The Union of Concerned Scientists has offered a band-aid for a gangrenous (industrial) infection.
The UCS study’s subtitle—“Prospects for Sustaining Our Ecological Heritage”—suggests that these scientists and the institutions they are part of are completely blind to the scale of the devastation, or merely unwilling to challenge the sacred cow of “national security” and its petroleum addictions.
How can we “sustain our ecological heritage” when it has nearly been obliterated?
Government Sanctioned Ecocide
The mighty Mississippi River has been channeled into hundreds of miles of concrete canals. There are Shell Oil Company refinery pipelines criss-crossing people’s yards in Norco, Louisiana, an onshore oil lease within 40 miles of New Orleans. [18] Conoco operations in Mossville, Louisiana caused massive deadly sulfur dioxide gas “spills” but the people were not told about them. [19]
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Departments of Environmental Protection have sanctioned hostile petroleum and gas operations killing wildlife, wetlands and people all over the Gulf States.
Seismic testing blasts marine life with deadly sound and pressure waves, and these kill elements of the food chain essential to the ecological health of wetland, coastal and undersea ecosystems.
Buzzing all over beneath the seas in the Gulf of Mexico are the ultra-state-of-the-art Unmanned (or Autonomous) Underwater Vehicles (UUVs or AUVs), an entirely new class of weaponry for the Pentagon, a new class of robotic machinery for offshore petroleum operations and seabed mining, a new classified “research” agenda for Woods Hole Oceanographic and Scripps Institute and their many affiliated “academic” institutions. [20]
Eleven of the top twenty U.S. ports by cargo volume in 1999 are found in the Gulf Coast region, including New Orleans, Houston, Mobile, and Tampa. Port facilities located between the mouth of the Mississippi River and Baton Rouge handle over 230 million tons of cargo annually, valued at more than $30 billion. The cargoes managed by these port facilities make up approximately 25 percent of the nation’s total exported commodities.
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