April 20 is one of the most famous days of the calendar year. On this day, Adolf Hitler was born and Mark Twain died. The territory of Wisconsin was officially established by Congress. Columbine happened, pitching the nation into a state of grief. The code name for meeting to smoke a joint evolved into a holiday for pot smokers, pitching the nation into a state of joy. Most recently, however, it was the day of the now infamous Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, or, as I like to call it, the first day of the end of the world.
Unless you’ve been playing WoW all summer or got holed up at Ikea trying to coordinate sheets with your roommate-to-be, you’re aware that the rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana was the biggest ecological disaster of all time, killing 11 people and any chance the planet had of surviving the human race. While an exact measurement is impossible to obtain, it is estimated that over 100 million gallons of oil have spewed into the Gulf of Mexico nearly unchecked over the past three months. During this time, engineers have scratched their heads at how to stop the flow and the government has been scrambling to get BP to fix the problem.
So, tell you something you don’t know, right? Well here’s something the newscasters have failed to mention: This spill is one doodle than can’t be undid. Oops.
Ever since man crawled out of the sea he has been wreaking havoc. With the discovery of fire came destruction, and before you knew it, all the mastodons were dead, the Amazon basin was deforested and the Polar ice cap shrank. Obviously this is the cynical, abridged version of the history of man. You can’t technically pin the general attrition of the planet on the mere existence of humans, but some statistics are hard to ignore.
It is estimated that in the past 500 years, 800 species of animals have gone extinct as a direct result of human activity, and even those “global warming is a myth” people have to admit that volcanoes cannot be held solely accountable for the nearly 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide released into the air annually. Yes, we are the highest on the food chain, but we are also the species that does the most damage.
This is not the part where I tell you to sell your car, buy organic and recycle. This is the part where I tell you it is much too late for that. It took the planet over 4.5 billion years to become habitable for man. It has only taken humans half a million years to make the planet nearly uninhabitable for all other species. Of course it wasn’t an intentional thing, but there have been too many irreparable oopses to justify our current cavalier attitude toward the environment.
The oil spill was an extreme example of how irresponsible we can be, but it is just one on a long list of mistakes we have made. The most outrageous aspect of the spill isn’t the volume of oil that has spilled, but that it happened and no one had any idea how to fix it. It is foolish to build any kind of machine that cannot be repaired, but it is absurd to pay more than $360 million dollars a year to run a piece of machinery that has no Plan C in case of damage. Add the fact that this piece of machinery pumps a toxic substance through a fragile environment that several industries rely on for their livelihood, and you have to be out of your goddamn mind to not plan for the possibility of things going wrong.
As this saga has unfolded, it has become clear that the public will never know how many corners were cut or by whom. It has already taken months to start to untangle the pointed fingers, but the punishment for being the one to take the blame is a monetary fine. That’s all well and good, but the planet doesn’t take checks. No amount of money can undo this damage and it is time to stop thinking about the earth in terms of dollars and cents. You could turn a huge profit if you cut down and sold every tree, but the only thing enjoying that cash would be your dead body.
The Gulf of Mexico may never fully recover from the oil spill. Nor will the people of India from the Union Carbide gas leak, nor the atmosphere from Chernobyl. Those were the worst disasters, but in truth thousands of smaller catastrophes happen on a daily basis. If we’re not careful, we will so damage the environment that human life is unsustainable, or at least absolutely miserable to maintain. If anything good comes out of this spill, it should be the realization that what we’re doing is shooting our future generations in the foot in our quest to maximize profits. Let’s all hope we haven’t passed the point of no return.
Allegra Dimperio ([email protected]) is a sophomore intending to major in journalism.
