Simply Exquisite

I've come out of estivation. Amazing.

Many of my friends know that I'm a die-hard architecture fan. (No, really. Consider the fact that I've dragged my husband to Bear Run, PA in late winter, driving through a hailstorm no less, just to see Fallingwater on a private tour, people. Then there's the trekking all over California for Wright and Greene & Greene houses or buildings... Or how about the architecture tour of NYC, of my own making from the AIA guidebook, the Marzie walks your feet off tour? When I say I like architecture, I ain't kidding. Trip to Barcelona? Forget seeing Barça play. Give me some Gaudí. World Cup in Brazil in 2014? A chance to see Oscar Niemeyer's work live.) Anyway, as a fan of architecture, I've been fascinated by the work of Maya Lin for decades, ever since she won the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition while still an architecture student at Yale. I was utterly fascinated by her. Both because of how well she forged ahead, in spite of all the controversy, and because she was so close in age to me and I couldn't fathom how someone my age could be so poised on a national and international platform. And, of course, I thought her designs were so impressive, so well thought out, so thoughtful of what they were to represent. From the simplicity of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC to the elegant concept of The Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery to the impressive African Art Museum (I love African art, too, btw) in New York, I've followed her work with great enthusiasm. 

At present, Maya Lin is working on what she calls her last memorial. It is the ultimate conceptual art project. It is a memorial to planet Earth. I cannot say enough about it, or thank the Cornell Ornithology Lab enough for alerting me to its very existence. I could spend hours on this website. In fact, I have. (Ironically, the very first dot I clicked on was Giant River Otters...)

The installation of What Is Missing is touring in its ever diminishing world. While not everyone will get to see it in person, you can participate on the web at WhatisMissing.net. What do you miss in the natural world in the last thirty years? Frogs croaking at night? Fireflies that look like stars come to earth in the summertime? Bachelor's Buttons in your garden? Naturally ripe and flavorful tomatoes? Rivers frozen in winter? Meadowlarks, Buntings or Robins making it as far south as you are? Tell Maya Lin your story.

And those of you who say, oh, it will be so depressing, please, by all mean, go to What You Can Do. 

Do Something.

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© Bright Nepenthe, 2012

In the Mire & Remembrance

Baby Tern on a barrier island in Barataria Bay, one of the areas hit hardest with BP oil on 2010. This chick and most of the others were swept away with high waters from Debbie.

(Image credit: Julie Dermansky, used with permission)

It's been a while, hasn't it? Things are better and appalling and not forgotten.  Yesterday, I actually thought of that baby tern as a metaphor. Today, I'm in a better and clearer frame of mind. 

Since my last post, I've filed a shelter petition for the young woman I call Lillie (don't even get me started on the legal end of this and what I have to say about child welfare.) I've seen the young man I was worried about land pretty much on his feet, and inch ever closer to aging out. I've seen Keyoncé disappear yet again, into the murky world in which he fails to thrive but doesn't struggle enough in to leave or to die in. Snow White is going to use my car for her operator's driver's license exam and we can have positive conversations again. Marina and Serena are fine in their group homes and in fact, they appear to be thriving. My other two GAL youth, Tammy and Shammy, are doing okay. My "not really my case officially" GAL youth is doing better, though I'm still worried about her living circumstance. Overall the trend is up. But, then again, less than a week ago, I've seen things like this (below) coming back into the home of my brand shiny new GAL youth, whose case I just got on because she is diabetic and this is what her prospective adopter is sending her home  with (late for her medication, no less) from visits: 

(That yellow bag? Cheetos-type fries, mostly gone. The cup? Milkshake. The 24 oz. soda? A FRAKKING 24 ounce soda. The doughnut, the sugary Bubblicious gum, the buttered popcorn. Quantum field help me, what is she eating all afternoon, if this is what worked its way home?)

And yet, in spite of all these many things, what motivated me to write a post is Julie's ongoing, powerful series on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf. Julie is my kind of person. I think I must operate on the same frequency. She isn't letting it go. She won't let us forget. Why? We shouldn't forget. The animals, the people, the everything about what BP did there with the Deepwater Horizon. Everyone and everything along the affected Gulf Coast will be seeing the effects for decades. We must not forget their struggle. 

