PPATH has daily “BP Dead Animal Count” updates. Today, it’s 53,850!
What The Public Can Do To Help Wildlife Harmed By The BP Deep Horizon Spill.
• Contact United States Secretary of Interior Kenneth Salazar at either (202) 208-3100 or feedback@ios.doi.gov and inform him that you want US Fish & Wildlife Services, not BP, to command all aspects (and related communications) regarding the rescue and rehabilitation of wildlife effected by the Deep Horizon spill.
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• Contact Assistant Attorney General Ignacia S. Moreno at (202) 514-2701 and request the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the United States Department of Justice bring suit against BP for violation of the Endangered Species, Marine Mammal Protection, Migratory Bird Treaty and Clean Water Acts.
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• File a Freedom Of Information Act Request at http://www.fcc.gov/foia/ Request information from US Fish & Wildlife and Marine & Fisheries regarding all the harm done to wildlife and ecosystems by the Deep Horizon spill, as well as BP’s involvement in the rescue and rehabilitation of wildlife and restoration of wildlife habitats.
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• Support PATH’s ongoing efforts to advocate for and protect the animals and habitats of the gulf by visiting www.ppath.org
• Osborn shoes offers one vegan style for guys with cotton uppers and rubber soles. They are fair trade, small-scale, and pretty freakin’ cool. I wish all their soles were rubber!
2. Abercrombie & Fitch: sweatshops in Saipan, exploitative worker contracts, zero-transparency according to Corporate Responsibility, ILRF’s Hall of Shame
3. The Gap (Old Navy & Banana Republic): New Delhi child labor, Saipan sweatshops labeled as “Made in USA”, Forced abortions on female factory workers.
• A New York Times article today reports on the grossly underestimated amount of oil gushing into the Gulf. “A government panel on Thursday essentially doubled its estimate of how much oil has been spewing from the out-of-control BP well, with the new calculation suggesting that an amount equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster could be flowing into the Gulf of Mexico every 8 to 10 days. The new estimate is 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil a day. That range, still preliminary, is far above the previous estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.”
• The New York Times Magazine, this week, has a heart-wrenching and though-provoking feature article on a phenomenon many psychologists, criminologists, prosecutors, veterinarians, and law enforcement professionals have suspected for a very long time: cruelty towards animals is directly connected to violence towards other people. “… a growing sensitivity to the rights of animals, another significant reason for the increased attention to animal cruelty is a mounting body of evidence about the link between such acts and serious crimes of more narrowly human concern, including illegal firearms possession, drug trafficking, gambling, spousal and child abuse, rape and homicide.”
• Blazing Through. John Varvatos offers a cotton/bamboo-blend, two button blazer in tan, and a linen herringbone blazer in brown. $198 (from $595) on GILT Groupe. Varvatos is a fur-free designer, and now if he’d only replace leather, lambskin, and merino wool, I’d be a happy man!
• Snack obsession of the day: Dried Chili-Lime Mango. The sweetness of mango, the kick of chili, the tang of lime – with a texture as satisfying as jerky, this is a fruit snack for big boys. To boot, recent research indicates that Chili may help stop the spread of prostate cancer cells and may contribute to improved weight loss.
• I have mixed feelings about Alpaca hair being used to soak up the oil spill. According to the UK’s Telegraph, hair from more than 100 alpacas in Pennsylvania is on its way to the Gulf of Mexico to help soak up the oil spill. Something doesn’t sit right with me about this (aside from the ethical implications of exploiting animals for their fur/hair/skin). Does the ecological impact of the livestock sector outweigh any possible good that could come out of using any (or every) part of these creatures’ bodies to clean up an environmental disaster?
Other solutions exist. In addition to Alpaca, human hair is being stuffed into pantyhose to be used as makeshift oil booms. There are probably tens-of thousands of hair salons in the united states, if not more – why even bother using Alpaca? If you cut hair or know anyone that does, now is the time to make use of your garbage!
Is it dramatic to compare the 200,000 gallons of oil that are spilling into and destroying the Gulf of Mexico each day to an arterial bleed? I was an EMT for a few years during college; I drove an ambulance and witnessed some pretty serious accidents. When the blood in someone’s body begins to spill out at an alarming rate, there’s a race against time to apply pressure and control the bleed; to get the artery stitched up. None of the paramedics or EMTs point fingers when we arrived to the scene of an accident; a life hung in the balance, and if we had ever stopped to ask who was to blame, or who might lose money because of it, or who would pay for the ambulance bill – the person would have surely died. The objective was to fix what had been broken and deal with the secondary issues later.
