Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, two of the only newspeople who get it, have been covering the BP spill consistently and Maddow especially doing a great job. My only complaint with their characterization is that the spill is the worst environmental disaster in US history. My concern is philosophical: What constitutes a disaster? More to the point, how focal or acute must be the cause for us to recognize it as a cause?
It seems plausible that in terms of “single events,” the BP spill has probably resulted / will result in more environmental damage than other single events, but in my view, the biggest environmental disaster in US history is the consumerism that has driven our economic engine for the last 200 years. The biggest environmental disaster is our attitude toward nature. Because the BP spill, as a cause, is so clearly circumscribed by the explosion and the decisions of a few people, it’s easy to conceptualize as a single causal event itself. Our attitudes toward nature, on the other hand, are more distributed, have more complex origins and are harder to think of in this way.
I especially want to prevent people thinking along lines like this: “If we could just eliminate these big horrible events — BP in the Gulf, the Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, DDT, etc. — things would be fine.” No, they wouldn’t. We have been unsustainable since the industrial revolution. Even if we achieve a 100% safety record and eliminate all the “big bad events,” there will still be small wetlands filled to make way for shopping malls, small (or not so small) sections of forest cleared for new apartment complexes, subspecies silently exterminated as their habitat disappears under a new subdivision. That, I think, is the more harmful, the more insidious disaster.
The objects in my living room are greater evidence of sin than any oil spill.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men…
[And] This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
– T. S. Eliot
Update 21-Jun-2010: CNN is also now characterizing the BP spill as the “worst environmental disaster in US history.”
