I received an email from watershed wizard Brock Dolman last night responding to the president’s oval office speech and a subsequent New York Times Article. Here’s a bit of what he said,
I must admit that when I heard Obama say the other night with his Oval Office speech – that the Gulf Gusher is “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced” – like the NY Times article below – I immediately started laying out a long list of American Enviro disasters besides the Dust Bowl and near Bison extirpation mentioned below! Seems to me that we might as well invoke the clearcut conversion of the majority of all old growth vegetation communities of all types, the genocide of over 95%+ of all Native American Indians, the near extinction of most salmonids populations, the actual extirpation of passenger pigeons, the discovery of Gold in CA, the damning of most rivers in the west & east, filling of wetlands and cutting of riparian corridors, the Gulf dead zone, and on the fur trapping front I would also want to advocate that the destruction of beavers (and all other furbearers) on the continent and the subsequent impacts to watersheds, hydrology processes and biological carrying capacity diminishment – should be in on the competition for “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced”.
Wow. Certainly the decimation of beavers changed the face of the nation – changed the fertility and responsiveness of the land. Changed parts of the west coast from temperate to arid. Changed the species available for hunting. Changed our ability to grow crops in dry areas. Changed the salmon runs. Changed the flight paths. Changed our streams from lush meandering shallow water to deeply downcut channels vulnerable to drought and flash flooding. Hmm.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that nearly all disasters started out as enormously lucrative “bright ideas” too. Take as many trees, beavers, bison, inch of farmland as you can. You can bet there has never been an environmental disaster where someone (or a bunch of someones) didn’t get sickeningly rich somewhere along the process. The vast destruction that’s a recipe for an environmental disaster of such magnitute cannot take place without its essential ingredient:
Greed.
Maybe the apocalypse in the gulf isn’t the worst environmental disaster in history. Maybe its not even the fastest. But I’m of the opinion that it’s no use trying to compare it now to anything because it isn’t finished. We have no idea how much damage it will eventually do, how drastically it will impact our wildlife or our ocean. We have no idea how we’ll look back on this and compare it to other events. Looking back is a luxury that we cannot afford. Right now we can only look through, through the thick brown gift that keeps on giving and the cloudy plumes of oxygen-depleting dispersant stretched out like severed fingers for miles along the ocean floor. Will this be the worst environmental disaster ever faced?
I’ll get back to you.
