World Oceans Day Blowout
Linda Sheehan
San Francisco Chronicle
06/04/2010
As the oil-slicked maelstrom in the Gulf surges silently and ominously outward, we come face-to-face with World Oceans Day. Proposed in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and celebrated annually afterward, World Oceans Day was officially designated in 2008 by resolution of the United Nations General Assembly as June 8th of each year.
The United Nation's 2010 World Oceans Day theme - Our Oceans: Opportunities and Challenges - almost impossibly understates the dizzyingly mounting challenges posed by the Gulf crisis. However, the opportunities for change may be equally as great.
The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, precipitated by a deepwater platform blowout that spread oil thickly along 35 miles of pristine California coast, spawned the first Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency, and many of our most pivotal environmental laws. Then-President Richard Nixon reflected that "The Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people."
How do our collective consciences respond to the devastation of this exponentially larger Gulf spill? What opportunities will we now seize? The spill projections now show the oil swirling out of the Gulf, into the Atlantic and well up the Eastern seaboard. No matter how we try to hem them in with place names, the seas constantly correct us. Our oceans are an interconnected body of water and life, and our decisions now will have equally far-reaching consequences.
We can find some of our answers by examining the flaws that led us here. Key geneses of both spills were cost-cutting measures that eventually cascaded to oil-gushing blowouts. More vigorous oversight of offshore operations and stronger safety regulations, fully enforced, would no doubt help prevent and minimize future potential disasters.
But the geologic pressures behind the oil surging into the Gulf may pale in comparison to the accounting pressures perceived by corporations, whose bottom line is to maximize profits. There is no spot on a corporate balance sheet to incorporate the benefits of a flourishing ocean, or healthy workers, or thriving fishing communities, or sun-drenched beachgoers basking in the smell and rush of clean, salty waves. Corporate balance sheets reflect only the company's costs of complying with worker safety and environmental regulations. The constant internal pressure to keep down all corporate costs, including regulatory expenses, means the costs of those decisions must go somewhere else - in this case, to the people and environment of the magnificent Gulf.
The profit-focused rules of our corporate accounting and governance systems by definition require corporate action to try to limit the scope, implementation and enforcement of meaningful laws that protect the public and environment. Like the repeated caps over the broken, slickly spewing pipe in the Gulf, regulatory controls can somewhat hold back the pressure of the financial bottom line. Stronger regulations will hold the pressure back longer, but escape routes that harm the public and environment will almost always be found.
This does not need to be the case. We chose the corporate model in use today, and we can choose to operate differently. In 1969, our collective consciences were touched by the images of bewildered marine birds sagging under the weight of the Santa Barbara oil spill, by the watery ashes of the Cuyahoga River fiercely burning in Ohio, and by the spreading silence beneath the surface of the dying Great Lakes. Acting on our conscience, we created the nation's modern environmental regulatory system. Today, our outraged consciences once again call for justice, resolution, accountability, change - something different from feeling powerless before the devastation that spreads daily before us.
