The EPA is under scrutiny about its estimates of oil inundation from the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. At issue is direct access to scientists at the EPA without oversight from the EPA administration. Congressman Raul Grijalva has been critical of the EPA policy that scientists cannot respond directly to journalists or government officials questions. Read below from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
WILL EPA SIT OUT SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY RULE-MAKING? — Memo Implies EPA Will Not Clarify Scientists’ Right to Publish or Speak with Media
Washington, DC — Despite a White House directive that federal agencies strengthen their procedures for ensuring scientific integrity and transparency, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is apparently planning no changes, according to an internal EPA e-mail released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As a result, EPA scientists will continue to lack consistent rules for publishing studies, speaking at scientific conferences or answering questions from the media.
Mugil and his mullet horde swam vigorously in the bay exploring along its shores where tall tribes of saltmarsh cordgrass stood still and tall in the gentle waves. Ducks, herons, and other fish found refuge, food, and shelter in the marsh which drew the mullet families from the ocean to its teeming life and sweeter waters. The saltmarsh protected hundreds of birds, fish, amphibians, and mammals.
It was wintertime and the grass had turned brown and rotted below the surface of the water where bacteria and other microscopic life turned the dead stuff into food for many forms of life. Mugil’s round head and low mouth were perfect for sucking- up this delicious army of microbes. He gulped down the little snails and worms that got caught in the updraft into his mouth as he sucked along the stems and bottom of the marsh grasses. Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm—this was good eating!
The mullet school swam vigorously toward the south end of Pensacola Bay Bridge where lay a slither of land named Deadman’s Island. It was surrounded by reefs and marshes that would provide Mugil and his family another great feast. Long before on a fatal night, a British sloop wrecked upon the reefs of this island in a violent storm. It sank to the bottom two hundred years before and gradually disappeared below the sandy bottom as waves swept sand over it.
Nearby the University of West Florida’s Archeology Institute students snorkeled and dove around the wreck to map its contours and recover sunken treasures. Mugil thought the divers were funny and he joined the crew, snorting around the places where they dug or measured, eating little tidbits of algae that grew on the old ship’s anchor and masts. His mullet friends joined him to sail by the rotting barrel wells and shoot like bullets past the masks of the divers. However, sharks and dolphins also joined the curious onlookers, sending the mullet horde toward safer marshlands inshore.
It was on the way inshore that Mugil had his first real encounter with death. High above him and the mullet school there flew an osprey—a bird of prey. Its keen eyes spotted a moving shadow – the backs of hundreds of mullet swimming as one below. It turned its small head downward with its sharp curved beak ready to rip and tear flesh, its talons ready to grab a juicy fish for lunch. The bird folded its wings back and plunged from the sky at record speed right into the middle of the mullet where Mugil swam happily along unsuspecting of danger from above.
When the osprey hit him he was stunned and left helpless in the clutches of the giant bird. He felt himself lifted from the waters into dry air. Through one big eye he saw his tribe disappearing toward the reef and through the other he glimpsed the terrible form of his killer. Mugil’s gills flailed up and down for water and the sweet release of oxygen when suddenly he felt himself released from the tearing grip of the bird. He plummeted down, down, tail over head into the sparkling ocean that was his home.
Smack! Wow – that hurt!
Mugil lay motionless just below the surface until the return of oxygen to his brain and body allowed him to move his fins and right himself. He sped toward the shoreline unaware of the battle for the skies above him.
Check back soon for the next adventure of Mugil when he learns about gill nets.
Mugil (Mugil cephalus) drifted with the current, tossed by emerald green waves. His tiny body was developing at a rapid pace since his mother had shed her row into the misty depths of the ocean. Millions of his brothers and sisters joined the transparent hordes of the plankton world encapsulated in an egg the size of a pencil dot on a page. Unaware that most of them would be eaten by a host of predators or crushed by giant waves, Mugil broke free of his egg casing on the second day of his life, emerging as a small larva about 15 mm long. Mugil instinctively snapped at passing zooplankton to fuel his growth and with his miniscule tail he followed the crowd up from the murky depths of the ocean toward the sunlit surface waters where the Gulf of Mexico food chain begins.
Sparkling microscopic phytoplankton were busy changing the sun’s energy into the food of life inside their diamond bodies. The diatoms, dinoflagellates, coccolithophores, and algae start out as drifters— prey to tiny copepods, crab, shrimp and hungry mullet larvae on up to baleen whales that scooped them up by the billions. Mugil gobbled up the crunchy food as fast as he could manage. No human eye could see the teaming hosts of tiny ocean life struggling for existence at the base of a food web, yet all these tiny creatures were supporting humans, whales, dolphins, sailfish, and sharks.
