The BP Oil Spill

Over the past 20 years MVF has been focused on three types of projects for funding. Species extinction, ecosystem protection and wealth extraction. The one area that we never consider was environmental disasters until 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon explosion resulted in 11 deaths over 5 million barrels of crude oil released only 41 miles from the Louisiana coast. I participated in an environmental assessment of the delta south of New Orleans with wetland scientist from Duke University andLouisiana Dept of Environmental Quality. We arrived 100 days post explosion and found one of the largest and most expensive clean up operations ever funded. $69 billion was spent by BP and it had the effect of hiring every single person, boat, shrimper, trucker, schoolteacher and cooks within a 500 mile radius of New Orleans.

We arrived in NOLA expecting to find death and destruction, isolated communities maybe sick from crude oil exposure, dead fish, birds, porpoises.. We found none of that and instead found a thriving cleanup industry working 7x24 collecting oil with shopvacs, dragging oil soak pads and cleaning birds by hand with Dove dish soap. Everyone who could work was employed by BP. Every hotel and beach house was rented out at 2X the price, shrimp boats were getting %40K a day to drag oil soak pads behind their trawlers. It was pretty cool to see the effort and commitment to clean up the wetlands.

We help fund a documentary by Jon Bowermaster called “After the Spill” that describes not the environmental but the human cost of the spill. Nature seems to be more resilient that human cultures for some reason. We have seen it in the Kimberley, the Pilbara and the Colorado River Delta. A loss of nature impacts the cultural landscape. The real effect of this disaster is not really known yet. The real story of the Delta is not the oil spill. It is the seal level rise and its impact on communities like Dulac, LA, home of the Houma Indian Mission (more in a different post).