š” Between the devil and the Deepwater Horizon
In which Gabriel Garcia Marquez holds up a mirror to our darkest nature
Dear readers,
First, a hearty Maryland welcome to new subscribers! I know there is an abundance of great writing here and I value your trust in Building Hope. My promise to you is to publish only my best work. Todayās essay kicks off Earth Month and marks the upcoming 14th anniversary of the inferno that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig, unleashing the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.1
Iāve been working on a collection of short stories that bring nature to the foreground and nudge people out of the center. Starting next week, youāll be able to read Part 1 of a story narrated by a maple tree about a forest threatened by a fracking pipeline. Subscribe so you donāt miss it. There will also be a little amuse-bouche of flash fiction coming this Saturday, thanks to
and the Books That Made Us. šāJose Arcadio Buendia dreamed that night that right there a noisy city with houses having mirror walls rose up. He asked what city it was and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no meaning at all, but that had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo.āĀ ~ Gabriel Barcia Marquez, āOne Hundred Years of Solitudeā
Letās start with a few facts about the Deepwater spill taken from Wikipedia, thatāfor me, at leastādo little to put it in proper perspective:
āThe US Government estimated the total discharge at 4.9 million barrels (210 million US gal; 780,000 m3). After several failed efforts to contain the flow, the well was declared sealed on September 19, 2010. Reports in early 2012 indicated the well site was still leaking.ā2
Have you seen the 2016 film,ā Deepwater Horizonā? It does a creditable job of telling a very human story despite all the technical complexities of the disaster. Of its many horrific moments, one of the worst for me was when an injured pelican somehow flew inside the bridge of the drill rigās companion ship. Squawking and terrified, it bounced off windows and control panels until finally landing, exhausted, on the floor. The oil-soaked birdās final death throes were sickening.
That moment was an effective dramatization of the ecological devastation that would be unleashed by the leaking well. The action scenes of humans being thrown by explosions, debris raining down on them, balls of fire chasing them down dark corridors all had the you-are-there quality of a good disaster film. But, somehow, they didnāt affect me as much as that single pelican.
The more interesting question isnāt what happened, though. Itās why it happened at all. I donāt mean the investigations into the series of arguments, poor decisions, or malfunctions of emergency systems that led to the blowout. I mean, what makes human beings believe that we can keep drilling in riskier and more remote environments? That we can design for and control any setbacks that occur? That we have a firm grip on the world when we fail, again and again, to account for its vast mythic dimensions?
The Deepwater Horizon was at the time the worldās biggest ocean-drilling exploration rig. And the well they were drilling for BP, by the name of Macondo, was the deepest ever attempted. (Doesnāt the name Titanic mean anything to these people?) As if we needed more, here is yet another example of our dumb hubris. Our insatiable need to conquer and subdue Mother Nature.
Thereās a card in the Tarot deck called The Devil. The Devilās a pretty frightening card, but itās also quite curious. For instance, the man and woman who are chained by the neck to the devilās black granite perch are a kind of reverse-image Adam and Eve. Counter-intuitively, they donāt seem to be in any distress. In fact, the chains around their necks are quite loose; they could slip out and make their escape at any time. So why donāt they?
This is the picture of addiction, of bondage to something that we know is bad for us. And still we return, again and again. This card warns that, by staying, we grow horns and become more and more devil-like by the day. We are implicated in our own enslavement. This all plays out on a deeply unconscious level, so itās unlikely weāll catch more than a brief glimpse of clarity now and then.
In the visual language of myth, the ocean symbolizes the vast, mysterious unconscious. The mysterious, unknowable depths can intimidate and frighten, even kill us in a trice. The Deepwater Horizon was over 50 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexicoāso far that the only way to commute to work was by helicopter.
Think about that. The helicopter needs jet fuel. Which necessitates drilling for oil. See the trap we have built for ourselves? The chains that we could slip, but choose not to?
A very sophisticated system of engineering and technology kept the Deepwaterās pontoon system floating safely above that ocean of the unconscious. Until the fire, that is.
Drilling for and consuming fossil fuels isāwe know thisālife-threatening. Every massive spill reminds us. As gaudy as was the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989, it would have been an equal, though far more disperse, disaster had the oil been delivered, refined, pipelined and trucked to gas stations, pumped into cars, and burned into the atmosphere. We are in constant, willful denial of this basic law of life on earth that everything goes somewhere.
The journalist Tom Friedman calls oil and gas āfuels from hell,ā in contrast to renewable energy (solar and wind), which are āfuels from heaven.ā Itās an apt image symbolically, if not rationally.3 The fossils have been sequestered down in the earthās crust over millennia, far from the thin and fragile layer of life known as the biosphere, for good reason. In every form, they are toxic to life. In mythic stories, hell is often depicted as a place of continuous fire and sulfurous smoke, a place of eternal damnation and suffering.
Exactly how the Deepwater Horizon must have felt that night of April 20, 2010. The balls of fire topped over the rigāthe height of a 27-story buildingāand blasted through every deck and level, eventually sinking the 32,00 ton structure. Worse, the explosions took eleven human lives and countless lives of other creatures unfortunate enough to call the Gulf home.
A consummate mythic storyteller, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, wrote that the buildings in the city of Macondo had walls of mirror. The sheer scale of the Deepwater Horizon, its literal and metaphorical connection with hellfire, invite us to imagine that it is also a mirror. Itās a mirror of our failed energy policies and corrupt subsidizing of fossil-fuel corporations, a mirror of our lack of humility and humanity, and a mirror that reveals the instability, unpredictability, and destructiveness of our continued addiction to fossil fuels.
Coda
In a report published in early 2020, a group of scientists found that the oil spread from this spill was far worse than satellite images showed at the time.4
āIn their study, published Wednesday in Science, the researchers dubbed it āinvisible oil,ā concentrated below the waterās surface and toxic enough to destroy 50 percent of the marine life it encountered. . . The findings show that the governmentās understanding of how oil flowed from Deepwater Horizon was limited and that it underestimated the extent to which marine life was killed or poisoned by toxic crude.ā
Claire B. Paris-Limouzy, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School, developed a model which allowed the team to track the path of the oil as it was dispersed by wave action, hurricanes, and currents. She noted that the footprint of such a spill exists in three dimensions, not only on the surface.
āThe Deepwater Horizon oil spill āwas no regular oil spill,ā Paris-Limouzy said, and cannot be examined simply with satellite images. āIt happened in the deep ocean. Between the deep sea floor and the surface is a lot of water.ā Oil in that water is tossed by hurricanes, tropical storms and natural wave action, among other things, far from the surface.ā
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At the time. Still the worst? One loses track. Thereās the BP well on Alaskaās North Slope that leaked oil and vented natural gas for four days seven years ago, until the āUnified Command achieved source control and killed the well.ā Gotta love the military language of oil drilling.
Those rare earth metals for batteries, etc, also have to come from somewhere. Industrial-scale anything carries great environmental consequences.
From the Washington Post, February 12, 2020. (Gift link.)
Wow, this was stunning and what a perfect framing device to use the devil and the deep blue sea. You pose the resounding question of why we continue to do this to the planet. I think the very unsatisfying answer is itās the devil we know.
A heart shattering tale (that I wish was fiction), asking the right questions. There is certainly an epic divide between those who see it one way and those who donāt.
Your drawing is amazing and ties in perfectly with what is happening to our world. Thank you Julieš