Instinctively Mugil headed toward land with thousands of mullet-fry (only one out of a thousand would live on to become a full-grown, frisky mullet.) As small as he was, it would be months before he found the bays and bayous of Pensacola where he would spend at least half of his life. Meantime it was a struggle for life in the sparkling waters of the Gulf. He grew by leaps and bounds changing from a larva to a true fish about three inches long with a torpedo-shaped body and strong forked tail fin. But those advantages also made him more visible to the eyes of spotted sea trout or a sea turtle with strong jaws.
As he swam with his kind in a sleek cloud that moved in unison across the lightening sands, moving away from the deep blue of the open ocean into the aquamarine waters of the shoreline. He was growing all the way and now he needed a lot more food. Diving down to crystalline white sands he and his horde ate algae, sand fleas, worms – whatever they could find. Along the shore line Mugil detected the sweet scent and taste of fresh water mingling with the bitterness of the salt-laden sea. Mugil was entering the Escambia Bay. Its bottoms and shorelines, bases of the bridge pilings, docks, old sea wrecks and reefs provided more and more good food for the mullet hordes. Mugil stuck his blunted head into the soft brown detritus on the bottom—a teaming microcosm of life on its surfaces. He ate it all indiscriminately. And he grew.
Lurking in the depths, a water snake spotted Mugil and lunged at him out of the shadows where the tiny fish and his family were feeding. Mugil caught the movement out of his big eye and with a jerk of his strong tailfin he barely managed to avert the jaws of the slithering beast. But sadly, one of his cousins became its prey. There were no guarantees in life. Mugil learned the hard way that the laws of nature spared no living creature. Every living thing was prey to something else.
Jimmy Buffet created Margaritaville on Santa Rosa Island, Pensacola Beach. He opened the Land Shark Landing bar and grill next door and gives benefit concerts to support local businesses hurt by the recession and Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. It is a jaunty-looking hotel now that Jimmy’s designers have added some color to the decor. It was originally built as a five-star, upscale resort until the recession tanked the project. Enter the tanned though aging Buffet whose reputation for losing his lost shaker of salt engenders a deep sigh of relief, donning of flip-flops and faded, oh-so comfortable tees—excuses to let the world’s tireless bantering just pass on by. Meanwhile, we’re in a hammock swinging in the breeze while Jimmy instructs us on how to develop the right attitude for the latitude. It’s a happenin’ place, part of the area’s story of adjusting to the times, cultivating resilience, and learning to keep on, keeping-on in spite of environmental disasters.
Pensacoleans reflect the long history of seafaring, lumbering, fishing and tourism that have fueled the coffers of the community and made it possible to live long enough to air condition homes and spray down the mosquito hordes so that it’s actually a pleasant place to live in between hurricanes.
We’re a tough lot. When the big winds blow, we stick together and the community builds back bigger and better than before, like antibiotics that select out the most resistant strains. We build bigger but do we builder smarter? Jury’s still out on that one. Our bravado against nature seems dimmed somehow, especially after the Oil Spill. That’s a horse of a different color, now an invisible invader. We can’t see it but we know it’s around. Haunting…disturbing.
So—Margaritaville.
Beyond Margaritaville, if you travel another half-mile west, you enter the Ft. Pickens National Park—a seven-mile stretch of protected barrier island beaches and habitats. And, even though it, too, has been impacted by the human footprint (the park maintains an asphalt road for the big recreational vans to get to the camping grounds), you can still get a glimpse of the natural habitats of a barrier island ecosystem. And it is truly a wonder. If you go off-season like now, in December, and you take time to walk around the marshlands, oak-pine woodlands, beaches, bay and inlets, you will not go unrewarded for your troubles getting there.
Go light. Binoculars and camera allowed. Pack a snack or lunch and beverage and go to Battery Worth part of the William Bartram Trail. You can park your car and head out to the bay, back to the view from the top of the old ramparts, then head out on the west-facing sandy marsh trail (1.7 miles) that ends at the main fort and information center. Meander and listen. Lots of bird action, wonderful wildflowers and vines, herons, ducks, and estuaries. You might see a beaver or an armadillo waddling around. Stop to rest on a bench, better yet lay back and watch the clouds. You can find peaceful moments if you let your thoughts run off on their own, unattended. Keep going. There are miles of trails, interpretation of history at the Fort, a marvelous bookstore and lots of Civil War history. Walk to the fishing pier and diving points; you will not be bored. Keep going out onto the shore line and watch for the mullet run to the ocean waters where they are spawning millions of mullet babies now through February. Look for jumping silver-bellied fish, and dark-backed schools of mullet running the waves. I actually saw some cut the curl.
