Why is the Gulf so mistreated?

Last Modified: Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 10:44 a.m.

A New York Times story on the front page of today's paper outlines the long-running propensity of our nation to treat the Gulf of Mexico like a dumping ground.

The story does a fine job of corralling the disparate problems that plague the Gulf and including the voices of those who question why things have been allowed to fester so long.

Oil pollution has been allowed to run rampant with little or no oversight and, often, few meaningful penalties for violators. Fertilizer runoff from the nation's midsection causes a massive dead zone off the Louisiana coast each year that robs the water of oxygen. Oil companies have been allowed to exacerbate our state's eroding coastline by digging canals through our coastal swamps and marshes. Flood-protection levees on the Mississippi River that now protect millions of Louisiana residents and millions more Americans from flooding, but they have also devastated our state's coastal marshes by robbing them of fresh water and sediment.

Louisiana residents often blame the federal government for many of these problems — a lot of that blame is justified — but we have perpetrated some of our own.

As the story notes, “the maintenance of a healthy Gulf also demands rigorous enforcement of regulations,” and “some of the strongest resistance to tough regulation, as well as the most permissive attitude toward industry and property development, has come from the Gulf States themselves.”

This has led to a “cycle of lax oversight,” the story notes. Members of several national environmental groups said they find much of the Gulf a hostile fundraising and political atmosphere.

“They don't have any support in state government,” Paul Templet, a former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, is quoted as saying. “They do a cost-benefit analysis, and they decide to spend their money elsewhere.”

Some of that opposition is a result of Louisiana's dependence on the oil industry for jobs and economic prosperity. To some extent, that's understandable.

But the fact that we're now dealing with not one but three oil spills — two smaller but significant mishaps are now soiling areas east and west of Terrebonne and Lafourche — makes it a good time to ponder what we might do to protect our environment more vigorously than we may have done in the past. Could it be possible, for instance, that some solutions will require Gulf Coast residents to make an either-or choice rather than the mythical balance between business and the environment that politicians so often promise? Are we ready to accept the fact that some of those choices, many that could profoundly affect our lives, could be made by Americans who live far away from the marshes and swamps we call home? And are we willing to accept the consequences of those decisions? In the aftermath of the BP oil spill, we're about to find out.



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