Letter from a Fish Shack
Dear Mr. President, I’m writing you from a fish shack, deep in a Louisiana marsh, where I sit on a dock that juts out over the water, a mile or so away from even the nearest marina. Some say that the worst of the Gulf spill has passed, that it is time to turn the national spotlight elsewhere, but that is not how the men who fish from these camps feel. You would like it here, Mr. President. While it isn’t quite the place apart from the world that it was a few months ago, you would find some quiet, away from the clamor of judging reporters and reports, far from the din and hectoring of life in the spotlight. No microphones, and no Fox News. But lots of egrets and herons and one hungry alligator cruising for dinner a hundred yards up the canal. I like to think that you would spend your time in this dilapidated fish camp that somehow survived Katrina (though its roof did not), by soaking in the quiet and reflecting on your presidency so far. And I like to think you would be quite proud of what you have accomplished, which, despite the carpers, is quite a lot, possibly more than any Democratic president in my lifetime. But I also like to think that you might re-consider a few of your choices, particularly those that involve the clean-up going on only a few miles from this shack, out on the dark and necrotic fringe of the great but dying marsh. I do not blame you for the oil spill, Mr. President, no more than I blame your predecessor for a hurricane. But my hosts at this camp, Anthony, a precocious sixteen-year-old who has captained boats since he was eight and who, like the young Mark Twain, dreams of being a Mississippi river boat captain, and his uncle, do blame you. To be honest, they would probably still blame you if you threw on a scuba outfit and swam down to the cap to plug all the leaks and then used your custom homemade oil vacuum to suck up the rest of the spill. And, frankly, Anthony and his uncle are not your problem, at least from an electoral point of view, since they wouldn’t vote for you under any circumstances. Nor am I your problem, since I, a Northeasterner from the other end of the political spectrum, will likely vote for you no matter what. But what should concern you, Mr. President, and concern you quite a bit, I think, is not the divide between me and my hosts here, but just how much we agree. What we agree about, as Anthony’s uncle and I sip our beers and stare out as the light dies on the marsh, is that the clean-up of the spill has been deeply mishandled, in ways not yet understood by you and the rest of the country. What should concern you is a deep and building anger, not just toward BP, but toward your ceding of power to BP, an anger that I might have found exaggerated in the media before heading down here three weeks ago, but that I now believe to be understated. You’ll be happy to hear that our first area of agreement has nothing to do with you, Mr. President, but with our mutual dislike of Peyton Manning, me as a Patriots’ fan and Anthony as a deep admirer of Drew Brees and the Saints, who bested Manning, a former hometown hero, in the Super Bowl. But our second overlapping opinion should concern you more. It has to do with that much-bandied-about word "freedom," and the lack of it, the sense that most people down here have that, on top of the deep depression that comes with loss of livelihood, there is also now a crippling sense of servitude. Servitude toward one’s country, toward the mission of cleaning up these beautiful and abundant waters, would be one thing, Anthony’s uncle and I agree. But the serf-like sense that one has to serve the very master who spoiled those waters in the first place is another entirely. We also agree on this: one of the small, sad sights down here these days is watching the captains of the so-called "Vessels of Opportunity" hired to help clean up the spill, who have likely not worn life jackets since they were toddlers, all buckled up as they putter out to sea each morning. It seems a badge of shame, of not being in control, which of course they aren’t, beholden as they are, not to their own government, but to a multinational corporation. It’s my understanding, from talking to people down here, that each and every one of these captains is required to sign an agreement that — as temporary BP employees paid for their part in the clean-up effort — they will not criticize the company and, of course, will not press further claims against it. At first, choosing to work on those vessels seemed like the commonsense choice — after all, their normal livelihood of catching fish was not an option, with the fishing grounds closed due to oil. But just recently, at an EPA meeting, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser told the audience he was concerned that every penny earned on one of those vessels would be counted against future compensation, while the damage to boats would go uncompensated, which means those who chose not to work for BP may do better in the long haul. The long haul is not a popular topic down here. Already there is talk of full compensation packages for two years, as if the damage to the Gulf’s reputation, if not its ecosystem, won’t last for decades. You are a reasonable man, Mr. President — too reasonable according to some. But I am not asking you to stomp your feet and wave your fist and claim to be in charge. What