Beyond Margaritaville you’ll capture the attitude of the latitude for certain.
Hope Beneath Our Feet, Restoring Our Place in the Natural World is a new anthology of essays by authors who responded to this question: In the midst of environmental crisis, how can we live NOW?
I am unabashedly promoting the book because I am one of the authors. To be published along with the writers and thinkers to whom I have turned for inspiration over the last twenty years, is a huge honor for me. Some of these mentors are: Frances Moore Lappé, Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez and Howard Zinn.
The book’s genesis is the work of Martin Keogh, its Editor. In the forward, Martin describes how his children expressed a sense of hopelessness about the future as they considered climate change or nuclear war—challenges that dwarf our sense of being able to make a difference. He wondered how human beings can keep hope and live well in very uncertain times. In 2006 Martin issued a call to writers to submit an essay answering the question above.
The book is published by North Atlantic Press and is now in its third printing – barely a month after its release.
Once I went out to Santa Rosa Island very early in the Summer of 2008, exactly two years to the day. The sand was so white it looked like a ski resort near the parking area. I was mystified, scooped up the sand in my hand and filled a small vial for my friends back in the Sonoran Desert where I lived for 20 years. I walked past the dunes, out onto the shore and felt my soul lift up as I viewed this curve of the planet on the horizon above a calm, translucent sea. I could not believe that such a place existed, let alone that it would be my new home. There were birds of all kinds in clusters along the water or diving for silvery flapping fish. Crabs darted in and out of tunnels, sometimes perched with their eyes staring right at me on long stalks, at the ready to plunge out of sight. Men and women were fishing, set up long before dawn, some waist deep in the waves heaving heavy lines far out to snag bonita they told me. Dolphins plied calm blue sea far off shore. Had I known what awaited me I might have turned right around and driven 1000 miles back to Tucson. But I did not and life has thrown a full measure of challenges my way but also love and friendship and many gorgeous days on this treasured place. Now it has been stricken a blow that is altering it forever. I cannot go there because I get sick from its fumes. Where now can I find solace, inspiration, renewal? This must be what the Bible meant by Hell, a condition created on earth by our own doing or non-doing. Well, there is only one way out. Get up, dry the tears, resolve to learn and remember, hold hands, pray together, eat together, love one another and co-create a new reality. For now, that amazing creation – the result of tens of thousands of years of co-creating among many species, and the elements – and which we call Santa Rosa Island, is no more.
Went out to Santa Rosa Island on the sky trail of the Blue Angels. The local press and powers were all about encouraging everyone to come out to the beach.It had been over a month. I thought I’d never go back because of the pain and the worry about exposure. Having just lost my sister, more loss is hard to bear.
Looking out over the water it was hard to see oil in the waves. But the trucks and hundreds of workers dressed in hazmat boots and jackets combed over the beach with shovels, skimmers, and plastic bags. It took only a few minutes to see what they were working on: oil beneath the sand.
These photos were taken on July 11, 2010. All along the beach road were trucks and down just about every entrance to the beach there were volunteers digging in the sand and bagging oil laden sand and seaweed.
The air stank with petroleum, breaking down in the intense heat and sunlight. I felt nauseated and weak and had to leave after only 15 minutes.
I noticed a few dolphins fishing close to shore and a couple of small dolphins in the bay adjacent to the Santa Rosa bridge when I drove over to the beach. On the shore, I saw no sandlerlings or gulls actually standing or running along it. A pair of willets stood in the dry sand above the shoreline. They did not seem skiddish at all, allowing me to approach closely for a photo. I thought that unusual behavior. As I left at the Ft. Pickens entrance parking lot, about thirty gulls congregated atop the restroom pavilion and were loudly squawking from their rooftop perch.
One man swam in the waves and out in the open water was a huge ship of some kind, perhaps skimming oil, or maybe doing some kind of research – it was an industrial looking type ship with a flat deck, quite high out of the water.
Our beach is greatly impacted. Don’t be fooled by the hype for tourism. We need to be more responsible about attracting unwary citizens and visitors to our shores, even if it means we’ll be hurt economically. It is the right thing to do to be honest, transparent, and to recognize and act like our home is under assault from our own energy policy and our corporate practice of taking risks with the public’s health and the environment’s well-functioning.
