The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.Milan Kundera
It was exactly one year ago today: a terrifying explosion, flames engulfing an offshore oil rig, 11 men dead. The beginning of one of the most horrifying environmental tragedies in US history – BP’s oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
I remember the images. The towering and ominous plume of toxic black smoke rising off the coast. Miles of snaking orange boom abandoned on desolate beaches. The endless live camera feed of crude oil gushing out of the broken pipe on the sea floor. Mud-stained and rain-soaked American flags drooping over rickety abandoned houses. Oil clean up crews and bird rehabilitation units working on converted seafood loading docks. Government officials speaking of “an invasion of oil.” The prim British businessman (and then CEO of BP) Tony Hayward commenting that he “would like his life back.” The confused screaming birds with oil soaked wings. The sheen of oil coating the bays and choking the marshes.
This wasn’t the first and it wont be the last major oil catastrophe that we see. Twenty-two years ago, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled millions of gallons of crude into Prince William Sound in Alaska. Nearly 50 years ago, Texaco (now Chevron) commenced oil operations in the pristine Ecuadorian Amazon, ravaging the rainforest and devastating local communities. And there are countless other calamitous disasters that have already (and tragically) disintegrated into the dust of world history: Lake View Gusher, Ixtoc I in the Bay of Campeche, The Atlantic Empress, Mingubulak, the Nowruz in the Persian gulf, the Amoco Cadiz, MT Haven, Torrey Canyon, Urquiola, Kuwaiti Oil Lakes, Greenpoint, Odyssey, Sea Star, the ABT Summer in Angola…the list goes on.
And these are only the “disasters.” The Niger delta is an oil sacrifice zone, where business as usual is causing an ongoing environmental and human rights tragedy. And here, even in Richmond, California, the century-old Chevron refinery is belching toxins into the environment and poisoning local communities on a daily basis.
We should not play with our health. We should not condemn our earth to become a casualty of our greed.
Today, we should remember. We should wage a war against forgetting. It was only a year ago that the horrifying black plumes of smoke began to rise off the gulf coast and the waves of oil began to choke the marshes, kill the fish, poison the people. And yet, there is a profound sense that even this disaster, in all its enduring horror, is beginning to fade from collective memory. And of course, for BP and the rest of the oil industry, our forgetting is their advantage.
Around the world, from the Gulf Coast to the Niger Delta to the Amazon rainforest, frontline communities are fighting to create clean and healthy environments, standing up for alternatives to reckless oil drilling, and waging a war against forgetting.
The relentless pursuit of oil has reached the remote Peruvian Amazon and now the Achuar people find their way of life threatened by yet another oil company, Canada’s Talisman Energy. But the Achuar are standing up for their rights, and are united in steadfast opposition to Talisman’s planned expansion of oil operations into their ancestral territory.
On “No Drill Day”, stand with the Achuar by sharing this story on Facebook and Twitter and signing the petition to Talisman. We have a chance to prevent yet another oil-related tragedy from occurring.
The stakes are high. Our earth is worth fighting for. We must always remember that. And if we don’t, our children may not have the luxury of forgetting.
