by Subhankar Banerjee.
This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is
republished here with Tom’s kind permission.
——-
Bear with me. I’ll get to the oil. But first you have
to understand where I’ve been and where you undoubtedly won’t go, but
Shell’s drilling rigs surely will—unless someone stops them.
Over the last decade, I’ve come to know Arctic Alaska about as
intimately as a photographer can. I’ve been there many times, starting
with the 14 months I spent back in 2001-2002 crisscrossing the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge—4,000 miles in all seasons by foot, raft,
kayak, and snowmobile, regularly accompanied by Inupiat hunter and
conservationist Robert Thompson from Kaktovik, a community of about 300
on the Arctic coast, or with Gwich’in hunters and conservationists
Charlie Swaney and Jimmy John from Arctic Village, a community of about
150 residents on the south side of the Brooks Range Mountains.
In the winter of 2002, Robert and I camped for 29 days at the Canning
River delta along the Beaufort Sea coast to observe a polar bear den.
It’s hard even to describe the world we encountered. Only four calm
days out of that near-month. The rest of the time a blizzard blew
steadily, its winds reaching a top speed of 65 miles per hour, while the
temperature hovered in the minus-40-degree range, bringing the
wind-chill factor down to something you’ll never hear on your local
weather report: around minus 110 degrees.
If that’s too cold for you, believe me, it was way too cold for
someone who grew up in Kolkata, India, even if we did observe the bear
and her two cubs playing outside the den.
During the summer months, you probably can’t imagine the difficulty I
had sleeping on the Alaskan Arctic tundra. The sun is up 24 hours a
day and a cacophony of calls from more than 180 species of birds
converging there to nest and rear their young never ceases, day or
“night.” Those birds come from all 49 other American states and six
continents. And what they conduct in those brief months is a planetary
celebration on an unimaginably epic scale, one that connects the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge to just about every other place on Earth.
When you hear the clicking sound
of the hooves of the tens of thousands of caribou that also congregate
on this great Arctic coastal plain to give birth to their young—some
not far from where my tent was set up—you know that you are in a
place that is a global resource and does not deserve to be despoiled.
Millions of Americans have come to know the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge, even if at a distance, thanks to the massive media attention it
got when the Bush administration indicated that one of its top energy
priorities was to open it up to oil and gas development. Thanks to the
efforts of environmental organizations, the Gwich’in Steering
Committee, and activists from around the country, George W. Bush
fortunately failed in his attempt to turn the refuge into an industrial
wasteland.
While significant numbers of Americans have indeed come to care for
the Arctic Refuge, they know very little about the Alaskan Arctic Ocean
regions—the Chukchi Sea and the Beaufort Sea (which the refuge
abuts).
I came to know these near-shore coastal areas better years later and
discovered what the local Inupiats had known for millennia: these two
Arctic seas are verdant ecological habitats for remarkable numbers of
marine species, including endangered Bowhead whales and threatened polar
bears, Beluga whales, walruses, various kinds of seals, and numerous
species of fish and birds, not to mention the vast range of
“non-charismatic” marine creatures we can’t see right down to the krill —tiny shrimp-like marine invertebrates—that provide the food that
makes much of this life possible.
The Kasegaluk lagoon, which I spent much time documenting as a
photographer, along the Chukchi Sea is one of the most important coastal
treasures of the entire circumpolar north. It is 125 miles long and
only separated from the sea by a thin stretch of barrier islands. Five
icy rivers drain into the lagoon, creating a nutrient-rich habitat for a
host of species. An estimated 4,000 Beluga whales are known to calve
along its southern edge, and more than 2,000 spotted seals use the
barrier islands as haul-out places in late summer, while 40,000 Black
Brant goose use its northern reaches as feeding grounds in fall.
In July 2006, during a late evening walk, wildlife biologist Robert
Suydam and I even spotted a couple of yellow wagtails—not imposing
whales, but tiny songbirds. Still, the sight moved me. “Did you know,”
I told my companion, “that some of them migrate to the Arctic from my
home, India?”