Please join me in commending Julie's work at the Atlantic. Like it, share it (yes, it's hard to like, but it's important to do so for social media connections and you help her get the recognition to keep on taking these pictures). Spread the word. Stick it to BP. Show them, and the entire industry, that the American attention span isn't quite as short as they hoped...

We will not forget Barataria Bay, its birds, its marine life. Or any place, affected by the DH spill.

Julie- Thank you.

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Cornell's Red-tailed Hawk Nest WebCam!

Watch live streaming video from cornellhawks at livestream.com

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© Bright Nepenthe, 2012

Just Can't Ignore It

Yeah, I know I did the Bad Big Oil post yesterday. But this has been pissing me off since about 7:30 am and I finally decided I can't stand not saying something about it. I know this will shock my readers that I am not comforted by:

"The chance that any spill would hit the Keys beaches is low."

Really? No reason to worry? Of course not! Because it's not like there have been any problems with deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico or anything. Or likely that oil can travel 77 miles from a spill. (NASA satellite imagery to the contrary.) And it's not like I don't trust recently Argentine Government-nationalized Repsol and embattled Spanish Repsol to be not distracted by their situation. Or that Cuba has any internal problems of concern that might take their focus off safe offshore drilling in their waters, which happen to be pretty much my waters, too. 

Oh, no. None of those things.

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Earth Day

Footage by NASA

Today, April 22, was Earth Day. It was also the two year and two day anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill, an event which will have changed my corner of the earth forever. The video above, a time-lapse sequence gathered by NASA, shows the evolution of the spill for the year following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, on April 20, 2010. Looking at the images at end, you might think, Oh, good, the oil is gone. Or... not as visible. Where did it go, I counter? Where. Did. It. Go?

It's still there.

As the NY Times' op-ed columnist Abrahm Lustgarten dubbed it the other day, the Deepwater Horizon spill is the stain that won't wash away. And that is in more ways than one. Because in addition to the obvious anniversary media coverage, there have been quieter articles, far more disturbing articles, for the past year. Actually, I would go back to that very unsettling piece in Mother Jones in the October/November 2010 issue, about the BP coverup and the hidden damage that was slowly to be revealed. Revealed by what was missing, what was dying and what was diseased. They had this chart, which I can't get out of my head:

Illustration by Nicholas Felton for Mother Jones 

How deep would the damage go they asked? How much would the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem and food web be altered? The article talked about potential damage to krill, phytoplankton, and various keystone species, such as killifish, and what that might do to the entire marine food web. Damage some of these small species and you will potentially wipe out larger fish.

Deformed Gulf Shrimps On the left is a Gulf shrimp with growths, while on the right are a group of shrimps without either eyes or eye sockets. Left: Keath Ladner. Right: Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera

(Image from Popular Science)

From the little guys, like the mutant eyeless shrimp, covered with bizarre lesions that have resulted as of tomorrow in closure of shrimping in the Mississippi Sound, Mobile (Alabama) Bay, Bon Secour, Wolf Bay and Little Lagoon (all also in Alabama) to the giants of the Gulf, how bad is the damage in the Gulf? It is clear there has been widespread ecological damage, whether the government or BP are willing to admit it or not.* The Sarasota Herald-Tribune ran a long article in November, 2011, detailing a truly stunning level of problems in a diverse number of species, from hundreds of dead dolphin washing up on shore (500+ as of November, 2011 and how many more simply sank, I wonder?) to tiny plankton and deepwater coral. Small fish are overtly diseased and large fish, like whale sharks, are nowhere to be found. Let's not get into the cetacean situation, diseased dolphin or the sea turtle situation. Ditto on the human children, living, or should we say just barely getting by, at the water's edge in South Plaquemines Parish, LA. It is too depressing, right? 

This 2011 photo provided by Donald Waters shows a fish harvested from the Gulf of Mexico with unusual lesions and infections. 

(Would YOU eat this fish? I sure wouldn't...)

(Image credit: Donald Waters/AP)

I guess I should just focus on the being good, wise shepherds of our Earth, which is what Earth Day is supposed to make us think about. But that leads me right back to the Gulf of Mexico...


We can look at the complex interplay in the Gulf states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, between the oil industry and the seafood industry as posing the ultimate question. We hear again and again about how we need to be less dependent upon Middle Eastern oil and that our only option is our own limited oil (with a distressing number of years from actually availability, a in a distressingly small supply) or that we need to use our natural gas resources, in spite of its addition of CO₂ upon burning it, and even if we know from ample evidence (watch that little Vimeo video on the upper right sidebar!) that fracking that gas may permanently spoil our water supply. 


