I was environmental before environmental was cool. Seriously. I mean, I wasn’t at the first Earth Day, but I was into Reduce, Reuse, Recycle back in the days when you had to take your recyclables somewhere—and when a lot of things couldn’t be recycled.
Now it feels as though there’s been a sea-change in the way we think about trash and recycling. In Austin, where I live, recycling is a way of life, with bins that let us toss in virtually everything. In Waco, where I work, recycling bins on the Baylor campus invite contributions of paper, plastics, aluminum cans.
Exxon, the corporation I made a villain in my first novel, Free Bird, and have been boycotting for two decades over their Alaskan oil spill, has become one of the safest and most-responsible oil companies around. When you compare their number of major fines in recent years with BP, we should have realized something bad was looming. (I know for some calling an oil company safe is like saying someone is the most humanitarian Nazi concentration camp guard; but seriously—check the numbers: 760 OSHA fines for BP, 1 for Exxon).
Most people have reached a point of accepting that the environment matters. And that’s what makes the BP oil spill and the damage to the Gulf that much more heartbreaking. Whatever your political persuasion, whether you’re drill, baby, drill, or tree-hugging Prius driver, it’s clear from the emerging facts that we should have known disaster was coming. The Houston Chronicle reports that “In the five years before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, federal investigators documented nearly 200 safety and environmental violations in accidents on platforms and rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, describing a stunning array of hazards that resulted in few penalties.”
Despite their green branding and attempts to paint themselves as more than a petroleum company, BP was, is, and will be a company that drills for oil. And facts show they they’ve done so with little regard for their employees, consumers, or the environment.
Set aside all they did wrong and could have done differently before the spill; after, they’ve consistently tried to minimize the damage and their own culpability. The Guardian notes that BP originally told us that 1000 barrels a day were entering the Gulf; then they upped their estimate to 5000 barrels a day. Now we understand that it’s at least five times that, with some scientists estimating higher still.
All of this could have been prevented. Tragic.
But there was profit in drilling deep wells in the Gulf for oil, and BP was pursuing it.
And that profit is where our responsibility enters in.
Yesterday my friend Ken was telling me about the electric car he hopes to buy. It has a range of 100 miles between charges and a top speed of 90 mph. Someday, perhaps all of us will drive vehicles or ride trains powered by alternative sources of energy.
But in the meantime, the political, ethical, and even spiritual choices remain: Do we use fossil fuels? How do we use them? What costs are we willing to pay to use them?
And what kind of commitments should we make to the paradigm shift it will take to move from exploiting this one-time only gift of dirty energy the planet gave us to other forms of energy that won’t pollute our air and water, won’t fill our atmosphere with greenhouse gases?
Part of my environmentalism is theological. Like many of my opinions, my environmental ideas are informed by my belief that God loved the world enough to create, enter, and die for it. They’re also informed by my recognition that many of the choices we make about energy have a direct impact on “the least of these”—the poor around the world who are most likely to suffer asthma and respiratory distress, to use polluted water, to suffer from our choices.
I was environmental back in the days when it didn’t really matter, since no one else was environmental. Nothing I said or did would matter, because alone I was only reducing my own footprint on the earth.
But times have changed. People have learned. Coalitions have formed that once would have seemed impossible between conservatives and progressives, between evangelicals, Catholics, and Protestants.
And now it’s time for all of us who love the earth—and earth’s people—to learn that business as usual leads to disasters like the one in the Gulf.
We must do better, and I believe we can.
Let’s start talking.
Leave a Reply