I received a message today from someone who questioned the position I had taken in a recent op-ed article on the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Because I was unable to get a reply through to the person who wrote to me, and because others might have the same concern he raised, I am placing his question and my reply to him here.
He wrote:
The last paragraph of your most recent article puzzles me. You say: “The oil pollution in the Gulf is already hurting residents, workers and business owners and causing heartbreaking damage to marshlands, beaches and the wildlife that inhabits the area’s waters and wetlands. Let us hope the terrible situation will not be politically leveraged into measures that cause even greater damage to the national economy.”
So if I get this right, you are saying that heartbreaking damage is being caused, but “keep on drillin!” But your concern is the national economy. What happened to preventing the “heartbreaking damage?”
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I replied as follows:
Virtually everything people do carries risks. Certainly every form of production does so. All manufacturing processes are risky — as a young man I worked in a factory where I saw a man’s hand ground to pulp when it was caught between two large gears of a machine. All farming activities are risky — as a young man I worked on a farm where a man was crushed to death by a tractor that lurched forward while he was underneath it doing repairs and another was killed when a tractor he was operating on the side of a ditch tipped over, throwing him off and crushing him beneath its weight. All transportation is risky — thousands die in traffic accidents each year in this country. All of these things are heartbreaking. Yet, for good reason, we do not imagine that we would be better off if we forbade manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation.
The Deepwater Horizon accident that continues to foul the Gulf’s waters and shores was an unlikely but extremely destructive event. The damage it is causing is heartbreaking. But forbidding oil drilling in the Gulf would also cause immense damage, not least to the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people whose incomes are tied to that activity, not to mention all those who value the products made from the oil extracted from pools beneath the ocean floor. We can’t have all good things and no bad things. In life as it actually exists, we must choose and make trade-offs.
