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More than ten years ago, I pulled into a Chevron station to fill up. A guy who worked there spotted my "Boycott Shell" bumpersticker and asked me about it.
I gave him the shortest explanation I could craft. It's a complicated story. The catalyzing incident for the boycott of Shell was the execution by the Nigerian government of writer Ken Saro-Wiwa. He, along with eight others, was hanged by the Nigerian government in 1995. The charges against them were widely considered to be trumped-up, the real motivation for their execution being their involvement in environmental activism in the Niger Delta, where Royal Dutch Shell was drilling for oil. Saro-Wiwa was part of a group called MOSOP, or Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. The Ogoni were the people who had the misfortune to be living in the area where Shell began extracting oil in 1958. They are a minority group within Nigeria, and being underrepresented in a federal government which was corrup to the core anyway, the Ogoni were left to fend for themselves while Shell's drilling operations destroyed their environment. They got none of the oil money, which was all going either to Shell or to the big shots in the government that allowed them to operate. Instead, fish died, water was contaminated, acid rain fell, oil flooded their fields and killed their crops, and their entire way of life, based as it was on farming and fishing, became impossible.
This naturally provoked some resistance from the local community. With financial support from Shell, the Rivers State Internal Security Task Force took on the job of suppressing it. MOSOP emerged in 1995 in response to this. Shortly afterward, Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders of MOSOP were convicted of murder in a highly questionable trial by a special military tribunal and then executed. This brought enough international attention to the issue of environmental destruction in the Niger Delta to make a boycott feasible.
Despite all that, the Shell boycott remained one of those causes that only the the most politically engaged Americans even knew about. Nobody knew who the Ogoni were. Nigeria was far away. (It had not even yet become famous for its wire transfer spam scams.) Ken Saro-Wiwa was not even as much of a household name as Chinua Achebe and most Americans had never heard of Achebe either. And most of all, the horrific exploitation of an African landscape for the profit of a European corporation was an old, old, old story. It was one of those things that just kept happening to the third world. The combination of corrupt post-independence governments, Cold War politicking, and international capitalism typically worked out very, very badly for the people who happened to be living on top of one of the world's most profitable natural resources. It stood to reason that if a major multinational corporation wanted oil, and a third world government was willing and eager to be paid for delivering it, that the people whose lives and environment were laid waste by the drilling process were just going to be screwed.
So, I summarized this for the Chevron attendant, and went and fueled up my car, and later that day sent an email to a friend of mine who had worked on Ken Saro-Wiwa, explaining how I was fighting the good fight one fill-up at a time. She wrote back and said, "I hate to break it to you...but Chevron drills in the Niger Delta too."
Well, fuck.
So, I stopped using Chevron and continued avoiding Shell. Still doing it. And now it's 2010. And off our own coast, British Petroleum has created an environmental catastrophe that may well make what happened to the Niger Delta pale in comparison. And while everyone in the media is scrambling to figure out whether/how to blame Obama for this, and making idiotic comparisons to Katrina (both are bad things that have happened to the Gulf Coast in recent years...beyond that, they have nothing in common), and BP keeps coming up with more and more desperate ideas about how to manage a disaster that is clearly beyond their control, I'm basically thinking one thing: We're all gonna die.
When I can get past thinking that thing, the #2 thing that occurs to me is: What's happening now is the kind of thing that an oil company *used* to be able to get away with only when it was operating in an impoverished country in an undeveloped region with no international clout and a government too corrupt and dysfunctional to protect the interests of its own people. You look at Shell vs. The Ogoni People, and you think well, that sucks, but no wonder the Ogoni lose. Who's going to stick up for them? This has been going on since 1958 and basically the only people fighting for the indigenous peoples of the Niger Delta are themselves. And they're still doing it--every once in a while you read about the occupation by local activists of an oil well, and so on.
You might expect different results when a multinational corporation goes up against the US. But it does still appear, so far, that in the US vs. British Petroleum, the US loses. Forget this whole first/second/third world thing. It's the oil companies' world now. We're just soaking in it. And choking on the fumes.
I do occasionally think back to the Bush years and recalling how much the Bush government always reminded me of a corrupt third world regime. It's clear enough to me that the conditions that led to this disaster were created long before Obama took office, and that allowing oil companies to operate without let or hindrance was totally a Bush administration thing. But we always knew that while Obama's election would fix a lot of problems, there were others it wouldn't solve. Our government's impotence in the face of gigantic oil companies with gobs of cash to pay lobbyists with would appear to be one of them.
I really, at this point, don't want to know who to blame--apart from British Petroleum, Transocean, and Halliburton, which would seem to be where to start. I'd like to know how the fucking thing can be stopped. I'd like to know THAT the fucking thing can be stopped. In my nightmares I worry that it can't, and that we have unleashed some chthonic thing that will resist our feeble attempts to shove it back in the bottle, and will continue poisoning the oceans until they all turn black.
I'd also like to know what we can do--independent of our still very slow-moving, money-loving, and ineffective government--to punish BP for this. Because assuming that we don't all die, I would like to see BP made an example of. So they've offered to pay for the cleanup. How very big of them. Rich as they are, they do not have enough money to restore what they've destroyed.
The Shell example suggests that boycotting doesn't necessarily get the job done. What finally got to Shell, apparently, was a lawsuit charging them with complicity in Saro-Wiwa's death and other human rights abuses filed under the Alien Claims Tort Act. They settled that one for $15.5 million--still denying they'd had anything to do with it. If BP ever is made to feel any of our pain, it'll probably be through massive class action lawsuits--if the cap on damages is ever done away with.
And the Chevron gas station story reminds me that there is no such thing as a clean tank of gas. You cannot fill up without contributing to environmental devastation *somewhere.* Nobody has yet come up with a safe, gentle, or pretty way of getting that stuff out of the ground; and when you burn it, you're contributing to global warming anyway.
And then I'm kind of back to, "Well, fuck." Followed by, "We're all gonna die."
I hope that I'll be wrong about that last part, as I have so often been wrong before. Meanwhile, I've been thinking for a while about the fact that a significant chunk of my monthly paycheck goes on gas, and that just about all of that dough has been going to BP--because they own nearly all the gas stations in my neighborhood and apparently have a monopoly on gas stations along the highway I spend most of my time driving. And I've decided, to hell with political effectiveness. I'm going to boycott BP purely because I am just too pissed off to give those assholes my money. Why let the completely putrid be the enemy of the merely inadequate?
:scared: :argh: :scared:
The Plaid Adder
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