By Logan Price

For The Beachcomber

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, crude oil from Louisiana (or MC252 as it is called here) mixed with water comes in at least three different forms.

The first, “sheen,” is the most easily recognizable. It is thin, iridescent and even beautiful at times, like gasoline spilled on a wet driveway. The second type is far less pretty. It is called “mousse,” named after the dessert which it resembles at first sight. It is dark brown or rust-colored and perhaps the worst thing that I have ever seen. It pools on beaches and fills wetlands, covering plants and animals.  

I made the mistake of putting some in my hand a few days ago as I stood on Grand Terre Island in Louisiana. It was just one piece out of a thousand floating on the water around my feet, and I put my hand under it, letting the water run out between my fingers and the mousse stay. It wouldn’t leave. I shook my hand, waved it in the water, and tried to rub it off. It spread to my other hand. Even after scrubbing them with sand, my hands were coated with an oily residue for the rest of the day and smelled like used motor oil.

I was standing on the beach with John Hocevar, a marine biologist and director of Greenpeace USA’s Oceans Campaign, when this took place. It happened to be his birthday, and he looked seriously bummed. We had driven a skiff to Grand Terre Island to take photos of the beached oil, but after a few minutes I had to remove myself for some time just to cry. It was all over the beach, in the grass above the beach and among the rock jetties. When I returned he was looking down between the rocks of a jetty, where it was the thickest. He was watching hermit crabs flail through it, their shells so covered with crude that they looked like melting balls of chocolate with legs. It wasn’t just what was in front of us that was so disturbing, it was the thought of how far it extended beyond where we were standing. 

I traveled from Vashon to the Louisiana Barrier Islands via San Francisco to do volunteer work with a small Greenpeace team, driving boats to places like Grand Terre Island and documenting the extent of this disatser to the press. I had no idea what it would be like, standing at the edge of the greatest single environmental catastrophe of my generation.

The scale of it leads way to a variety of emotions. During the daytime we stumble about in the humid heat and try to do our work. In the evening we come home and try to act normal. The next day we are back on the water and it becomes real again, the unimaginable, true cost of our way of life. 

We are still 60 miles up-current from the spill site, where oil continues to gush at a rate of 2.5 million gallons a day. Most of it is headed away from us, towards the coastlines of Alabama and Florida. That’s the third form, the slick, and it is pure crude, over 100 miles long. In milk jugs, the amount of oil leaked would run from Seattle to Patagonia and back again, and no one knows for sure when it will stop flowing. BP assures us the leak will be stemmed by relief wells in August, but here in the Gulf, there seems to be a serious lack of trust in the company and its promises. 

Maybe the Gulf will bounce back. I give nature a lot of credit for its resilience. But at this point it is hard to imagine that shoreline ecosystems here will even come close to full recovery in our lifetime, even if the leak is halted this summer. The offshore effects will be harder to quantify and more precarious. 

Already a dead juvenile sperm whale has been found 80 miles south of the broken well. NOAA has stated that if at least three adults are killed as a result of the oil, Gulf sperm whales will be beyond recovery. Too often we see our environment as separate from ourselves, but in the end it is who we are. It is our place — our livelihoods, our history. There is nothing more heartbreaking than the death of place.

If there was ever a time to demand a clean energy future, it is now. There will be no easy escape. The oil and coal lobbies are too powerful. It will require more than greening our lifestyles, but actual systemic and major policy change.

“We are not addicted to oil,” a conservation biologist from Louisiana recently told me. “We are enslaved to it.”

We need to heed the people who are carrying such messages and support them. We need emancipation.  

— Logan Price, an Islander, is in the Gulf Coast working with Greenpeace to call attention to the full extent of the spill.