One of the basic memes of environmental reporting holds that anything good that happens is actually bad: When nature turns out to be stunningly resilient in the face of human activity, it’s bad, because it empowers humans. When biologists find new species, it’s bad, because they’re threatened by development. If scientists ever find a lost valley full of dinosaurs, the headline will read “Dinosaurs Survive Untold Millennia! Now Threatened by Climate Change.”
Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, my colleague Steve Hayward and I observed that based on the available literature, ocean ecosystems disrupted by oil spills are among the fastest to recover, often quite quickly. Having studied some biology over the years, I knew that much of this was because one group’s oil spill was another group’s dinner bell: the Gulf is full of bacteria that eat oil naturally, huge populations are stunningly resilient. So, I wasn’t surprised to read that a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that bacterial microbes inside the Deepwater slick “degraded the oil at a rate five times faster than microbes outside the slick—accounting in large part for the disappearance of the slick some three weeks after Deepwater Horizon’s Macondo well was shut off.”
But of course, this good thing is really a bad thing: Bethanie Edwards, the lead author of the paper, was, the story says:
… “a little afraid” that oil companies and others might use the results to try to convince the public that spills can do relatively little harm. “They could say, ‘Look, we can put oil into the environment and the microbes will eat it.’”
And, she reminds us that (even though it’s an entirely natural substance constantly entering the oceans from natural sources), “Oil is still detrimental to the environment … because the molecules that are not accessible to microbes persist and could have toxic effects.” And, of course, there’s always the climate coup de grâce: “Edwards added, the oil that is consumed by microbes ‘is being converted to carbon dioxide that still gets into the atmosphere.’”
Of course, everything humans do results in carbon dioxide emissions, including breathing. So, there you have it. Nature proves resilient, but don’t celebrate: climate change will kill everything anyway.
print this page