the late 1950s when DDT was sprayed on fields and marshes with the goal of eliminating diseasecarrying insects. But what the chemical proved, in a giant science experiment not so different from the one currently going on in the Gulf, was that “the web of life” is not some fanciful notion that a groovy ecologist invented. In fact, the way that DDT moved through that web—killing the insects but also moving up the food chain to vegetation and smaller fish, accumulating in larger quantities with every step up, eventually settling in lethal quantities in top