I am asking instead is for you to examine this situation logically and then take charge, real charge. You will say that the template for this disaster was built during the Exxon Valdez disaster two decades ago, and you are right, but this is a new disaster with new circumstances that requires a new template. Let BP pay for its mess, as they should, but they should not be in charge of every detail. They should not be out on scientific survey boats, noting when the scientists forget to put on their plastic gloves so that this fact might be used as evidence in some future lawsuit. They should not be running the show at Fort Pickens, a national seashore in the Florida panhandle where the fort was built to protect us from foreign invasion, and did so successfully until three months ago, and where the rangers, who know and love that land, have been beaten down to docility by the corporation now in control of their national park. They should not be bringing in outsiders to clean up waters that the locals have known since they were kids; they should be listening rather than ordering, taking advantage of this crucial knowledge of tides and winds. And they should not have the power to influence the bird surveyor that I spoke to the other day, who couldn’t give me any real numbers on bird deaths he had witnessed, because, as he sheepishly admitted, BP is on his organization’s board of trustees. I am a houseguest tonight, out here on the marsh, and let me use this experience to suggest an analogy with BP’s behavior. It would be as if in the middle of the night I decided to defecate in Anthony’s bathtub and then, loudly and boorishly, ordered him to clean it up in the morning. Worse still it would be as if, tomorrow morning, I were to slip him a fifty, and get him to sign something that said I could sue him if he ever mentioned what I’d done. In short, it both doesn’t make sense and is morally abhorrent, Mr. President. So don’t accept it. Gather your top scientists, environmentalists, policy makers, and make use of the people who know these waters. Demand BP’s money-of course they should pay for their own mess-but take charge of your own shores, showing that you are beholden, not to their corporation, but to your people. Because for all the differences that my hosts and I have, we all agree on one thing. It would make a world of difference if, tomorrow morning at dawn, when the Vessels of Opportunity putter past this dock on their daily commute to lay boom and spot oil, they were flying their country’s colors and not the corporate flag of green and yellow. Sincerely, David Gessner Read more of Gessner’s Gulf reporting in his online journal .
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Letter from a Fish Shack
Michigan Oil Spill Increases Concern Over Tar Sands Pipelines
Up to a million gallons of oil spilled from a ruptured pipeline into the waterways of southwestern Michigan last week in what the federal government is calling the most destructive oil spill in Midwestern history. Owned by Enbridge, the pipeline was likely carrying controversial tar sands oil, industry analysts and environmental groups tell OnEarth . Enbridge’s CEO says that’s not the case. But there’s no doubt the damaged pipe was part of the company’s 1,900-mile network that transports oil mined from Alberta in northwestern Canada, where the tar sands deposits are located, to Midwestern refineries. As federal officials assess the extent of last week’s damage, the spill is raising new concerns about plans by Enbridge and other oil companies to build more pipelines and increase the U.S. reliance on a form of fuel whose extraction and refinement causes vast amounts of environmental damage. Heavy crude began gushing from a 30-inch pipeline buried in marshy ground near Battle Creek, Michigan, more than a week ago. By the morning of July 26, the stench of petroleum filled the air, and thick globs of oil covered the fast-moving Kalamazoo River. A week later, fears that the oil would flow 80 miles downstream to Lake Michigan, wiping out fish and fouling beaches during tourist season, have been allayed. More than 800 workers flown in from across the United States managed to corral the runaway oil on a 25-mile stretch of river. The damage likely exceeds $100 million, although no official estimates have been made, according to EPA officials. And state and federal officials say the spill will require months to clean up and years of monitoring for potential air and groundwater pollution. Enbridge will be charged the cost of the cleanup and has promised (as with BP on the Gulf Coast) to pay all legitimate damage claims from residents. But environmental experts say the impact of this spill is only a preview of greater potential problems to come if proposed new pipelines are built. What Was in the Pipe? Alberta’s tar sands hold the second-largest oil deposit on the planet, after Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. But while Middle Eastern oil is liquid and can be pumped out through conventional means, tar sands are essentially a gooey, gritty mixture of petroleum and sand known as bitumen. Extracting oil from them requires vast amounts of water and energy, emits copious greenhouse gases, and tears up extensive swaths of boreal forest — one of the world’s largest-remaining intact ecosystems. The Natural Resources Defense Council has called Alberta’s