Oil, Coal, Wind and Food

In 1969, an offshore oil drilling platform close to Santa Barbara’s white sand beaches exploded and spilled 100 000 barrels (16 million litres) of oil into the sea. This ecological catastrophe led to new environmental laws and changes in oil industry. One can wish that the similar catastrophe facing the Gulf of Mexico at the moment would produce these kinds of positive side effects as well. However, there are no signs that the American dependency on oil is decreasing; in fact, Gulf of Mexico represents an increasingly important domestic source of oil (one third of American oil production).

Boston Globe cartoonist Dan Wasserman.

Energy issues have hit the headlines often this year. In West Virginia, 29 workers died in a mining accident recently. Then came the oil spill in the coast of Louisiana. In the clean energy side, there was the approval to build the country’s first offshore wind farm in Nantucket, close to Cape Cod, the beautiful peninsula that I visited in March. There were many protests in the island of Nantucket about this development of a windpark size of Manhattan, for aesthetic reasons. The worry of destroying the views is of course understandable and often employed in the windmill debates. But pondering the issue in the actual energy context, we must set new priorities. Do we want to spoil the oceanic view from the summerhouses of privileged people (for example the late senator Ted Kennedy was opposing the windmill park as his family has a holiday house on the seaside there) or are we more concerned about the ecological system of the seas and the global warming? Boston Globe’s cartoonist Dan Wasserman got the point a few days ago:

Politics are often coming far behind the civil society in fighting against social or ecological problems. The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who is often pleading for clean energy policies, saw an opportunity in the current oil spill to change the American energy production patterns. While I totally agree with him, I think that for now the only hope (even if it's not very realistic either) is that people would themselves start thinking of the consequences of their car-centred life styles. If climate change hasn’t provoked any tangible phenomena in the USA (except for the droughts in California maybe) and is thus relatively easy to ignore, the oil slicks washing to your beach might cause some concrete worry and perhaps even an acknowledgement of its connection to the life you’re leading.

In her excellent and inspiring non-fictional book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” (2007) Barbara Kingsolver tells how her family decided to live a more environment-friendly and healthier life. They moved from Arizona to their summerhouse in greener Virginia to cultivate their own food. In desert-surrounded Arizona, all the food was produced far away or irrigated with the water coming through a canal connected to Colorado river that now gets drier and drier when approaching the border with Mexico (not even reaching the ocean anymore). Their idea was to avoid products that are transported from Europe or South America or even just from another state in the USA. Instead they would consume only locally produced food that is gasoline-free and also better quality – and who needs strawberries in January anyways.

The book is a wonderful melange of scientific facts, tales of family life in a farm, horrific stories how huge agri-business corporations work and how local food from small farmers is not only healthier, more ecological, tastier, but also supports life in small communities. Unfortunately, I will leave Boston before the farmers’ market season really begins, but I’ve already left bananas or other exotic fruits from faraway countries in the shop (and for health reasons I always prefer organic products here). For sure, I will write about this book again here and I truly recommend it to everybody even not living in the USA. But I also hope to find a similar book written from a European perspective, so widely it has opened my eyes about the lobbying that affects what we eat and the problems, consequences and solutions that an individual consumer should be aware of.

"Recipes for Disaster" (or Katastrofin aineksia, 2008) provides another example of civic action in order to save the planet. In the docu-film Englishman John Webster and his Finnish family in Espoo are going for an 'oil-diet' for one year, oil meaning often plastic that is in all the simple things we daily use (therefore the Websters are making their own toothpaste and shampoo for example). The film is tragi-comic but the ecological idealism wonderfully crazy.

Following Webster, Planet Green website challenges us to join the oil detox reminding that gasoline is where only half of the barrel of oil goes to! The website also tells us that "Plastic production continues to increase at a rate of nine percent per year. Scientists estimate that more plastic will be manufactured in the first ten years of this century than in all of the previous one." Below an example where all this non-degradable plastic is ending up (see more photos by clicking here).