The spill - the term seems too innocuous for the actual damage realized - has yet to be completely contained, yet work continues on a number of fronts. Widows of the 11 men killed on the rig addressed Congress in an effort to change current maritime law governing the deaths of people on the high seas. Read more about the archaic law and the attempts to redress it here.
There have been calls to mobilize volunteers and workers to both aid in the clean-up at BP's expense and to ease some of the joblessness effecting young people and other segments of the US population. Not everyone can volunteer, but may wish to donate to worthy charities on the ground. Charity Navigator rates the eight best charities for this crisis according to their criteria. See their recommendations here.
If you have a twitter account, surely you've come across @BPGlobalPR's withering commentary regarding BP's ham-handed attempts to address the damaged well and manage their image at the same time - fixing the well and compensating the Gulf coast residents is one strategy, purchasing advertising and search terms on Google is another. Read this to hear from the man behind @BPGlobalPR explaining himself in more than 140 characters. It's worth the read.
Carolyn Scott's TEXAS GOLD, portrait of Diane Wilson's battle against the petrochemical industry, is compelling and Diane's tenacity and principle are inspiring and admirable. It is too bad that so few lessons had been learned from her struggle to educate the industry that a healthy gulf is healthy for local economies. It has been reported that up 20% of the seafood in the US is harvested in these threatened waters. Damage done to the wetlands, in part to streamline access for the petrochemical industry, is implicated in the level of damage caused by hurricane Katrina, particularly to the coastal areas in Mississippi that had once enjoyed a substantial barrier of wetlands in Louisiana that would diminish the energy of hurricanes making landfall.
Perhaps that lesson fails to resonate because the corporations that drill into those waters are multinational giants with no longterm connection to the communities or countries. The Government Accountability Project assembled a list of troubling details emerging in the wake of the explosion here. Among the troubling details is the fact that a safety regulation that might have mitigated the damage resulting from a rig failure required by Norway and Brazil, two other nations with aggressive offshore drilling activities, was not required of BP in US waters. Regulation and regulatory agencies have been weakened over the decades since the creation of the EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other landmark laws and agencies enacted in the wake of the negligent oversight by industry. Regulation is cast by its opponents as "anti-business." Listening to news reporters speculate on the numbers of small businesses that may be disrupted or bankrupted as a result of the explosion along with the effects on businesses indirectly related, one has to wonder how regulation of risky activities can ever be anti-business.
This April we celebrated the 40th anniversary of Earth Day and recalled that it was a mammoth oil spill in 1969 spoiling the coast of Santa Barbara that had galvanized the public and the polititians into action. Will we emerge from this tragedy with lessons finally and well and truly learned?
See Carolyn Scott's TEXAS GOLD for a personal look at the gulf region and one of its heros.
Watch Robert Richter's WHAT PRICE CLEAN AIR? to revisit the controversies surronding the enactment of the the Clean Air Act.
Check out the series from Phoenix Learning Group on the future of green careers, particularly, GREEN CAREERS: CLEAN ENERGY - SOLAR POWER.