tar sands operations "the largest and most destructive project on Earth." (See OnEarth ’s Fall 2007 story " Canada’s Highway to Hell .") The tar sands oil is refined largely in the Midwest, and vast pipeline systems move it across the continent. Enbridge Energy Partners, a Houston-based subsidiary of the Canadian company Enbridge Inc., says the oil in Pipeline 6B, which ruptured last week, was moving from a transfer facility in northwestern Indiana to a refinery in Ontario. Enbridge CEO Patrick Daniel told OnEarth that the oil originally came from Cold Lake, Alberta. Daniel maintains that the leaked oil was not derived from tapping tar sands and said the area where it originated does not have "oil sands" (the industry’s preferred name). But Alberta’s Department of Energy says Cold Lake has at least 41 producing tar sands operations. A spokesman for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said there is conventional oil production in the area, as well. Richard Girard, a researcher with the Polaris Institute who authored a recent in-depth profile of Enbridge’s operations, said that based on his research, Pipeline 6B would almost certainly have been carrying oil derived from tar sands. The Polaris Institute is a Canadian advocacy group that opposes expansion of the tar sands industry. There is no universally accepted definition of exactly what constitutes tar sands. But environmental leaders say that regardless of the exact composition of the heavy crude in the Michigan pipeline, the spill demonstrates the growing hazards of the tar sands industry. "It’s coming from the same monster," Girard said. "It’s oil attached to sand underground, regardless of how they get it out." Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, NRDC’s international programs director, says the mystery over the oil’s origin drives home the need for more transparency . "It’s important to know what is in the pipe when a spill happens," she said. "If this is tar sands oil, it likely needs to be dealt with in a different way" because of higher levels of heavy metals and other properties, she said. "But there’s no requirement that they need to publicly report or even privately report what they’re bringing in." Controversial Expansion Efforts Although environmental leaders say the Michigan oil spill could have significant implications for other proposed Enbridge projects, the company’s CEO says it will learn from the Michigan disaster and increase safety procedures. The company wants to begin shipping tar sands oil to China by building a pipeline from Alberta to the coast of British Columbia, where it will fill up tanker ships. The Canadian government is considering the proposal, which has faced opposition from First Nations communities in the pipeline’s path. Environmentalists are also concerned about spills from the pipeline and tanker ships in the rough waters off British Columbia’s coast. Residents, Native American tribes, and environmental groups are also worried about a proposed Enbridge pipeline that would cross Illinois, and another project called the Keystone XL. That’s a 2,000-mile pipeline proposed by Enbridge rival TransCanada that would transport oil across the American heartland to the Texas Gulf Coast. In June, 50 U.S. Congressmen signed a letter saying the Keystone XL pipeline should not be approved until its impact on global warming is considered. The proposed pipelines across the U.S. are driven in part by the fact that Canadian refineries are approaching maximum capacity, according to industry experts. Midwestern refineries are seeking to expand, and new refineries may be built on the Gulf Coast. Refining tar sands creates significantly more air, water, and greenhouse gas pollution than refining standard crude oil. NRDC is currently challenging an air permit for a BP refinery in Whiting, Indiana, where the company has proposed dumping more sludge into Lake Michigan as part of an expansion to process more tar sands oil. Critics say the Michigan spill shows that Enbridge and other companies cannot be trusted to transport oil across hundreds of miles of ecologically sensitive land, including the Oglala aquifer in Nebraska, which provides water to eight states and lies under TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline. There have been at least five other pipeline spills that dumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil this year, including 126,000 gallons from an Enbridge pipeline in North Dakota in January, according to an analysis by the Sierra Club. Girard’s report logs 610 spills and leaks from Enbridge pipelines between 1999 and 2008, totaling 132,000 barrels — or almost half the volume of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. In January, the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration warned Enbridge that the company was failing to comply with regulations regarding corrosion on Pipeline 6B. The agency, part of the U.S. Transportation Department, said Enbridge could be subject to fines of $100,000 per violation per day if it did not take action, but no enforcement was pursued at that time, according to the agency’s letter. "Tar sands supporters leaped on the Gulf spill to make the point that tar sands are safer because you don’t have to drill underwater," said Ann Alexander, a staff attorney in NRDC’s Midwest office. "But the Enbridge spill pops that balloon."
