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Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do to Save Them - Hardcover

Danson, Ted; D'Orso, Michael

 
9781605292625: Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do to Save Them
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1605292621 ISBN 13: 9781605292625
Verlag: Rodale Books, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Most people know Ted Danson as the affable bartender Sam Malone in the long-running
television series Cheers. But fewer realize that over the course of the past two and a half
decades, Danson has tirelessly devoted himself to the cause of heading off a looming global
catastrophe—the massive destruction of our planet's oceanic biosystems and the complete
collapse of the world's major commercial fisheries.

In Oceana, Danson details his journey from joining a modest local protest in the mid-
1980s to oppose offshore oil drilling near his Southern California neighborhood to his current
status as one of the world's most influential oceanic environmental activists, testifying before
congressional committees in Washington, D.C., addressing the World Trade Organization in
Zurich, Switzerland, and helping found Oceana, the largest organization in the world focused
solely on ocean conservation.

In his incisive, conversational voice, Danson describes what has happened to our oceans in
just the past half-century, ranging from the ravages of overfishing and habitat destruction to the
devastating effects of ocean acidification and the wasteful horrors of fish farms. Danson also
shares the stage of Oceana with some of the world's most respected authorities in the fields
of marine science, commercial fishing, and environmental law, as well as with other influential
activists.

Combining vivid, personal prose with an array of stunning graphics, charts, and photographs,
Oceana powerfully illustrates the impending crises and offers solutions that may allow us
to avert them, showing you the specific courses of action you can take to become active,
responsible stewards of our planet's most precious resource—its oceans.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

TED DANSON's versatility in both television and film makes him one of the most accomplished and credible actors today. From his first feature film roles in Joseph Wambaugh's The Onion Field (1979) and Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981) to his starring role in the television series Cheers, Ted Danson has captivated audiences worldwide with his equally sensational dramatic and comedic performances. Danson currently stars in HBO's Bored to Death. He recently appeared on the critically acclaimed legal drama Damages on FX, as well as HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. In addition to winning two Emmys and three Golden Globe Awards throughout his career, Danson has been nominated for twelve Emmys, eight Golden Globes, and one SAG Award.

MICHAEL D'ORSO's work includes fifteen books; seven have been bestsellers
and three have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER ONE

TOUGH OIL

OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND

There's no phrase that better explains how our planet's oceans have reached a point where they are so direly threatened on so many fronts and yet so few of us have any idea of the danger they're in.

On one level, this makes perfect sense. Humans are terrestrial creatures. We live on the land, not in the sea. When we refer to the "environment," we're typically talking about our environment--the land, air, rivers, lakes, and coastlines where we live, work, and play. It's no surprise that a study of charitable giving in America showed that of all donations directed toward environmental concerns, 99 percent went to agencies and organizations focused on terrestrial issues, while 1 percent went to groups working to protect the oceans and the sea life within them.

Protect them from what?

That would be the typical question asked by anyone on the street. And again, at first glance, this makes sense. We're all taught in school that 71 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by oceans, and much of that is so deep that only a handful of humans have ever gotten close to the bottom. It would probably come as a shock to most people to learn that less than 1 percent of the living space on the Earth is on land--the other 99 percent is in the oceans, which contain many unique, and undiscovered species.

So what kinds of hazards could possibly threaten that many animals in that much water?

This has been the prevailing attitude ever since men first began pulling fish from the sea. Until the past half century or so, the oceans have always been seen as an inexhaustible resource, far too vast and abundant for us to even conceive of any danger that could possibly threaten them.

It's only when a disaster of one kind or another hits close to home-- meaning close to our shorelines--that we consider the health of our high seas.

So it makes sense to begin this book with just such a disaster--the April 2010 explosion at BP's Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig, some fifty miles off the coast of Louisiana, a blast that killed eleven workers, injured seventeen others, and, as I've mentioned, triggered the biggest oil disaster in the history of the United States.

APRIL 2010

EXPLOSION at BP's

DEEPWATER HORIZON

THERE SEEMS to be A CYCLE to these OCEAN DISASTERS--and it's A CYCLE WE SIMPLY CANNOT AFFORD to LET CONTINUE.

IT WAS TRAGIC, HORRIFYING, ALMOST BEYOND COMPREHENSION . . .

And, sad to say, it wasn't surprising at all--not to anyone familiar with the ever-increasing dangers of offshore drilling.

