Another oil spill

In the 1990s I was at the age and career stage where my descent into senescence was punctuated by the receipt of awards and distinctions. It almost always meant that I had to make a speech. At one of the most pleasant of these, the annual meeting banquet of the American College of Epidemiology, I spoke about ethical and moral dilemmas epidemiologists confront, and then launched into some remarks that I believed were thought-provoking, about the philosophical foundations of epidemiology: why do we do it, what's its purpose in the grand scheme of things? Are we trying to discover the secrets of life and its diseases with the aim of making man immortal? Speculating about what our successors 100 years on might think about our priorities, I used the analogy of the internal combustion engine to speculate about what Nikolaus Otto, Karl Benz, Gottfried Daimler, and the other inventors and developers of the internal combustion engine would think of the world they have wrought, if they could return and see it today. Every time there is an ecologically damaging oil spill that thought returns. Perhaps the internal combustion engine will turn out to be mankind's worst ever mistake. It's made us so dangerously addicted to petroleum fuels that we will take any risk to obtain a supply sufficient to feed momentarily our insatiable, insane lust for it. In almost every way I can think of, addiction to petroleum fuels is deadlier than addiction to cocaine, heroin, or even tobacco. To feed this addiction, humans have despoiled lovely places all over the world, pristine wildernesses, peaceful villages, tropical rain forests, sandy deserts with fragile webs of life, Arctic barrens, the seabed itself, with its life sustaining organisms at the base of marine food chains, and all the tasty gourmet treats that come from the sea - shrimps, oysters, scallops, crabs, lobsters. We care greatly about these, and about the damage to the habitat of migratory and other birds, but it's the plankton and micro organisms at the very base of the marine food chain we should care about the most. Destroy these and all higher in the food chain are imperilled too. The current spill off the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico comes from the sea bottom, from an oil deposit at a depth below the surface of about a kilometre. Miniature unmanned robot submarines are being deployed in attempts to seal the leakage, but so far it seems unstoppable. If it can't be stopped soon, this could become the worst marine eco-disaster ever. Will we learn from it? I guess not. Plans will no doubt be prepared and assurances given to protect the far more sensitive Beaufort Sea deposits offshore from the North Slope of Alaska and Northern Canada - and the Caribou breeding and feeding grounds as well as the rich profusion of Arctic sea life. I believe those assurances almost as much as I believe the promises of politicians and used car salesmen. The marine life in the region off the coast of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi is rich and varied, harvested to feed millions of people; so it is economically very important. It is ecologically even more important. If it is gravely damaged by this oil spill, it will demonstrate yet again the dependence of human health on ecosystem health.