It’s a strange feeling to awake inland from the beaches and to hold them in my mind as the beautiful, bountiful places they were even just three weeks ago…to know the advancing black tides are out there washing into fragile places…it makes for a continual sense of uncertainty.
The economic impacts are felt in the general sense in the community of doom and gloom. The local mental health clinics have been active on radio and in the newspapers advising us on how to be resilient and keep our chin up. Their advice seems like a wafer held-out to the starving. We flash on a baby dolphin crying out to its pod out on Ft. Pickens, later dying on the way to a rescue center. Flash-backs of oil soaked turtles and birds.
Some of the staff at the university are avid fishermen, from families who depend on the weekly catch as part of their diet and for whom fishing was a meditation, a communion with the land and sea. They do not know what to do with their time and thoughts. Prayer is big here, with a very religious community. There is a lot of “miracles can happen” speak, and vacuous talking about “it will be okay.”
It’s not okay. The air fills with petroleum products that are lethal. No, it’s not above the EPA standards yet, that is true. But it will have its impacts. This is a community that has never really wailed against 100 years of corporate irresponsibility that left PCB and other damaging byproducts in our bays and bayous and ocean of air. We finally cleared away Mt. Dioxin, one of three super-fund sites in the Pensacola area. But we don’t talk much about that because, well we want those corporations to keep coming to infuse much needed dollars into the community.
Now, perhaps, we’ll rethink that and require, as the nation surely now must require, that a corporation have public safety as its first responsibility and profit as its second priority. Corporations are supported by stockholders, us, and we must now see that we have to read the monthly statements and keep vigil over them, or we ourselves will be just as culpable as the corporate leaders we criticize, even hold as villains. Its time for all of us to grow up, and to realize that we have not, as a people, required ethics in our business practices – certainly in our offshore oil drilling safety standards.
But, we Pensacoleans, we are living the nightmare now for all of you. Our foolishness is in our faces, on our shoes and toes, and in our lungs. What that will mean for our futures is another uncertainty.
Turtle Island churns under the soles of my feet on this fair-weather day on the Gulf
NOAA Photo
Turtle Island churns under the soles of my feet on this fair-weather day on the Gulf. The ocean is green near the shoreline—pea green. I’ve never seen that before. I wonder if an algal bloom is forming in warmer seas. A battalion of brown pelicans coasts on dark arched wings over the waves.
Children build sand castles and bob in the surf while far out at sea large fishing vessels ply the waters for bigger catch. I can see one person atop a scaffold with a line trawling behind. I wonder about toppling into the cold, thick waves so far from shore.
There are few shorebirds but it is late in the day. They are probably on the bay side of the island resting in warm dunes. A moveable feast of beauty and abundance, we call this Santa Rosa Island named to honor a young woman from Lima, Peru who lived 500 years ago.
How arbitrary our histories.
Take the story of Caretta caretta. She doesn’t even know we’ve tagged her with a dichotomous term to set her species apart from others. Her only inclination is to find a darkened shoreline and lay her burden down.
Buoyed by the salty water she paddles with strong legs through the currents.
Through heavy lid, she looks toward shore and vaguely remembers its smell and warm, gritty touch. Suddenly she recalls the hovering gulls with their piercing eyes and angular beaks. She quickens her advance in hopes she might outpace the probabilities.
The moonlit shore is quiet as she takes purchase on the shifting sand below her. She looks from just under the water. Bright lights might turn her away to find a place where pale moonlight guides the way instead. It is instinctual.
And should she come ashore and dodge the beach chairs and plastic bottles, to lay a hatch of eggs, and later when they emerge, so tiny and vulnerable, will her young head toward the sea with its shimmering moonlight, or will they head for the Holiday Inn instead?
Countless volunteers tend turtle nests all along these Gulf shores to redirect hatchlings toward the ocean. Does it mean they are no longer self-sustaining?
Caretta caretta, loggerhead turtle mom, come back! Come back!
Will she find a place to lay her eggs? If she doesn’t, will she release them into the water and watch as a devouring host of predators gobbles them up as fast as they emerge?
And, what of it…what if all the Caretta caretta’s disappear? Will it change my walk on the beach?
To answer that question we would have to observe this beach over the long arc of time—not the brief period of a human lifetime.