It's almost eerie to look at the similarities between the situation our American Oceans Campaign (AOC) group in Santa Monica faced back in the 1980s, when we began our fight against drilling near the coast of Southern California, and the situation our entire nation faces today in the wake of the Gulf tragedy. There seems to be somewhat of a cycle to these ocean disasters--and it's a cycle we simply cannot afford to let continue.

At the time that Bob Sulnick and I formed the AOC and launched our antidrilling campaign in the Pacific, it had been roughly twenty years since an offshore platform off the coast of Santa Barbara--just up the coast from us--suffered a blowout the likes of which, at that time, had never been seen in America. By the time that well was capped nearly twelve days later, a hundred thousand barrels of crude oil (4.2 million gallons) had spewed into the surrounding waters, creating an eight-hundred-square- mile surface slick, shutting down the region's fishing industry, coating seabirds and mammals with chocolate pudding-like petroleum, and blackening the area's beaches with tar balls.

AGREE TO DISAGREE

ROBERT SULNICK

Cofounder of the American Oceans Campaign

In 1985 I was the president of No Oil Inc., an organization fighting to stop Arm & Hammer and Occidental Petroleum from drilling oil wells adjacent to the Will Rogers State Beach in Pacific Palisades, California.

On a cold rainy night, we held a poorly attended fundraiser in the basement of the Presbyterian Church in Santa Monica. After my speech to the nine people there, a tall thin man walked up to me and said that he liked what I had to say. When he left, the other No Oil folks asked if I knew who that was. I said no. At the time, I thought Cheers was a bar somewhere in Los Angeles. So began one of the most amazing friendships I have ever had. In 1987 Ted Danson and I founded American Oceans Campaign (AOC).

The environmental community, as necessary and vital as it is, cannot solve environmental problems on its own; it does not have the resources or infrastructure to do so. Industry, of course, has the resources and the infrastructure. AOC decided to approach the oil industry with the proposition that we agree to disagree about offshore oil drilling and agree to agree about things like conserving energy and re-refining used oil.

By reaching out to the oil industry, we were able to accomplish things that otherwise would have been out of reach. During the 1980s, we had a constant dialogue with big oil, which led, among other things, to California's first rerefined oil program. Those relationships also helped BP Solar establish solar energy in California and the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) support California's first used-oil rerefining law.

I will always believe that agreeing to disagree with an opponent while being able to work with them on other mutually beneficial issues is the right approach for environmental problem solving.

These days, unfortunately, we're all too familiar with those kinds of images. But back then, just one month into the year of 1969, they were shocking, unprecedented. The entire nation looked on with a mixture of outrage and disgust. This was a landmark turning point for America's oil industry, which, until then, had enjoyed almost completely unchecked expansion. In the explosive decade of street protests and demonstrations that followed the Santa Barbara spill, people responded by burning their gasoline credit cards and marching with placards calling for the government to step in and take action so something like this would never happen again.

Which the government did, with a vengeance. Its response to that spill reached far beyond oil. With cities across the nation smothered in smog, rivers so polluted they actually caught fire (as Cleveland's Cuyahoga River famously did later in 1969), bodies of water as large as Lake Erie declared "dead" because of oxygen-sucking algal blooms caused by decades of chemical runoff from industries and farms, and, finally, the Santa Barbara disaster, US lawmakers at all levels passed an avalanche of landmark environmental legislation, including, in 1972, the Clean Water Act and the statutes creating the Environmental Protection Agency.

Dozens of federal and state laws were enacted, restricting and regulating what Americans, both as individuals and as corporations, were allowed to dump into our water, our soil, and our air. A little more than a year after that Santa Barbara spill, the first Earth Day was celebrated. Eventually, a moratorium was placed on all new leases for gas and oil exploration in federal waters for the lower forty-eight states (outside of existing areas in the Gulf of Mexico) which, of course, included those waters off the coast of Southern California.

And here's where the cycle set in.

You would think--you would hope--that that outrage and those laws would stand strong forever. But the very success of that moratorium seemed to lull people to sleep. As years passed with virtually no disasters to speak of--certainly nothing on the scale of those events of '69--public concern over environmental issues faded. People became complacent. All the while, the oil...

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Verlag
Rodale Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1605292621
ISBN 13 
9781605292625
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar