Last month, some Ecuadorian indigenous leaders visited the Gulf Coast to show solidarity with another indigenous people, the Houma of Louisiana. A joint group then took a boat tour through bayous where the Houma have fished for generations. Mariana Jimenez, from Ecuador's Amazon, reached over the side of the boat into gray water, grasping a handful of once-verdant marsh grass. It drooped lifelessly in her hand, leaving dark brown blotches of crude oil on her palm. "I see it," she said. "It's just like Ecuador. They talk about all the technology they have, but when there's a situation like this, where's the technology?"
"I think all of this is a terrible contamination for the Houma people," commented Humberto Piaguaje. "It's a cultural contamination. Their fishing and shrimping that was their livelihood is ending now. They need to be asking BP for compensation for the next generation."
Big Oil Blowback
Here's the simple, even crude, lesson these ambassadors offer: whether Americans like it or not, we are all connected in new ways -- and not ways the advocates of "globalization" once promised -- now that we've entered what resource expert Michael Klare calls the age of extreme energy. Think of it as a new kind of blowback.
Our addiction to oil is now blowing back on the civilization that can't do without its gushers and can't quite bring itself to imagine a real transition to alternative energies. Humberto Piaguaje might say that the wound BP gashed in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico has unleashed the wrath of the Earth's millions-of-years dead.
Put another way, corporations presume that it's their right to control this planet and its ecosystems, while obeying one command: to maximize profits. Everything else is an "externality," including life on Earth. "What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident," says Nnimo Bassey, "is that the oil companies are out of control. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet."
Think of oil civilization in its late stages as a form of global terrorism.
Ellen Cantarow is a journalist whose work on Israel/Palestine has been published widely for 30 years including at TomDispatch. She is now working on climate change and big oil, which have much to do with the Middle East, Israel, and Palestine, as well as the rest of the planet. Recent phone conversations with her stepdaughter Kim -- she and her husband have a scuba-diving business in the Florida Keys -- led indirectly to this story. To catch Cantarow discussing what led her to this piece, listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview by clicking here, or to download it to your iPod, here.
[Note on sources: Douglas Yates of the American University of Paris let me read part of the manuscript of his book, The Scramble for African Oil (forthcoming next year from Pluto Press), an invaluable overview of the political economy of big oil in the Niger Delta. An essential primer on the Delta is the remarkable photo-essay anthology, Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, by Michael Watts and photographer Ed Kashi. Joe Berlinger's award-winning documentary Crude is a must-watch with its focus on the Ecuadorian lawsuit against Texaco, as well on the lives of the plaintiffs. Ermegildo Criollo's story comes from that film.]
Copyright 2010 Ellen Cantarow
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
