AB: What’s at stake here—what is in danger? I
don’t know if you want to list it by ecosystems or by
particularly sensitive species or how you want to go about it…
Dr. Robert Thomas:
The coastal wetlands of Louisiana are the most productive ecosystem
along the coast in our country. And you know, the Everglades are
beautiful and wonderful and dear to my heart. But they don’t
produce anywhere near what coastal Louisiana does.
Forty percent
of the fisheries of the continental United States are based in our
wetlands, something like 90 percent of the species of commercially
important fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico use coastal wetlands as their
nursery grounds, and we’ve got the most extensive ones along the
entire Gulf of Mexico. And so we’re supporting 40 percent of the
fisheries.
The reason I say the continental U.S. is that Alaska
is so productive that it dwarfs everything in the continental United
States. But if you rank the top ten landing ports for fisheries in the
United States seven of them are in Louisiana. We are sort of the
fisheries mecca in the continental United States. So that’s at
risk.
The thing we’re talking about the most down here is
oyster fisheries, which again is about 40 percent of the oyster
fisheries of the U.S. That’s what we’re most concerned
about because finned fish can possibly swim away, whales and dolphins
can possibly swim away, but those oyster reefs are sitting still. And
when that oil comes in on top of them it’s just going to have
devastating impacts. So we’re very, very concerned about that.
As
a matter of fact I had an oyster sandwich tonight just in case. Just
sort of a sad laugh but it’s absolutely true. It’s part of
the culture. As a matter of fact a lot of people down here were talking
about going out to eat seafood over the weekend.
I never talk
about these things without talking about the environment, the economy,
and the culture, because all three of those things, especially in
Louisiana, are so tied together that you can’t separate them.
AB:
Getting back to the ecosystems for a minute, although I know
we’re going to be weaving in everything here including the
environment and the economy, can you talk a little bit about…
Well, you mentioned the oyster beds because those are stable, and the
finned fish and the whales might not fare too badly, but can you talk
about some of the other wildlife species that are likely to have some
trouble?
Dr. Thomas: I think the
wildlife that has me most concerned is that right now we’re in
the height of the nesting season for the sea birds. And the Chandeleur
Islands—all that oil is right out there by the Chandeleurs, and
they’re very low, because of the past hurricanes just wiping them
out, and they’re rebuilding. But they’re extraordinarily
low now for my lifetime.
So you’ve got tens of thousands of
birds out there sitting on nests. Well, that southeast wind that will
probably blow for a few weeks has the sea level elevated about three
feet.
So what could happen is that if that oil comes in there on
those barrier islands it’s going to possibly just float that oil
right over all those nests and it’ll coat all the babies, and
they’re dead if that happens. They’re just gone.
So
the nesting seabirds like various species of terns and gulls, pelicans
and thing like that are just very vulnerable right now. They’re
probably the most vulnerable land animals form this whole ordeal. And
of course those beaches are also used for sea turtle nesting. We
don’t have the largest turtle nesting in the country here but
it’s still significant. So that’s very much at risk as
well. All the sea turtle species in the Gulf of Mexico are likely to
nest on our beaches.
Manatees are coming in now too.
They’re not resident here year-round but they come in every
summer—they come in along the gulf coast, mostly into Lake
Ponchartrain and into the estuary. Then they go back at the end of the
summer.
AB: What are your worst case scenario fears right now? Prepare us for the worst.
Well, this is the worst case scenario, what’s going on right now.
And
I’m not saying that as my own personal opinion. That’s what
I’m getting from people who’ve worked in the oil industry
for 30 or 40 years, and I’ve even talked to some of the people in
the regulatory field, in oil and gas, who are naturally pretty
defensive of it because they know that in general they’ve done a
pretty good job with safety.
But these people are extraordinarily
fearful right now because they say that when they used to sit around
and write up case studies of descriptions of worst case scenarios this
is at or beyond their wildest dreams and fears.
So they’re
very concerned. And when those people get very concerned about
it—because they’re always the ones who that’ll always
explain away everything and say “Well, no, the safety
record’s good, and worst case rarely happens and I’m sure
things are not going to be as bad as everybody
thinks—they’re not saying that.”
They’re
saying, "This is it, this is the thing I thought I’d never see in
my life." And it’s bearing down on us real fast. We have no
options—all the work they’re doing out there right now is
putting a very small dent in the whole story.
Plus the public
hysteria is going to grow because we’re so tightly tied to our
cuisine, and to seafood. So many people here have jobs directly
involved in it. And so that’s causing a lot of people to be very,
very nervous. Then there’s the fact that it could oil our marshes
that we’ve already been losing for decades now. We’ve been
losing many, many square miles a year of coastal
wetlands—it’s just disappearing—for at a variety of
reasons, not all of which are natural but not all of which are man-made.
And
now you’re talking about that elevated sea level going in here
and just taking that oil right back in the marshes and laying it down.
Nobody knows what’ll happen when that happens. We do know it will
be bad, but we don’t know what’ll happen.
I’ve
already talked about the finned fish and the whales and things like
that hopefully being able to take off. There’ll be some deaths,
there’s no doubt about it, but for the most part they’ll
survive. But we’re really concerned about what we have no track
record on: what’s going to happen to the plankton? That’s
at the bottom of the food chain and it’s deriving all of its
energy from those coastal wetlands.
So if the coastal grasslands
die, the marshes die, then the plankton are affected by the oil as well
as not having the coastal marshes to feed in the organic material for
them, then the plankton die.
If the plankton die, that’s
the bottom of the food chain, so it starts to work its way up, and
probably the thing that’ll surprise most Americans—people
who have not been connecting dots about how we’re
connected—is that one of the biggest food businesses in the
entire country is the chicken industry. And the catfish
industry—the pond-raised catfish industry. Everybody in America
eats one or both of those meat sources, and they’re in every
restaurant, they’re in every store, they’re in every
specialty shop on the corners of most cities.
But if you lose the
wetlands you lose the plankton, you lose the plankton you lose a
filter-feeding fish called the menhaden (we call them pogey down here
but menhaden is the official name). It’s a real oily fish that is
caught every November and December during the season by the zillions of
tons and they take them and boil them down, render them down, and they
take all of that meat out of these animals and that’s what feed
chickens and catfish.
So if you lose the wetlands you lose the
plankton and if you lose the plankton you lose the menhaden and if you
lose the menhaden you lose chicken. You lose catfish. And those are
huge commodities in this country. They have incredible importance
throughout the nation. And you can’t raise that many chickens on
cracked corn. It has to be protein.
So connecting the dots
here--what’s happening here today is going to impact all elements
of people’s lives across the United States.
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