It was on the third day of the OCEANOISE conference that things started to gel. The themes and loose ends of the previous days began convening on the session topics – which were “Riverine and Coastal,” “Management and Policy,” and “Seismic.” Like water, all of the so many different ideas and flavors began flowing together.
I “laid an egg” (intentionally) by stating that 40% of the ships at sea are transporting fossil fuel, so the most direct way of accomplishing the stated goal would be to use less fossil fuel.
One of the virtues of OCEANOISE is that while it includes many academics, it also includes people in ocean policy, marine conservation, and ocean industries. So a lot of work gets done – not just through the presentations, key notes, and poster sessions, but also through the long lunches and social events that orbit around the many discussions stimulated by the programming.
When Barrack Obama was elected in 2008, and seated in 2009, he appointed Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Department of Interior (DOI). This brought an end to eight years of the DOI being run at the convenience of the extraction industries.
While taking this Earth Day to punctuate our appreciation for the our entire planet may seem a stingy expression of gratitude for Mother Earth that sustains all life, it is a great day to take a pause and honor those people who have dedicated their lives to honor Her – every day.
Aside from the continuation of our dependence on fossil fuel, the “Macondo Deepwater Horizon” blowout was probably the worst fossil-fueled environmental disaster ever.
Taking a day to celebrate those who have dedicated their lives to supporting our blue planet.
We have not yet seen how the current administration has synthesized any of the EIS comments we submitted this year, but given their proclivity to pushing the envelope to see what they can get away with, my suspicions are that they will ignore all public input and just see what we’ll do about it.
By way of this semantic legerdemain they would open up the floodgates for extractive and construction industries to run roughshod over their operation areas without regulatory oversight or legal consequences.
A whole raft of regulations were signed into law after a litany of environmental disasters pissed the public off to the point that we were done giving industry free license to destroy our living habitat.