If we could go back even a thousand years (a bleep on the screen of geologic, Earth time) we’d see an abundance of birds, perhaps many we’ve never seen here before. And the waters would team with crustaceans; you could just scoop up dinner with your hands.
We’d be looking at an ocean web of life that compares to today’s web like intricate lace to an old net. But if we do not know that, the old frayed net looks pretty good.
A Yale psychologist gave this phenomenon a name: intergenerational, environmental amnesia. Basically, we’ve failed to remember our origins; we’ve forgotten to tell the human story.
That story tells us how we evolved with a host of other species, interdependent on each other. In a far distant land, in a far different world, our kind began humbly dependent on the whole.
We were part of something that worked, found its rhythms in a sort of give and take that leveled the playing field for all. Some little guys had the gift of a poisonous bite that made the big guys shy away and so on.
Then we evolved an opposable thumb and a frontal cortex. We were powerful beings by virtue of our new intelligence. We learned to cooperate and bring down beasts that towered over us. We covered our bodies with their hides and set out to explore the world at large.
We got caught up in our own ingenuity; we forgot our origins, intent on harnessing nature to our collective dreams. This was our infant sensibility.
Today our task as a species is a difficult one: we need a dose of emotional honesty to accept that we aren’t as great as we’d thought. What’s superior about spoiling paradise, about circumscribing the futures of our children?
Well, we can chalk it all up to immaturity, for our species’ evolution is new and our learning curve is a sharp one. We’ve got to use our talent for the good of all. We can’t repair nature’s living webs, but we can give her a chance to do it herself.
For Caretta caretta we can turn down or turn off our lights, sit out on the decks of our homes and watch the waves glisten in the moonlight, listen to the oncoming waves. Is that so bad?
Native American wisdom recognizes the Earth as Turtle Island, the continents forming plates on her back. In this era of human pervasiveness, we are changing the body of the Earth in which every living thing finds a source of life.
For most of our species’ history we did not know that. But now we do recognize our impacts on the ecosystems that created the biosphere.
Caretta caretta’s plight to find a darkened beach points us toward a path we could take. If we turn off our lights, she might find a place to lay her eggs, her hatchlings a way back to the ocean, and for us a reduction in energy consumption and carbon emissions.
It is rare for us to make these connections. Small though they seem, it is myriad of these that need correcting.
Global warming threatens our very existence. Since we are the cause of it, we can stop it. Doing so will correct our species’ relationship with so many others and begin to set things right again.
Caretta caretta’s story is mirrored in the stories of countless species feeling our footprint.
We must take up the cause for each of them where we live with the firm conviction that enhancement of life anywhere enhances life’s chance of survival everywhere.
Identify a small area of land or a nearby river and defend its integrity with your life.
Caretta caretta…no, it’s not a song. It’s a symphony.
I’d stayed away from Santa Rosa Island, Pensacola Beach because I couldn’t take it…seeing the destruction of a rare, beautiful place and all that inhabit it. Finally, curiosity got to me and I went out on the western end of the island to the Gulf Islands National Seashore, Fort Pickens. At its entrance I began walking with trepidation. It was about 8:45 and there were not many people out. As I walked along the glass green waves all I saw on the shoreline was a lot of kelp blown up by southerlies and the usual beach denizens: ghost crabs on the prowl, sanderling scurrying to snatch a welk from the draining sand and retreating waves; black skimmers trawling a long organge jaw to scoop minnows. A fleet of pelicans above and a squadron of spotted eagle rays below glided over their hunting grounds. A couple of small sharks had ventured into shore after fish and out on the horizon dolphins were feeding. I saw a dozen speicies of shorebirds including a dozen willets and one or two gulls. Least terns were solitary and dove straight down into the calm water then winged sharply upward. I think I might have seen a large loggerhead pop its big head out of the water.
Talked to two rangers patrolling the beach with bags full of tarballs and other trash left by humans – flipflops, bottles, condoms, and food containers. We chatted. Apparently just a quarter mile away the tar balls were entering Pensacola Pass and washing up on the Escambia Bay shoreline. The beach I walked this morning would be next unless by some miracle the winds and currents keep the advancing oil beds and sheen offshore. But given the size of the oncoming black tide (two miles wide by 30 miles long) there probably isn’t much chance of that.
A pall hovers over our vibrant city, newly recovered from Hurricane Ivan. This city that so many corporations have left lethal legacies and then moved on…this city has seen enough of that.
See below some reminders that all is not well and a couple of last images of ocean system denizens in the path of destruction.
Osprey Photo from the Montana Natural History Museum
Susan Feathers 
