The Post-Normal Times

“There are so many causes, and there is no simple solution to it – I just do not feel that they should bear the burden of that” – this time, referring not to cigarette smoking or climate change, but…. to the destruction of the Louisiana Wetlands – they being, “the oil and gas companies that is.” This is the same line of argument that was made in the film “Thank you for smoking” but the quote is from Jim Porter, head of the main lobbying group of the Louisiana oil and gas industry, speaking to Daniel Zwerdling, who produced an NPR radio story on this that aired Saturday morning. Porter maintains that the damage caused by oil and gas operations to the wetlands is less than 10%. Gene Turner, a scientist from Louisiana State University who has been investigating the loss of the Louisiana wetlands – since the 1970s – says that oil and gas operations are responsible for 30-60% of the damage. State officials are unwilling to “play the blame game,” arguing that, when those canals were dug through the wetlands in the 1960s and 70s, it was legal, and nobody knew of their importance – not only for seafood, but for protecting the oil and gas pipelines that are buried in them. Instead, they have joined with industry and environmental groups to launch a campaign to convince taxpayers to foot the bill for wetland restoration – without which New Orleans might as well be abandoned.
But Zwerdling finds that history is also more complex than this story line would have it. First of all, dredging of those more than 8,000 miles of canals through the wetlands, and piling dirt along the banks was legal in the 1970s only because every time a regulation was proposed that would have required a modification of industry practices, the industry, from which the state was getting 40% of its budget, threatened to go elsewhere, threatening loss of revenue and jobs. The piling up of dirt along the banks creates a wall that prevents water from flowing in and out of the marshes. The vegetation then dies, and the soil disintegrates and is replaced by open water. Now they argue that regulation will hurt oil supplies, and that they are already doing their fair share by financing the ad campaign. Zwerdling quotes from an Army Corps of Engineers Environmental Impact Statement dated 1973 which warns that oil and gas activities threatened seafood and wildlife, and also said that damage could be reduced through a change in practices, which the industry refused to do.
I heard a presentation by Gene Turner in 1989 or so, when he had just completed some of the first studies that actually quantified some of these impacts, and from several other researchers who investigated the socioeconomic impacts of offshore oil and gas operations. At the time I was a research assistant for a National Academy of Sciences Committee that was evaluating the Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Studies Program, supposedly done to support decisions of the Minerals Management Service with respect to oil and gas leases. The whole Committee met in the region and was taken on a tour of the coast, in the van of the “Ragin’ Cajuns” football team. As I recall, this was one of the few studies sponsored by that program that said anything conclusive. According to Don Boesch, who at the time was head of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and who had helped to arrange the committee visit to the region, just getting those studies to be done at all took considerable pressure from the scientific community. When I paid a visit to the MMS offices in New Orleans to get documents and maps, I also vividly recall an informal remark from the person in charge of producing Environmental Impact Statements – that if we had another oil crisis, it would no longer be necessary to write those things because people would “just want the oil.” I don’t know if he expected anything like Katrina.
But there is another reason this story made me choke. In my current day job, I write about land and water issues, and about some of the complexities associated with attempts to implement the concept of “payments for watershed services” and the “myth of simple solutions.” And so I have made similar remarks about the difficulty of linking multiple causes and effects of watershed degradation which are separated across large scales of space and time. This is necessary to link management practices of particular land users, to their outcomes and to those who benefit from them – or not. There is, of course, a big difference between my arguments and the standard industry line, but you wouldn’t know it from the soundbites. First of all, I say such things not to excuse anyone from responsibility, but to argue for a learning approach, in which adjustments are made along the way in light of new information – as it becomes available. If the oil and gas industry had their way, no studies would have even been done. Furthermore, in the case of the Louisiana wetlands, we aren’t talking about distant offsite impacts but about dredging operations that have occurred on-site. But even when impacts have distant causes, there is much that science can tell us. If you don’t do the science, or don’t ask questions in a useful way, you will never find out. And sometimes judgments and decisions have to be made with incomplete information.
I could go on and on about this subject and about differences, but for now, if you are interested, you can find more in the Flows bulletin I write, which is archived at www.flowsonline.net, and in several papers that can be found on my personal website.
[5-15-06 - edited to correct typos. Apologies for the delay - I wrote this one in a hurry as I was preparing for a trip I will probably blog about next.]