Tethered Swimming

Way back in 2000, before the fall of American civilization, there was a feeling of resignation among environmentalist types.  The evidence for global warming was already overwhelming and sitting Vice President/environmental champion Al Gore was running for President, yet it was still impossible to have a sane policy conversation about changing the way we use energy.  More than a few people thought that it would take a true disaster to force the reality of the situation into the mainstream discourse.

That disaster basically happened in 2005 when New Orleans was all but destroyed.  But that catastrophe was quickly subsumed into the larger Red vs. Blue clan feud.  After a few documentaries and some good seasons from the Saints, the media-political conventional wisdom was that New Orleans had been fixed.  The Super Bowl win just clinched it.

But BP’s destruction of the Gulf of Mexico is a far grander and more durable disaster.  This time, there are no olde tyme racial undertones about poor black people getting screwed over (once again).  This time, the story won’t fade from the front page after only a few weeks.  This time, very wealthy people are going to be directly affected as all those fancy houses and resorts along the coast see their beaches trashed.  This time, blame can be laid at the feet of both political parties.  The Gulf cannot win the Super Bowl.

The powers that be are now talking openly about the well belching oil until August (and the start of hurricane season).  Even that may be optimistic.  Pictures and video of devastated shoreline, the development that finally put BP on the front page and kept it there, is going to increase in the coming weeks and months.  A complete recovery is already impossible, and the timeframe for getting things as back to normal as possible is going to be denominated in decades.

The corporate press, which made ignoring and distorting world changing events an art form in the Naughts, won’t be able to put this story to bed.  Afghanistan and Iraq are far away, and it was easy enough to settle them into the background noise of American life.  Record high unemployment doesn’t have much pull with the kind of people who work in newsrooms.  This past winter the global warming debate was – and it’s going to be hard to convince people of this thirty years from now – substantially affected by snow in Washington D.C.  This is different.  This is the disaster the environmentalists have been waiting for.

Whether or not it will actually change anything is still an open question.  And leveraging this into enough public concern about the unsustainable systems that provide our cushy 21st century lifestyles won’t be easy.  But the moment has arrived, and since it’s going to stay awhile, we might as well make use of it.