Dear Readers,

Like many of you, I've been in astonishment and grief over the ongoing gusher of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Though in many ways this spill (if we can even call it that) is so different than the Exxon Valdez oil spill 21 years ago, the story of it seems hauntingly familiar.

Early on, I wrote an op-ed for the South Mississipi papers - I've pasted it below this letter. And this past week, my friend Michelle Wilson Nordhoff and I hosted an oil spill vigil on the Coastal Trail. See photos and writeups here: http://www.themudflats.net/2010/06/09/voices-from-the-flats-a-vigil-for-the-gulf/,  http://www.ktuu.com/Global/story.asp?S=12618847, http://www.adn.com/2010/06/08/1313973/gulf-oil-spill-vigil.html.

My husband, Rick Steiner, has been there at ground zero for much of the past 6 weeks, and what he reports back is even more dire than what we're reading in the national media. So - what then can we do?

We can continue to take steps in our own lives toward lessening our carbon footprint.

But this won't be enough unless the vast majority of people do so. And that's unlikely. We need government to either lead or get out of the way.

We can demand that our government hold BP accountable, and disentangle us from the stranglehold that corporations have on our economies, communities, and lives.

We can demand that our government turn its full attention toward clean energy - energy efficiency, energy conservation, and alternative energy sources - and away from our oil addiction.

We can continue to speak up, and speak out, for what we know to be true: our life on this planet depends upon our courage, our voices, our actions.

Nothing less.

Marybeth

The BP Gulf Oil Spill: All Too Familiar
 
The image of the first oiled bird pulled my heart strings. It brought that sinking feeling, like my heart just dropped into my gut. That old pain. That anger. That question: will this one do it?

I see the fishermen filing their lawsuits, angrily saying they’ll make BP pay. Do they know it took 20 years for Exxon to finally pay Alaska Natives and fishermen, and that then it was just one-tenth of the initial 1994 jury verdict? Do they know thousands of those people had died before ever seeing one red cent from Exxon?

I see the beach cleanup efforts, the booms and boats and skimmers. It’s impressive, how many are out there so quickly. But do they know that after two years of cleanup efforts on the water and on the beaches, after $2 billion spent by Exxon alone, less than ten percent of the crude from the Exxon Valdez was recovered? The rest stayed in the environment—sunk into the water column, buried into sediment, washed deep between rocks, and continues to poison the fish and marine mammals of Prince William Sound.

I see the workers standing ready to rescue oiled birds, the volunteers arriving to help however they can. Thousands of volunteers came here, too. I was among them. I stood beside a woman from Connecticut, cleaning oiled sea otters. I was on a boat in Kachemak Bay, trying to capture oiled murres. I camped with volunteers from New York, working on beach cleanup efforts. Do they know, these thousands of brave and compassionate volunteers in Louisiana, how low the survival rate was here in Alaska? How we spent an average of $80,000 for every sea otter—and that’s with all the time volunteered and many materials contributed—and even then the survival rate was discouraging?

I hate to sound fatalistic. I remember all too well that feeling that there must be something I could do to stave off this disaster, to fix what we’d broken. I hear of the volunteer who is waiting to be given something to do, and sits watching images on T.V. that shows the oil spreading to all the places she loves, and I remember doing the same thing. I remember that feeling of needing to do something.

But I also remember what I concluded, after all the herculean volunteer efforts: once the oil is in the water, it’s all over. There’s very little that can be done to clean it up.

It’s all over—except for bearing witness. So my advice to our friends in Louisiana is to do that well. Whether you’re cleaning oiled birds or running a skimmer or sitting in a diner talking to fishermen, bear witness and record all the death and destruction, all the horror and heartbreak. Record it well.

And then let us use it, use the lessons from the Santa Barbara spill, the Exxon Valdez spill, and now the BP Gulf spill, to finally bring about real change, to finally end our addiction to fossil fuels and the stranglehold of mega-corporations on our seats of justice and reason, on our civil society and our environment.

We’ve known since the 1970s that this energy path was neither sustainable nor safe. We’re reaping the consequences of our failure to change course then. Just look at the toll of human lives in the last month:  29 coal miners in West Virginia, 11 rig workers in the Gulf of Mexico, 2 coal miners in Kentucky. And now the toll of fish and wildlife mounts. How many more sacrifices to the gods of fossil fuels will it take before we wake up, before our leaders create real, substantial change in our energy policy?

Let us use this disaster to usher in a new clean, green day of energy efficiency, energy conservation, and renewable energy. That’s what we can do, all of us, no matter where we stand today. We can demand a safe, sustainable energy future, without oil spills.

Dear Readers,

Spring. My garden is under four feet of snow. Hard to believe the changes I’ll witness in the coming month.

Change is the only constant, but it still throws us for a loop. Last October, my friend and Alaska wolf biologist Dr. Gordon Haber died when his plane crashed into Denali’s mountains during a research flight. Gordon was a tireless scientist and advocate for Alaska’s wolves, in the face of incredible resistance from Alaska’s Board of Game and Department of Fish and Game. His website, www.alaskawolves.org, is a must-read for anyone interested in knowing the truth about the lives of wild wolves.

Several of us, from across Alaska, banded together and tried to get the Board of Game to create a buffer adjacent to Denali National Park – the buffer Gordon first proposed in 1972 – to protect those wolf families most often seen by the hundreds of thousands of park tourists from being trapped and shot when they forayed outside park boundaries in winter. We failed. Worse, the Board removed the sliver of existing buffer, so the wolves are now more at risk than ever. See my opinion piece about this buffer at the Anchorage Daily News online.

We have our work cut out for us. If you’re interested in learning more, email me.

Balancing activism—the urge to do something direct now—and writing—the creative work that will, in the long haul, foster change—is always a challenge for me. But it’s a challenge I love.

My essay, “From the Ground,” first published in Alaska Quarterly Review Spring/Summer 2007, is included in the new anthology To Everything on Earth: New Writing on Fate, Community, and Nature (http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/Book%20Pages/9780896726550.html).

Some books I’m reading and re-reading: The Gangster We Are All Looking For by le thi diem thuy, Approaching Ice by Elizabeth Bradfield, and The Maytrees by Annie Dillard.

Enjoy the returning light -

Marybeth