Can oil be cleaned up under Arctic ice?
Unfortunately, as you’ve already guessed, I’m not here just to tell
you about the glories—and extremity—of the Alaskan Arctic, which
happens to be the most biologically diverse quadrant of the entire
circumpolar north. I’m writing this piece because of the oil, because
under all that life and beauty in the melting Arctic there’s something
our industrial civilization wants, something oil companies have had
their eyes on for a long time now.
If you’ve been following the increasing ecological
devastation unfolding before our collective eyes in the Gulf of
Mexico since BP’s rented Deepwater Horizon exploratory drilling rig went
up in flames (and then under the waves), then you should know about—
and protest—Shell Oil’s plan to begin exploratory oil drilling in the
Beaufort and Chukchi Seas this summer.
On March 31, standing in front of an F-18 “Green Hornet” fighter
jet and a large American flag at Andrews Air Force Base, President Obama
announced a new energy proposal, which would open up vast expanses of America’s
coastlines, including the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, to oil and gas
development. Then, on May 13, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals handed a victory to
Shell Oil. It rejected the claims of a group of environmental
organizations and Native Inupiat communities that had sued Shell and the
Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to stop
exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic seas.
Fortunately, Shell still needs air quality permits from the
Environmental Protection Agency as well as final authorization from
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar before the company can send its 514-foot
drilling ship, Frontier Discoverer, north this summer to drill
three exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea and two in the Beaufort Sea.
Given what should by now be obvious to all about the dangers of such
deep-water drilling, even in far less extreme climates, let’s hope they
don’t get either the permits or the authorization.
On May 14, I called Robert Thompson, the current board chair of
Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL).
“I’m very stressed right now,” he told me. “We’ve been watching the
development of BP’s oil spill in the Gulf on television. We’re praying
for the animals and people there. We don’t want Shell to be drilling in
our Arctic waters this summer.”
As it happened, I was there when, in August 2006, Shell’s first small
ship arrived in the Beaufort Sea. Robert’s wife Jane caught it in her
binoculars from her living-room window and I photographed it as it was
scoping out the sea bottom in a near-shore area just outside Kaktovik.
Its job was to prepare the way for a larger seismic ship due later that
month.
Since then, Robert has been asking one simple question: If there were
a Gulf-like disaster, could spilled oil in the Arctic Ocean actually be
cleaned up?
He’s asked it in numerous venues—at Shell’s Annual General Meeting
in The Hague in 2008, for instance, and at the Arctic Frontiers
Conference in Tromsø, Norway, that same year. At Tromsø, Larry Persily —then associate director of the Washington office of Alaska Governor
Sarah Palin, and since December 2009, the federal natural gas pipeline
coordinator in the Obama administration—gave a 20-minute talk on the
role oil revenue plays in Alaska’s economy.
During the question-and-answer period afterwards, Robert typically asked:
“Can oil be cleaned up in the Arctic Ocean? And if you can’t answer
yes, or if it can’t be cleaned up, why are you involved in leasing this
land? And I’d also like to know if there are any studies on oil toxicity
in the Arctic Ocean, and how long will it take for oil there to break
down to where it’s not harmful to our marine environment?”
Persily responded: “I think everyone agrees that there is no good way
to clean up oil from a spill in broken sea ice. I have not read anyone
disagreeing with that statement, so you’re correct on that. As far as
why the federal government and the state government want to lease
offshore, I’m not prepared to answer that. They’re not my leases, to be
real honest with everyone.”
A month after that conference, Shell paid an unprecedented $2.1
billion to the MMS for oil leases in the Chukchi Sea. In October and December 2009, MMS approved Shell’s plan to drill five exploratory wells. In the
permit it issued, the MMS concluded that a large spill was “too remote
and speculative an occurrence” to warrant analysis, even though the
agency acknowledged that such a spill could have devastating
consequences in the Arctic Ocean’s icy waters and could be difficult to
clean up.