On this Earth Day I contemplate what we will do with all that energy when we have less or no food to eat and no freshwater to drink? If it's so crucial for business that we have to use all this gas and oil, who will be buying stuff when they are too hungry and too thirsty to work and go to the mall? What is the plan then Big Oil?


Not long ago, I was surprised that several of my email correspondents knew of, or had read, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which I've mentioned on the blog before as presaging the world out of balance, driven so chemically, by pesticides and industry and cover-ups. Carson was concerned about DDT and it's terrible effects on birds (oh, gee, it's also rather bad for people...). September 27 will mark the 50th anniversary of Carson's book. 


Look how far we've come.


If you want to really think about our 42nd annual Earth Day, I encourage my readers to check out photographer Julie Dermansky's Flickr set Louisiana Wetlands with 249 exquisite photos of what delicate wetlands are supposed to look like. And then, take a look at her BP Oil Disaster series with 600 photos of everything that BP, and the oil industry as a whole, want you to forget. In these two photo sets Julie, whose photos have been featured many a time on this blog, has captured a beautiful world, sullied for a cause that I have a harder and harder time grasping these days.


There's more to come on this topic in the weeks ahead. For instance, what about bees being impacted by neonicotinoid pesticides like Merit, threatening our land-based food supply? (Readers of the blog know that in addition to our fruits and vegetables, much of our livestock feeds on bee pollinated fodder.) What will we do when all the insect pests are resistant to imidacloprid, except for bees, who were our friends?


Every day ought to be Earth Day. For a few posts more, it will be.

---

*Surprisingly, one of the loudest recent clarions has been that of Al Jazeera. The irony of a media outlet in the oil-rich Middle East featuring such evidently controversial material is rich...

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Two Years

Deepwater Horizon in flames, taken by a photographer who wished to remain anonymous.

Where are we, two years later? Where is the Gulf?


Stay tuned....

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Earth Day

© Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Julie Dermansky's One Year Remembrance Album

dead sea turtle painted red at sunset

Friday April 15th, 2011 Waveland, MS

Dead sea turtle on the beach in Waveland Mississippi,  painted red by the Institute for the Marine Mammal Studies so it wont be counted a second time, left on the beach until a crew comes to remove it. 

An unprecedented number of dead young  Kemp's Ridley and Loggerhead  sea turtles have washed up on the shores of Mississippi along the Gulf of Mexico starting almost a year after the BP oil spill. 

Test are being done on the high number of turtle and dolphin corpses found on the beaches but results have not been released. ~ Julie Dermansky

I got Julie Dermansky's Newletter this afternoon when I was sitting in the pediatrician's office with my son. It's really hot in Miami these days and I was drinking a too-sweet Sprite in one of those weird-shade-of-green plastic soda bottles that's made from petroleum. (For a refresher on what we make from petroleum, revisit this post. We might have one like it on things made from corn soon, btw.) Anyway, I opened her email on my little iPad and felt ill, sad and small. About an hour before, I'd just posted my Memo blog post below, saying I'd never forget Deepwater Horizon. But Julie's photos, her most recent blog post, and her recent additions to her Flickr photostream show that sadly, the ones who are not forgetting the most are the animals. And not just marine animals, either. Poisoned water works its way inland. Even terrestrial animals can't forget, if you look at that poor little armadillo in her flicker stream. 


I couldn't finish my soda. I looked at the bottle and all I could think was what price...? What is the real price of this plastic?


So much beauty has been lost to us with BP's Deepwater Horizon spill. Julie relentlessly documents it all. I am proud to help disseminate her work.

dead bird with blue feathers

Saturday April 16- Gulfport Mississippi

All images, and text captions, in this post: © Julie Dermansky, All Rights Reserved, Used With Permission

You can follow Julie's work at The Atlantic. She was in Egypt at Tahir Square in February. She also currently has an exhibit in New Orleans, at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art featuring her work after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. You can see much more of her work at jsdart.com.

Post text © Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Memorandum: Not forgotten, not planning to forget.

