Beyond Oil: Activism and Politics

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Beyond Oil: Activism and Politics

Posted Aug 26, 2010 by Bill McKibben

[Excerpt] On May 6, a little more than two weeks after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the first oil washed ashore. It was found on the beaches of the Chandeleur Islands off the coast of Louisiana -- one of America’s first wildlife refuges, established by Teddy Roosevelt in 1904 after a decade-long struggle with the plume trade, which was killing off our seabirds. We don’t normally think of hydrocarbons as possessing a strong sense of irony, but there you go.

In fact, the BP spill and its aftermath were a slap in the face of the environmental movement in so many ways. You would have thought the most visible ecological tragedy of our time might have led our government to take real action against our worst problems. Instead, the same week that the well was finally capped the Senate punted on doing anything -- anything -- about climate change.

So, for those of us on the green side of things, there’s never been a better moment to sit back and say: Are we doing something wrong? We seem not to be as good at this as our forebears, who turned the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and the Cuyahoga River into Earth Day 1 and the Clean Air Act, or even those ancient proto-greens who turned the fancy hat trade into the wildlife refuge system. Yale pollster Anthony Leiserowitz told The Washington Post that the difference between this summer and the awakenings after past disasters is as stark as “on versus off.” Why? Or, if you want to think more positively, what’s the recipe for doing better next time?...

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Originally published August 23, 2010 at onearth.org

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