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Michigan Oil Spill Increases Concern Over Tar Sands Pipelines
Urban Foraging: From the Local Park to Your Plate
It’s been almost 25 years since "Wildman" Steve Brill, the renowned New York City forager, was arrested for eating a dandelion in Central Park. Today, the local food craze and struggling economy have coincided to make foraging more popular — and more acceptable to the authorities. Indeed, Brill is busier than ever with his edible plant tours of Central Park (he and the city made amends), and chefs at trendy restaurants across the country are incorporating foraged ingredients into their seasonal menus. Foraging groups in Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle have created online maps showing cherry trees at municipal tennis courts and raspberry bushes in vacant lots. San Francisco (of course) has a Community Supported Foraging group, based on the agricultural co-op model. So how hard is it to round up a fresh, free meal in an urban park that’s really meant for pick-up soccer, dog-walking, and outdoor concerts? We asked expert forager and instructor Leda Meredith, author of The Locavore’s Handbook and Botany, Ballet, and Dinner from Scratch , to show us how it’s done one recent morning in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Here’s what she taught us. (See photos of some of what we picked at the end.) Lesson #1: Foraging in parks is legal…sort of. "There’s no law specifically against foraging in New York City," Meredith says. (Brill was arrested for conducting tours without a license, not foraging itself.) "Technically, there is a city ordinance against removing things from parks without permission, but that’s really meant to stop people from, say, stealing rose bushes," she explains as we approach a patch of un-mowed weeds surrounding a sassafras tree near the park’s main jogging and biking loop. Other cities tend to have similarly vague rules, and in her decade of foraging in New York parks, Meredith says she’s never once been stopped. "If a park ranger did come up to you, you’d be in the clear as long as you ate everything on the spot." Lesson #2: Avoid the "dog zone." "Notice how I reached over ," says Meredith, holding a stalk of goutweed, a celery-scented plant that can be used to flavor soups, that she retrieved from the middle of an overgrown patch. Harvesting a foot or two inside the edges of growth should keep you clear of anything Fido left behind. You’ll also want to avoid spots that have been sprayed with pesticides; most parks post warnings very clearly for the sake of children and pets, but it’s worth calling your local park to find out for sure. Be sure to rinse your bounty well when you get home — just as you would with any produce. Lesson #3: Serious foraging yields more than just a few dandelion greens. With just a little knowledge and effort, you can actually collect enough produce to significantly reduce your carbon footprint. In a good week, an expert like Meredith can forage enough wild edibles to meet half her veggie needs. "I filled two shopping bags in just a couple of hours here this weekend," says Meredith, who lives a few blocks away from Prospect Park. That means no fossil fuels were used to transport her meal. It’s true that greens — including dandelion , the foraging poster child, which is used in salads and can also be sautéed — make up a pretty big percentage of the typical yield in the spring, but plenty of other choices abound, too. As in many urban green spaces, Prospect Park also has fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and root vegetables. That’s a comforting fact, says Meredith, considering that that if all of the regular food supply routes were cut off in an emergency, New York City’s stores would run out of food in about two days. Of course, if a disaster struck in the middle of the winter, you’d be out of luck. Lesson #4: It’s a great hobby for cheapskate foodies. As she stops to point out some lamb’s quarters growing among the grass in the park lawn, Meredith recalls how she recently saw the same green at the famed Park Slope Food Co-op on sale for $5 per pound and labeled as "wild spinach." "I laughed because I knew the farmer must have gotten the idea after doing the weeding," she says. It’s quite tasty, and she prefers it to cultivated spinach. It’s not uncommon to find items