Private industrial interests haggle over who’s really responsible for the Gulf of Mexico ‘So Big You Can See It From Outerspace’ oil spill, The question of environmental racism hasn’t been raised - Yet. So I invited Jim Albertini with the Malu ‘Aina Center for Non-Violent Education and Action in Hawaii to talk about the not-so-sublte political and geographical lines that keep public attention safely separated from another sort of spill that is not visible from outerspace. Siting a feedlot in a poverty zone is not an accident of geography. Siting a deep-water oil rig over an oil field can disguise the fact that aside from passengers on cruise ships, there are no poor communities in the Gulf of Mexico - so how can anyone call BP's platform-placing decisions racism? Here's how: for decades now the Gulf has been used by 'Mad Science' as an experiment in deep-water drilling... and probability. Game theory, too, if you factor in the people effected by an "accident". Given the numbers involved here, it's hard to call the BP incident an "accident". That's what actuarials are for: to weight the cost of clean-up versus the benefits of 'cleaning up'. Or as the 'Explainers' at Halliburton put it: “It’s not our fault. We were off the platform 20 days defore the fire.”
- KBOO