Maybe we should go along with U.S. President Donald Trump’s distraction of renaming the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America.” Although the body of water, surrounded by five U.S. and six Mexican states and Cuba, has been called the Gulf of Mexico for almost 500 years, it’s emblematic of the ecologically destructive mindset prevalent in U.S. centres of power.
As Yale University history professor Greg Grandin writes in the Guardian, “If the intensive extraction of riches from a patch of nature bestows proprietary rights over that patch, then the Gulf belongs to the US. For more than a century, its industries have drilled, fracked and fished it to such an intense degree it’s a wonder there’s any oil, gas or seafood left to be had.”
Grandin notes that many locals refer to the U.S. Gulf Coast as “the industrial coast, a region where gas flare-offs burn 24/7, where fracking blowouts blaze until the vapor runs out and where rusting pipes and tall stacks billowing black and brown smoke are organic to the landscape — present at the creation, not of the world but of our world today, dominated by petrochemical and petroleum companies.”
It’s also the site of one of the worst marine oil disasters in history — the 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, an oil rig operated by British multinational oil and gas giant BP. Eleven workers died and 17 were injured, and as much as 60,000 barrels of oil a day spewed into the water, forming a 149,000-square-kilometre slick. The economic impacts on everything from tourism to fishing were profound, with expensive cleanup and recovery efforts ongoing. To this day, all fish tested are contaminated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from crude oil.
The Deepwater Horizon explosion was the worst of a continuing number of industrial disasters, including a platform off the Louisiana coast blown over by Hurricane Ivan, which is expected to gush crude oil and gas into the Gulf for the next century!
Mexico, which also drills for oil and gas in the Gulf, has had its share of disasters, some with continuing impacts, but as Grandin writes, “Pemex, Mexico’s nationalized oil company, doesn’t have the machinery to drill and frack as intensively and extensively as US companies do.”
The Gulf of Mexico has long been a diverse and complex ecosystem, rich in marine and shore life, with distinct geographical regions spread over its 1.5-million square kilometres. It’s the world’s largest gulf and ninth-largest body of water. It’s also resilient. But everything has its limits. Drilling and fracking for the Gulf’s rich reserves of oil and gas, especially, have put its ecosystems at great risk of collapse.
Add to that the volumes of toxins carried through numerous states and dumped into the Gulf by the world’s fourth-longest river, the Mississippi. Massive amounts of agricultural nitrogen and phosphorous create “dead zones”— areas where pollution has choked oxygen, harming aquatic life — of up to 17,000 square kilometres.
Throw climate disruption into the mix, with the increasingly intense storms it’s causing, and the Gulf of Mexico’s prospects diminish to dismal. If President Trump keeps even a small percentage of his promises to the oil and gas industry, those problems will accelerate.
Grandin argues that oil and gas expansion isn’t to increase output, which would drive down prices, but to lock in production. “If the investment is made, if the infrastructure is built and highly capitalized hubs like BP’s Mad Dog are up and running, it will be hard, in the future, to give up burning fossil fuel, no matter how many solar panels China sells to third world countries.”
It's a sign of the times. The fossil fuel industry is doing everything possible to keep its obscenely excessive, taxpayer-subsidized profits rolling in, including buying politicians, even though executives know that continuing to burn their products puts our future in jeopardy.
Call it what you like (we’ll stick with Gulf of Mexico) but look at what we’re doing to the Gulf. It’s what we’re doing all over the only planet we have, one that offers everything we need to survive and thrive, if only we learn to care for it.
Let’s not let distractions draw our focus from real problems, in the Gulf and beyond.
David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.
Learn more at davidsuzuki.org.