To President Obama, the US regulatory bodies involved, the US Congress, Florida Governor Rick Scott, the Florida Legislature and most of all to the Big Oil PACs:

I will NEVER forget the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, all the cheap cutting of corners and guidelines and the lies built into their safety plans that were not worth the paper they were printed on. I'm getting my Nissan Leaf in the Summer (been on order for a full year now!)  and I'm going to fuel it with hopefully safer-than-Fukushima nuclear generated power from Turkey Point.

So don't kid yourself into thinking that everyone has too short an attention span to remember what BP, Transocean, Halliburton did to the Gulf of Mexico and all our marine and wetland life a year ago.

Ain't happening.

All these beautiful images are Associated Press photos with clear attribution, used for educational purposes.




© Bright Nepenthe, 2011

Balance and the Sea Around Us

"All surface life depends on life inside and beneath the oceans. Sea life provides half of our oxygen and a lot of our food and regulates climate. We are all citizens of the sea."

~ Ian Poiner, chairman of the Census of Marine Life Steering Committee

Image source: Census of Marine Life

Bluefin tuna from the Mediterranean at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo.

(Image credit: Toru Hanai/Reuters)

Have you ever wanted to speak intelligently on a topic, then studied and researched, only to find that the more you learned, the more it felt like you had fallen into the mines of Moria?

Welcome to seafood. Or really, food, in general, as a topic for an environmentally concerned, scientifically literate citizen.

I read with avid interest CNN's article summarizing some of the landmark findings of the Census of Marine Life this morning. The Census, released today, took ten years to complete, employed some 2,700 scientists from 80 countries around the world. It comprised surveying sea life from the smallest microbes to great cetaceans, from the shallowest tidepools to the deepest trenches, such as the Marianas Trench, some 10,000 meters (6.2 miles) deep. The resulting findings indicate that there is a staggering number of marine species, at least a million, but that we have only described about a quarter of them. You can read the brief or full version of the Census here.


Some of the marine life discovered is so exotic, so lushly beautiful, that it takes your breath away. You can see some of the images at the Census gallery. Some of the creatures are mysterious and truly bizarre-looking. And some live in conditions as inhospitable as any on this planet. The report, the galleries, and some of the perspectives that have been offered on the Census are truly enthralling to anyone who loves the sea, or loves interesting creatures.


My excitement is, however, tempered by the fact that several months ago, one the Comtesses sent me some info about Paul Greenberg's forthcoming book, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, which I then devoured, and if you'll excuse a further pun, stewed on. Greenberg is a regular contributor about marine life, seafood and marine environmentalism at the New York Times. This book, along with a harrowing series of articles in the Times, gives me serious pause for thought about the riches and diversity that are revealed in the Census of Marine Life report.


When you consider Greenberg's op-ed piece on menhaden, published last December, you can get a feel for how very fragile our understanding is of the collective marine ecosystem. Menhaden, a very small forage fish, are filter feeders. They keep our oceans clean and provide food for larger predatory fish. At least one author, H. Bruce Franklin Ph.D., has called menhaden The Most Important Fish in the Sea. Drastically overfished for use as lubricants, and ironically as food for farmed fish, the menhaden is rapidly disappearing from the Eastern seaboard, and as a result, the bass population in Chesapeake Bay has been heavily impacted. Other impacts include the fouling of water and creation of large dead zones.

"The muddy brown color of the Long Island Sound and the growing dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay are the direct result of inadequate water filtration — a job that was once carried out by menhaden."

~ Paul Greenberg, A Fish Oil Story, New York Times 

On the other end of the size spectrum, we can look at endangered bluefin tuna, a huge fish. Bluefin is one of the Four Fish. (The other three are sea bass, cod and salmon)  In a long article in the NY Times Magazine, Greenberg talks about Tuna's End. Overfishing of tuna, and lack of a consistent international approach to tuna fishing, has devastated most of the bluefin population. And yet, the market still demands and receives wild caught bluefin.


Bluefin tuna can reach a length of more than ten feet and weigh in at more than a thousand pounds, though tuna of that maturity and size are almost never seen now in the wild. Swimming in the frigid arctic, the Northern Bluefin tuna, uses thermoregulation to prevent heat loss and permit more efficient muscle functioning. That's right, we're talking effectively warm-blooded. Their countercurrent exchange of blood provides them with the ability to swim and feed in ice cold water, in a fashion relatively unique in the fish world. This magnificent fish is now critically endangered.