It would be an irony of sorts if the only thing that stood between
the Obama administration and an Arctic disaster-in-the-making was BP’s
present catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.
The first oil rush in Arctic waters
This isn’t the first time that America’s Arctic seas have been
exploited for oil. If you want to know more, check out John Bockstoce’s
book, Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western
Arctic. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century,
commercial whalers regularly ventured into those seas to kill Bowhead
whales for whale oil, used as illuminant in lamps and as candle wax. It
was also the finest lubricating oil then available for watches, clocks,
chronometers, and other machinery. Later, after petroleum was
discovered, whale baleen became a useful material for making women’s
corsets.
In 1848, when the first New England whaling ship arrived in Alaska,
an estimated 30,000 Bowhead whales lived in those Arctic seas. Just two
years later, there were 200 American whaling vessels plying those waters
and they had already harvested 1,700 Bowheads.
Within 50 years, an estimated 20,000 Bowhead whales had been
slaughtered. By 1921, commercial whaling of Bowheads ended as whale oil
was no longer needed and the worldwide population of Bowheads had, in
any case, declined to about 3,000—with the very survival of the species in question.
Afterwards, the Bowhead population began to bounce back. Today, more
than 10,000 Bowheads and more than 60,000 Beluga whales migrate through
the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. The Bowhead is believed to be perhaps
the longest-lived
mammal. It is now categorized as “endangered” under the Endangered
Species Act of 1973 and receives additional protection under the Marine
Mammal Protection Act of 1972. It would, of course, be unforgivably
ironic if, having barely outlived the first Arctic oil rush, the
species were to fall victim to the second.
Inupiat communities have been hunting Bowheads for more than two
millennia for subsistence food. In recent decades, the International
Whaling Commission has approved an annual quota of 67 whales for
nine Inupiat villages in Alaska. This subsistence harvest is deemed
ecologically sustainable and not detrimental to the recovery of the
population.
My first experience of a Bowhead hunt in Kaktovik was in September
2001. After the whale was brought ashore, everyone—from infants to
elders—gathered around the creature to offer a prayer to the creator,
and thank the whale for giving itself up to, and providing needed food
for, the community. The muktuk (whale skin and blubber) was
then shared among community members in three formal celebrations over
the year to come—Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Naluqatuk (a June
whaling feast), two of which I attended.
In 2007, with writer Peter
Matthiessen I visited Point Hope and Point Lay, two Inupiat
communities of about 1,000 inhabitants on the Chukchi Sea coast. Point
Hope is considered one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements
in North America. At Point Lay, we accompanied Bill and Marie Tracey on a
17-hour boat ride during a Beluga whale hunt. After the whales were
beached, four generations gathered in a circle to offer prayer and
thanks to the whales. In other words, for such Alaskan Inupiat
communities whales are far more than food on the table. Their cultural
and spiritual identity is inextricably linked to the whales and the
sea. If Shell’s vessels head north, the question is: How long will
these communities survive?
And it’s not just whales and the communities that live off them that
are at stake. Oil drilling, even at a distance, has already taken a
toll in the Arctic. After all, the survival of several Arctic species,
including polar bears, walruses, seals, and sea birds, is seriously
threatened by the widespread melting of sea ice, the result of climate
change (caused, of course, by the use of fossil fuels).
In 2008, the U.S. Department of Interior listed the polar
bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. In
addition, millions of birds use the near-shore Arctic waters, barrier
islands, coastal lagoons, and river deltas for nesting and rearing their
young in spring, and for feeding in summer before they start migrating
to their southern wintering grounds. When the Arctic wind blows in one
direction, nutrient-rich fresh water from the rivers is pushed out into
the ocean; when it blows in the other direction, saltwater from the sea
enters the lagoon. This mixing of fresh and saltwater creates a
nutrient-rich near-shore ecological habitat for birds, many species of
fish, and several species of seals.
