“The science fiction nightmare has become reality”
In November 2010, renowned author Joseph Boyden read a stirring reflection on his experience living through the BP oil spill. The following is an excerpt from that speech. While this particular section focuses on the nightmare of the spill, Joseph’s talk ended with an inspiring call to action: let’s stand up from our circle and demand that sustainable, truly green energy be the silver lining that emerges from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico.
Author Andrew Davidson (The Gargoyle) with Joseph in Hartley Bay, BC, September 2012.
As a Canadian for the Great Bear, Joseph continues to lend his voice and his art to defending our most important places from oil spills.
*************
My wife Amanda and I walk on the sands of Pensacola Beach tonight. We’ve strolled here before, in the past, but it’s different now. Really different. The sky has turned from lavender to purple to black, and what we see comes straight from a science fiction movie. Our darkest imaginings of some mishandled future have sprung to life. For stretches longer than football fields, dozens of white-skinned, red-eyed aliens plod like zombies across the beach where the water meets the sand.
And then we see: the white-skinned aliens are really hazmat-clad humans wearing single infrared lights affixed to their heads. They shuffle and bend in teams of two, one holding a plastic bag while the other digs at black gelatinous blobs in the white sand. They wear white masks, and the waxing moon lists in the sky. Suddenly understanding that the beings are human is no less frightening.
We’ve come to this Pensacola beach, one of the latest victims of the BP oil disaster, with a local politician, a number of Waterkeeper Alliance representatives, and a local journalist. We’re here to meet a geologist, a man who brings a particular tool crucial to a better understanding of the oil’s impact: ultraviolet light. Oil illuminates an eerie orange under the light while water and sand remain neutral.
***
A blue, cone-shaped glow appears on the night beach in the distance amongst all the red eyes, and we beeline for it.
Throughout the day and into the night, workers scoured the beach for telltale blobs and dark patches, scooping and raking, but here under this ultraviolet scrutiny, we can see that, especially along the waterline, the oil has covered huge swaths of the beach in a sort of splattered blanket. We move to a section where the surface appears white and either successfully cleaned or as of yet unaffected. The geologist tells us to dig into this sand, and when we do, it’s hard not to cry. At a depth of six or seven inches, the telltale orange glow of oil permeates the sand in bright twisting ribbons.
This oil only arrived yesterday. The saturation is the result of merely a few tides.
****
Tonight, traveling with a local politician allows us to see Pensacola Beach. We’re told that the red lights affixed to the heads of the clean-up crew are to protect the returning turtles that will be laying their eggs soon. But these red lights don’t help workers to distinguish oil from seaweed or shells or dead fish. The red lights don’t illuminate the oil, period, and it seems ever more unlikely that turtles would swim their way through a choking skim of oil to lay their eggs on an oil-saturated beach reeking of petroleum and swarming with masked humans digging at globs of whatever they can guess might be oil.
The enormity, the weight, of the clean-up to come and the damage already done renders us silent. As if we needed any more proof that the environment isn’t a self-cleaning machine readymade for manmade injuries, one of us steps into the warm Gulf waters, steps out again, and asks the geologist to aim his ultraviolet light at his bare feet. This beach will be deemed clean and reopened by some other head honcho in only two days, but right now, the water is so polluted with particles of oil that our friend looks like he wears orange polka dot socks. The science fiction nightmare has become reality.
