Hear A Naturalist

Offshore drilling was banned for decades after a 1969 spill off the Santa Barbara coast. Then there was the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, and now video of the gushing well in the Gulf of Mexico, suggests that 800,000 gallons of oil is pouring into our Ocean on a daily basis as opposed to the 200,000 gallons thought originally. This horrific incident is now the worse environmental disaster EVER and coincidently happened to occur on Earth Day. One can only imagine the devastation that is yet to come of this. One such controversy is whether the plans to build yet another off shore drilling rig in the Arctic is still scheduled to occur this summer. According to the wall street Journal, Shell wants to drill exploratory wells in the Arctic’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas this summer. Shell has said that its wells will involve drilling in about 150 feet of water, not the 5000 foot depths where oil is gushing out into the Gulf. Regardless of the depth, I think we need to take into account the already harmful damages caused by previous oil spills, and reconsider other means of extracting resources, even if this means higher gas prices. These oil spills have had detrimental effects on all forms of life. Why continue with plans knowing there is no definite means of a perfect cleanup? “There’s a lot of techniques available to us”, Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said on the Today show Monday morning. “The Challenge with all of them is...they haven’t been done in 5000 feet of water”. Seems senseless doesn’t it? The oil spill in the gulf begs the question of what are the odds of something else happening to harm the ecology, harm the economy and be unfair to the taxpayer. Regardless of one’s stance on the subject of climate change – either the extent or the cause – there is no debate that we (the earth, the environment and the animals) pay dearly for our energy.