When I watch the video footage of the oil just spilling endlessly into the surrounding body of water, it haunts each moment of the day. But it’s worse than any car-wreck, and the only people with the tools to stop it are the perpetrators, themselves. Feeling powerless in a situation like this is not just an existential experience. We feel powerless because we act powerless. We act powerless because BP and governmental agencies continue to spend a lot of time and money convincing us that they know better. We can’t call 911 for an oil spill.
As you’re reading this, a black tower of sludge is still exploding and gushing and bleeding out, and the mobilization to plug it up isn’t nearly as drastic as it should be. People are still shopping in malls, getting their nails done, watching sports, chuckling with friends in the corners of bars. They say “the show must go on“, but for me, there is something so visceral and disturbing about the video above that it’s become the song I can’t get out of my head: a constant drone; a visual mantra. It’s the reminder that as I am making lunch or taking a shower or going for a run – the painfulness of global awareness paired with the demands of an unquenchable globalized thirst for oil and power, paired with our isolation and individual inability (or unwillingness?) to do anything other than pick up some of the wreckage and rinse it off, is too much to handle. Not many of us are trained to dress this sort of wound.
BP spokespeople will tell us that an abstract “We” are “focused on doing everything in our power to stop the flow of oil” and that “We” want to “mitigate the impact on the lives and livelihoods of those who have been affected“. They’ll claim that “while we continue in these efforts, we are participating fully in investigations that will provide valuable lessons about how to prevent future incidents of this nature,” and we are convinced that someone will be held accountable. (source)
In 2003, the ambulance I was driving arrived on the scene of a domestic violence case. The victim was beat up pretty badly, and the abuser had eerily become as docile and apologetic as a puppy. Something about this scenario resonates with each man-made environmental disaster:
They promise not to hit us again. They apologize, and say they didn’t mean it. Can’t we see how it hurts them to know they’ve hurt us? They are dressing the wounds they inflicted. They tell us not to leave them, and each time we want to believe that they really do love us. “This time…“, we say to ourselves,”This time they’ll really change.”
In fact, they will try to make themselves the heroes of this situation. Ultimately, no individual person will be held accountable and we’ll all shrug our shoulders and say “oh well, that’s life“, and get back to doing what we do until the next major oil disaster happens, at which point everyone will act shocked. “We couldn’t have predicted this“, we’ll say again. Well, here I am in 2010 predicting that it will happen again and again. Unless, of course, we realize that asking nicely is useless.
The consequences of oil drilling will always outweigh the benefits. This is a lesson that must be learned in a perpetually losing game – and it’s a lesson that will never be taken seriously by those in power. Fossil fuels are not infinite. The cost of ignoring that lesson goes against the will of so many, including the sperm whales, bluefin tuna, brown pelicans, turtles, fish, coastlines, river-systems that are fed by the oceans, forests that are fed by the river-systems, and all life on this planet. This is not mean to be poetic – this is basic ecology; if the oceans die, we die. If we perpetually gorge giant holes into the ocean floor, we will continue to have accidents and kill vast areas of the planet, animals, forests, our families, our best friends, our one and only home.
Don’t let the glitz of a heavily funded PR agency fool you, or the stern and comforting promises of any governmental agency bring too much solace; just because it’s common does not mean this behavior is not a sickness. Just because it’s institutionalized does not mean it isn’t pathological. It’s a text-book case of an abusive relationship. How much longer can we stick around?
BP’s underestimated dead animal count is 9,835 and growing as of 3/15/10.
• An interview with designer John Bartlett over at Tim Groen has me pretty inspired and excited! We all know how rare it is to meet other fashion people interested in compassionate lifestyle and cruelty-free design. Bartlett, who is ardently anti-fur and veg, has committed to eliminating all leather from future collections, saying “I decided that I’m not going to work in leather anymore at all.”
• 42,000 gallons of crude oil are spewing out into the Gulf of Mexico very 24 hours. Experts say it could take months to stop the leak that has already covered 600 square miles and threatens wildlife areas and coastlines, like the sensitive Louisiana coastal ecosystem and the Mississippi Delta, now mere miles from the slick. The explosion that caused the oil rig to collapse and killed 11 crew members remains a mystery. BP (Beyond Petroleum), Transocean (the rig’s operational company) and government have not been able to stop the oil from spewing out of a broken pipe 5,000 feet below sea level. And lastly, the blowout-preventer – a device designed to stop a leak in scenarios like this, did not deploy and remains unable to be triggered. Burn the oil. Skim and collect the oil. There is no harmless solution and, in the fashion of an addict that never learns the lesson, the oil economy chugs on. We will all be reassured that “everything is being done” and “no one could have predicted this” and “it’s an unfortunate but unavoidable risk“. Who is doing the reassuring? Well, according to a NYT article yesterday, BP is and their profits more than doubled in the first quarter of last year, thanks to increased oil prices.
How can we ever move on from oil? Will these disasters ever cease and, if not, what does that mean?