I don't know about you, but I'm a big lover of sushi. My diet, as many of you know, is rather limited by intolerance and auto-immune problems. Pure protein, like that in sashimi, is always a pretty safe bet for me. And I love(d) toro. But I won't eat a critically endangered fish like bluefin. As Treehugger.com says, "you wouldn't eat a tiger, so why would you eat endangered bluefin tuna?"


But here's the thing. You know those little charts that you can get from the Monterey Aquarium people that tell you what's environmentally moral to eat (I mean, that's what they're really trying to tell you, right?) and what's not? Do you ever wonder if they, or the principles on which they are based, really work? I even have the Bay Aquarium's neat little app on my iPhone (which I still shudder to think about in light of the whole Congo business, let me tell you). It has recommendations for seafood and sushi. Most everything that I used to eat is on the avoid list. But what does it mean when we then switch to new fish to decimate? Because if we all start eating tilapia instead of tilefish, we'll soon end up with the same problem we had with tilefish. Our human numbers on this planet, and the first world's wherewithal to purchase wild fish, will soon knock down any species numbers. Look at what we've done with menhaden, which had been the most plentiful fish in the world. The global catch of wild fish in 2009 was estimated to be 170 billion pounds a year. (As Greenberg says, it's equivalent to the net weight of the entire population of China...)


So should we eat wild fish at all?


If you listen to Paul Greenberg, the disequilibrium in our oceans is getting to the point where really, in good conscience, we probably shouldn't eat wild-caught fish, especially not caught in any mass fishery kind of way like with purse-seining.¹ And, of course, we shouldn't be fishing menhaden into extinction, for lipstick and fish oil, either. Farmed fish is it's own kind of problem, of course. From pollution to antibiotic use, to the potential escape of farmed fish into the ecosystem, farmed fish are not a facile solution by any means. But they may be our only solution.


Of course, fishing is not the only thing that impacts marine life. There are all the dams that affect salmon, and oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon. You have only to read the little horror story of the BP coverup over at Mother Jones, to see the devastating long-term effects of oil plumes on marine life in the deep scattering layer (oil has spread down into the even the abyssopelagic zone, of which there are a few areas in the Gulf of Mexico). I seriously considered blogging about that article last month. It is so depressing (and that's compared to what I normally blog about, so you think about that, people...) and so complex, that I really didn't know if my readers would want to hear about it. There's so much land drama can we take more marine drama now that the spill is supposed to be capped?


But today's article and the release of the census stirred me to write about the issue of fish and marine life. Or more precisely, it was Ian Poiner's quote at the top of this article. Most of my readers know Rachel Carson's sentinel book The Silent Spring. We now hover on the 60th anniversary of her National Book Award winning The Sea Around Us. (In some respects, Greenberg, with his reverence for the oceans and marine life, seems almost to be channeling Carson with his temperate warning of impending environmental disaster.) Our oceans are in such a state of crisis. It is so very sad.


Scientists have spent ten years cataloguing such magnificence.


How on eaarth² are we going to save it?

¹Purse-seining, by Bryan Christie, from the New York Times article Tuna's End:

² You can read all about Eaarth here.


© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Space, the final frontier

They found someplace new that we could screw up!!!!


I hope if there's intelligent life there that they're intelligent enough to say no trespassing.

Both images are from Space.com


You can read more here.




© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Symphony of Science

Symphony of Science

Thanks to Dana for sharing this...




© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

The Rime of the Albatross and Plastics

from Royal Albatross Center, Dunedin, New Zealand

 At length did cross an Albatross, 

  Thorough the fog it came; 

  As if it had been a Christian soul,  

  We hail'd it in God's name.

  It ate the food it ne'er had eat, 

  And round and round it flew. 

  The ice did split with a thunder-fit; 

  The helmsman steer'd us through!

  

  And a good south wind sprung up behind; 

  The Albatross did follow, 

  And every day, for food or play, 

  Came to the mariners' hollo!

  In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,

  It perch'd for vespers nine;

  Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,

  Glimmer'd the white moonshine.'

 'God save thee, ancient Mariner!

 From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—

 Why look'st thou so?'—'With my crossbow 

 I shot the Albatross.

