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March 24, 2006
Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

Seventeen years old, and we still sOIL ourselves

“Here in Alaska, when we see the images of yet another oil spill, we get it, at a visceral level:  This isn’t just an echo of our past.”

- Marybeth Holleman, author of “The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost.”

     Of the stories of Exxon’s spill seventeen years ago, it’s hard to say which is the most tragic.

     There’s the one about the pod of orcas caught in the oil-laced waters of Prince William Sound shortly after Alaska’s 9/11. When the whales surfaced for air, they inhaled oil into their lungs.

     Most of us remember that sea otters, in their frenzy to clean themselves, ingested the toxic crude (populations still haven’t recovered). The newsletter Wild Voices published a photo of a Kodiak brown bear with half its face black from oil.

     Cordova had its share of troubles. The town’s popular former mayor was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His note indicated that his misery and depression had roots in the social effects of the spill.

     Unexpectedly, little has changed. On the spill’s memoriam:

     •  At least 20 key animal species in the Sound continue to languish in an environment where oil remains deep beneath the shoreline.

     • Workers who toiled on the beaches in an absurd attempt to clean up the oil continue to suffer from the exposure to hydrocarbons.

     • Discouraged crews continue their struggle to sponge hundreds of gallons of oil from the frozen tundra after a pipeline leak went undetected several weeks ago at Prudhoe Bay.

     Just how much damage does oil account for? When will our selfish and indulgent fellow Americans correlate the war on Iraq, the rush to plunder the Arctic Refuge, and the ultimate cost of oil consumption—greenhouse gasses that are warming our planet to the point of catastrophic and irreparable harm?

     (It is a wonder that fundamentalist Christians, so heady with delusion, haven’t yet conjured up a comparison between oil and Satan. After all, oil comes from deep down in the earth, it speaks to a worrisome geological period that risks connections with devilish evolution, and it causes wars. He stops his snow machine, thinks about it, then revs it up to pursue his high mountain mark.)

     Maybe the problem is that oil isn’t valuable enough. Like the comedian who pointed out that we could stop gun crime if a bullet were to cost a million bucks, think how careful those oil companies (and the state “regulatory” agencies that obediently do their bidding) would be with its transportation if an ounce of crude were as expensive as an ounce of gold.

     The economic necessity to conserve the treasured oil would be so great that anyone caught driving a Hummer would be publicly flogged.

     Instead of snorting coke, wealthy capitalists and their political pimps would instead dribble out lines of crude onto their diamond-studded mirrors.

     Plutocrats sniffing oil:  It is a caricature inspired by headlines—“BP profits”/”Idaho Republican named to head Interior Department”—separated with a page in the paper; or by newscasts—“Secret meetings between Murkowski and oil companies”/“13 mostly women and children killed in U.S. military operation”—split with a commercial.

     For those sanguine prognosticators who promised after the Exxon Valdez tragedy that “things will change”—listen harder, the echoes are deafening.  





























Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com.
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Editor's Desk
by Aaron Selbig

Red Alert
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by Neil Zawicki

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in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership.