That up there is Cat Island in Louisiana, in a photo from a week ago, which is nearly four years after the Deepwater Horizon ejaculated oil all over the Gulf coast. It used to be a nesting ground for brown pelicans, a lush mangrove-covered island that looks, as Doug Meffert, Vice President of the of the National Audubon Society, said, as if there was a fire. There wasn't a fire.
Sure, there are areas of that have recovered from the spill that started in April, some mitigation by time, water temperature, natural bacteria. Indeed, some of the recovery has surprised scientists.
Of course, there's no telling what's going to happen in the future as the environment continues to adapt to its poisoning by the oil and by the chemicals used to clean up the oil. An environmental chemist at LSU said, "[T]he oil is still in the marsh and it stays buried there, and every time there’s a storm event, tropical storms, it’s going to move some of that oil that’s still in the offshore environment around, and it will resurface." Another scientist says that they're still not sure where a third of the oil is.
We should also take into account the studies that link the oil spill with heart deformities in big fish like tuna and amberjack, ones that, you know, are immensely profitable, overfished already in some areas, now fucked right in their guts. "We can now say with certainty that oil causes cardiotoxicity in fish," says another scientist. Of course, we know what science is worth when it comes to the environment in the United States on this Earth Day 2014.
It really is like BP squatted down just squatted down over the Gulf of Mexico and squirted out the kind of watery shits that you get after drinking a bottle of cheap whiskey and eating a ton of fried food, laughing at how huge a dump it was taking and merely saying, "Whoa, that stinks" when it was done. But at least it wiped, right?
Back on Cat Island, there's one other effect of the decimation of the vegetation there. See, the roots of the mangrove trees held the soil together and, without them, the island is eroding away quickly, destroying not just the nesting grounds of the pelicans, but a buffer between the mainland and storms, and, well, hell, probably oil spills, too.
By the way, here's what Cat Island looked like in July 2010, a couple of months after the spill began, but before the oil had had an impact, during that gut-wrenching period of wondering where it was going to hit.
Pretty isn't it? It's nice that we have photos to remember it by.
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