growing wild in the park that are featured in trendy locavore restaurants and specialty markets. "Last fall I found 20 pounds of maitaki mushrooms growing here — and as I was passing by the farmer’s market on the way out, I saw some for sale for about $19 a pound." Lesson #5: Speaking of mushrooms, always err on the side of caution. Foraging dilettantes should zero in on just a few easy-to-recognize plants in the beginning, and even then, it’s best to eat a small quantity the first time, says Meredith, as we come upon a patch of pokeweed. "For instance, these shoots are delicious when they’re young, but they get toxic when they get older and start branching out." Meredith suggests taking a class to get started safely. The Yahoo! Group Forage Ahead is also an excellent place for beginners to get some expert advice; users can ask questions and even post photos. And The Eye Witness Guide to Mushrooms by mycologist Gary Lincoff is Meredith’s pick for a mushroom-specific field guide. Lesson #6: While you’re at it, make sure to help yourself to some invasive species. It so happens that many of the edible plants proliferating in parks are the very same ones that threaten to overwhelm local ecosystems. The goutweed and mugwort that Meredith likes to gather in Prospect Park were recently listed as numbers one and two on a 10 Most Wanted Invasive Plants list posted at the park’s Audubon Center, and many others, such as burdock, are also considered highly invasive. "I once saw volunteers from a conservation group pulling it up — and they were thrilled to hand it over," says Meredith, who promptly took the roots home and stir-fried them. Lesson #7: Leave less rampant vegetation alone. Of course not every wild edible is overly abundant-and you’ll want to be judicious in harvesting those. (To find specifics in your area, check with a local conservation group, or look-up specific plants in the Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health’s online database .) "Make sure to leave plenty of flowers, so the plants will seed and proliferate, and never take the last of anything," Meredith says. This is for the sake of both the ecosystem and the bourgeoning foraging community. "On Sunday, I went to a patch of pokeweed I always harvest from, and I saw that about half of it had been neatly sliced away — a sign that foraging is getting more popular — and whoever it was left plenty for the rest of us," she says. Lesson #8: If you want your food to taste good, don’t trust old field guides. "Those are edible, sure, but they’re not very tasty," says Meredith as we pass some plantain leaves poking out of cracks along a concrete walking path. "But you see plantain leaves over and over again in some of these older books. You start to get the idea that the author never actually tried half of these plants." Chalk it up to the changing face of foraging. What used to be considered a survival skill for wilderness hikers is now the domain of sophisticated gourmets. The good news is, there are plenty of great resources that reflect the new zeitgeist. Meredith likes Brill’s Foraging with the "Wildman," John Kallas’s Wild Food Adventures , and Sam Thayer’s Foragers Harvest . Her own two books and blog also have recipes and other foraging resources. PHOTOS: WHAT WE FOUND Images from our tour of Prospect Park with urban foraging expert Leda Meredith. All photos by Kethevane Gorjestani. You don’t have to walk far into Prospect Park to find something worth foraging. Just inside the northern entrance (above), we encountered mugworth, which Meredith says can be used as a seasoning. Meredith picked and smelled some of the mugwort, which is also known as cronewort. Meredith says the leaves and flowers of the common violet are good in salads. Here Meredith finds some burdock, whose roots are a staple food in many cultures. The Japanese use it in stirfry. Meredith cuts an immature flower stalk of the burdock plant and peels off the leaves. Here’s a bonanza of plants ripe for foraging. Just off the path, Meredith found this mix of mugwort, dandelion, epazote, and lamb’s quarters. Smell can help Meredith identify certain plants. Epazote leaves like these have a strong, distinct odor. See even more of what Meredith found in Prospect Park in our photo set on Flickr .
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Urban Foraging: From the Local Park to Your Plate