The Healing Power

This headline -- U.S. Finds Most Oil From Spill Poses Little Additional Risk -- set me thinking about the strength and the fragility of natural systems. It seems that 3/4 of the oil from the spill has effectively disappeared, and that no more ugly slicks are expected to wash ashore. The ocean is very, very big, and oil is after all not something unnatural, but something that comes from the earth. Small amounts of oil have been leaking into the ocean for tens of millions of years, so there are natural bacteria that eat it, and the Gulf ecosystem has evolved to cope with it. With a few years you need sophisticated sampling equipment to detect that the spill ever happened.

And yet if the Gulf will not be much less healthy than it was before, it will still be far from healthy. It will still host the vast "dead zone" created by fertilizer carried down the Mississippi, a New Jersey-sized area where excessive growths of algae kill off most fish. Its degraded coastal wetlands will continue to erode. Its populations of birds and fish will still be distorted by overfishing and habitat destruction.

Life will go on -- life has a resilience that amazes. But the life that goes on will not be the life that once populated the Gulf. It will be less diverse and less abundant, with less capacity to awe us or to feed us. How to value the changes in the natural world brought about by development and pollution is a hard question, but I believe there is a real cost, and that we should do what we can to limit our impacts to the world.