All this is my way of saying that if oil drilling begins in the
Arctic seas and anything goes wrong, the nature of the disaster in the
calving, nesting, and spawning grounds of so many creatures would be
hard to grasp.
Don’t let Shell’s drilling ship head north
With the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico ongoing, scientists are
beginning to worry about hurricane season. It officially begins on June
1 and doesn’t officially end until November 30. Any significant
storm entering the Gulf would, of course, only exacerbate the disaster,
moving oil all over the place, while hindering clean-up operations. Now,
think about the Arctic Ocean, where blizzards and storms aren’t
seasonal events, but an all-year-round reality and—thanks (many
scientists believe) to the effects of climate change—their intensity
is actually on the rise. Even in summer, they can blow in at 80 miles
per hour, bringing any oil spill on the high seas very quickly into
ecologically rich coastal areas.
On May 5, Native Village of Point Hope and REDOIL joined 14
environmental organizations in sending a letter to Interior Secretary Salazar. In light of the oil spill in the Gulf
of Mexico, it urges him to reconsider his decision to allow Shell to
proceed with its drilling plan. That same week, Secretary Salazar did
finally order a halt to all new offshore drilling projects and asked
Shell to explain how it could improve its ability to prevent a spill—
and, if one happens, to respond to it effectively in the Arctic.
On May 18, Shell responded publicly that it would employ a pre-made dome to contain any leaking
well and deploy chemical dispersants underwater at the source of any oil
leak. From what I gather, both methods have been attempted by BP in the
Gulf of Mexico. The dome has so far failed,
developing hydrates and becoming unusable before ever being placed over
the leak. Scientists now believe that those toxic chemical dispersants
have resulted in significant ecological
devastation to coral reefs and could be dangerous to other sea
life. None of this bodes well for the Arctic.
There is, I’m beginning to realize, another crisis we have to face in
the Gulf, the Arctic, and elsewhere: How do we talk about—and show —what we can’t see? Yes, via video, we can see the gushing oil
at the source of BP’s well a mile below the surface of the water, and
thanks to TV and newspapers we can sometimes see (or read about)
oil-slicked dead birds, dead sea turtles, and dead dolphins washing up
on coastlines.
But what about all the other aspects of life under water that we
can’t see, that won’t simply wash up on some beach, that in terms of our
daily lives might as well be on Mars? What’s happening to the
incredible diversity of marine life inhabiting that mile-deep water, and
what cumulative impact will all that still-spilling oil have on it, on
the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico, and possibly—in ways we may not
yet be able to imagine—on our lives?
These are questions that desperately need to be asked and answered
before we allow oil ships to head north and drilling to spread to
America’s Arctic Ocean. Keep in mind that there, unlike in the temperate
and tropical oceans where things grow relatively fast, everything grows
very slowly. On the other hand, toxins left behind from oil spills
will take far longer to break down in the frigid climate. Bad as the
Gulf may be, a damaged Arctic will take far more time to heal.
Whatever we can’t see, what we already can see on the front pages of
our newspapers and in the TV news should be more than enough to convince
us not to take seriously the safety claims of giant oil companies desperate
to drill under some of the worst conditions imaginable. Send those
drill rigs into Arctic waters and, sooner or later, you know just what
you’ll get.
If the remaining permits are approved for Shell in the coming weeks,
the Frontier Discoverer will be in the Chukchi Sea less than
six weeks later.
President Obama and Secretary Salazar should stop this folly now. It’s important for them to listen to those who really know what’s at
stake, the environmental groups and human rights organizations of the
indigenous Inupiat communities. It’s time to put a stop to Shell’s
drilling plan in America’s Arctic Ocean for this summer—and all the
summers to come.
Related Links:
Obama’s finally connecting the Gulf spill and clean energy. Champagne time?
The federal government needs to take command of the disaster response
How would you stop the Gulf oil leak?