- from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Whenever I think of albatrosses, I think of Coleridge. In my annotated book of English Poets of the Romantic Period, the annotation for shooting the albatross reads: His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner for killing the bird of good luck. 

And so here I am, reading this article about the albatross in Cornell University's Living Bird magazine (this issue is not online yet) from their spectacular ornithology program, from which my childhood friend Julie graduated more than a few years back. I subscribe to Living Bird in part because I love birds and in part because I think our world has become such a horribly difficult place in which birds struggle to survive. Sometimes my husband laughs because I think that waking up without hearing birds in my yard would be absolutely unimaginable. It was the one thing that gave me reservations about the idea of getting hurricane impact-resistant windows. Would I still hear my cardinals and orioles and mockingbirds and bluejays when I awoke in the mornings? Thankfully I do. I really love birds and some birds amaze you with their wonderful songs or artistry of feathering while others are simply magnificent.

When I think of truly magnificent, I definitely think of the albatross. If you've never been lucky enough to see one, all I can tell you is that really, their wingspan is simply beyond imagining. I chose the photo at the top just so you get the sense of scale. And so you can imagine my horror when in reading Cliff Beittel's wonderful article in Living Bird I see this:

That's a dead baby albatross and from its remains it's easy to see that what killed it was ingestion of plastic. Quoting Beittel's article, sometimes adults mistake plastic for prey and return to their nests regurgitating plastic to their chicks, some of which will die from starvation while their stomachs fill with refuse rather than food. 


It takes only two ounces of plastic to kill an albatross chick.


I used to drive everyone in my family crazy by cutting plastic things like those plastic soda can 6-pack rings into pieces so nothing could get caught in them. Now I wonder if that's not just making them of a better size for feeding to a bird's young.


Plastic both does terrible things (occupying space better occupied by food) and is made of terrible things (both plasticizing agents and monomer components are pretty nasty stuff). But I guess paper is no better since that's largely going to cost trees that are needed by birds as well.


Looking at that photo above, I'm just having one of those days in which I feel like there are way to many people on this planet doing way too many thoughtless, or even worse thought-out and still bad, things.


I love birds. In fact, I love most living things.

I hope a fair number of them survive us.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Deja Vu? Oh, Yes, Said They....

Deepwater Horizon was a fluke. Off shore drilling is sooooo verrrry, verrrrrry safe....

A Mariner Energy oil rig, the Vermillion Block 380, burns 80 miles south of the Louisiana coast Thursday. The fire has since been put out.

KATC3/AFP/Newscom

The Mariner Energy rig Vermillion 380 exploded yesterday off the coast of Louisiana. There was all this talk about how there was no spill and yet I see in the fairly reliable Bloomberg this morning that they were noting a mile long 100 feet wide sheen on the water. Don't know about you but I'm thinking that maybe some oil spilled. Because really, water doesn't have a sheen to it. (I know this for a fact because I'm a PhD chemist. Definitely. Not. Sheen-y)  

“This incident will increase pressure on the federal government to prolong the moratorium,” said Gianna Bern, president of Brookshire Advisory & Research Inc., a former BP crude oil trader whose Flossmoor, Illinois, firm provides risk-management advice to oil producers. ( from the Bloomberg article)

Well, ya think? (Frankly, I'm slightly pessimistic Gianna... I really don't know what it will take to get a lasting moratorium on offshore drilling in this country.) About the only good thing here is that the Vermillion 380 stands in only 400 feet of water.

And on the note of thinking of how the very last thing that Louisiana needs is more oil in offshore waters, let me direct readers to Hurricane Creeper's most recent blog post, in which it looks like oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill is working its way inland, following evidence of a fish kill in the Choctawhachee Bay. Evidence of oil working its way into the bay was first reported last Thursday by the Walton Sun. You can check out the Destin Log photogallery. Choctawhachee Bay is right near Destin, which had some of those pristine beaches you may remember from some of my earlier blog posts. Destin's beaches have remained open and unblemished according to the city's webpage. Although I do recall seeing video back in June of tar balls washing up on a Destin beach and a child getting one stuck on her foot. But the Destin webpage says it all swell there. Seafood is safe to eat. 

All so safe. Just like offshore drilling.

After looking at Jennie Hobbs's photos, I'm thinking I'll be skipping it, thank you.

I want my Nissan Leaf. Now please.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010