tursiops.org - Wernicke: It ought to make us sick, but will it?

lauricedeephd writes "The last paragraph of a story inside the News Journal last week said it all about where we are with this oil spill thing:

"Officials said 166,926 pounds of tar ball and oil materials were collected by 526 people on Tuesday on Perdido Key and Pensacola Beach."

Ho-hum. So matter of fact, another day's tally of the growing toll. Given the vagaries of tide and winds, that paragraph is as likely to apply one day as the next. A little less or a little more "tar ball and oil materials," what's the difference?

But who knows the accumulated toll of dead dolphins, pelicans, turtles, whales and other sea life that have died out at sea, never to be seen?

Here's an excerpt from a story in The New York Daily News. Reporters were taken — surreptitiously — by a BP contractor into the Louisiana marshes to see the impact. He snuck them in, he said, because BP wanted to minimize pictures of dead and dying birds and animals (www.nydailynews.com/news/national/galleries/l):

"The grasses by the shore were littered with tarred marine life, some dead and others struggling under a thick coating of crude.

" 'When you see some of the things I've seen, it would make you sick,' the contractor said. 'No living creature should endure that kind of suffering.'

"Queen Bess Island was the first place where fledglings were born when the beloved, endangered Louisiana brown pelicans were reintroduced in the 1970s. Their population rebounded and was finally declared stabilized in 2002.

"Now their future is once again in doubt. In what had been such an important hatchery, hundreds of pelicans — their white heads stained black — stood sentinel. They seemed slow and lethargic.

" 'Those pelicans are supposed to have white heads. The black is from the oil. Most of them won't survive,' the contractor said. 'They keep trying to clean themselves. They try and they try, but they can't do it. ...'

" 'I saw a pelican under water with only its wing sticking out,' he said. ...'It was just covered in oil. It was struggling so hard to survive. We did what we could for it.

" 'Nature is cruel, but what's happening here is crueler.' "

An Alabama conservationist, John Wathen, has been flying over the spill regularly and posting videos on YouTube. (Last month a News Journal reporter went on one of his flights along the Florida coast.)

Late last week one of Wathen's grim videos (www.youtube.com/watch) captured national attention and he was interviewed by Keith Olbermann. Here's some of Wathen's narration on the video:

"We saw this pod of dolphins obviously struggling just to breathe. Then we found this guy: a sperm whale swimming in the oil had just breached. Along his back we could see red patches of crude as if he'd been basted for broiling. Then we saw this pod of dolphins, some already dead, some in their death throes. It seemed they were raising their heads looking at the fires, wondering why is my world burning down around me, why would humans do this (to) me."

Why?

We want cheap gas. God forbid we should have to pay $3 or more a gallon for it. Why, people wouldn't be able to sit outside the store with the air conditioner running while the wife grabs some bread and milk; it's summer, you know.

And it's downright un-American to expect anyone to pay another 2 or 3 cents a gallon to support mass transit systems that could reduce our dependence on cars.

No, as a nation we're quite frankly opposed to the idea of paying what gas really costs — at least at the pump. But we're content to pay with the lives of young Americans and borrowed dollars to secure Middle East oil, and we're content to let the oil companies avoid "costly" regulations, and to let our government fail to impose them.

But real costs can't, by definition, be avoided. As the old TV ad used to say, pay me now — or pay me later.

It's later.

Note:
The link (www.youtube.com/watch) includes a list of videos showing whales and dolphins very deeply affected by the oil spill.

Source: http://www.pnj.com/article/2010"