Book Review: "Not One Drop"

Book Review: Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, by Riki Ott, White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008, pp. 327. ISBN, 978-1-933392-58-5.

On March 24, 1989, the single-hulled tanker “Exxon Valdez” ran aground on Alaska’s Bligh Reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The fully loaded ship bore fifty-three million gallons of crude oil that was transshipped via the Trans-Alaska or “Alyeska” pipeline from that state’s North Slope to the port city of Valez. Between thirty-eight and eleven million gallons flooded into the once pristine setting giving rise to the most damaging oil spill in US history. What ensued was a badly botched symbolic “cleanup” in which 6,722 workers subsequently filed claims for respiratory illnesses (6,000 of whom died while their cases churned through the judiciary system) and an Olympian public relations and legal campaign aimed at limiting corporate liability, meaningful government oversight and citizen involvement.

A stone’s throw away in the Copper River Delta, living near the fishing village of Cordova, fisherma’m Riki Ott and hundreds of commercial fishers and their families awaited a collision with the “inevitable.” In fact, earlier that same evening, Ott had spoken via teleconference to gathered members of Valdez’s Oil Action Committee, saying: “Given the high frequency of tankers into Port Valdez, the increasing age and size of that tanker fleet, and the inability to quickly contain and clean up an oil spill in open water of Alaska, fishermen feel that we are playing a game of Russian roulette. When, not if, ‘The Big One’ does occur and much or all of the income from a fishing season is lost, compensation for processors, support industries, and local communities will be difficult if not impossible to obtain. . .” (p. 38)

‘Destiny’ is a big word to throw about, but destiny somehow suits Ott’s home of choice, her oft-repeated prescient warning, chosen occupation and prior Masters and doctoral degrees in marine pollution. Fred Ott, her father, had been among legendary conservationist Aldo Leopold’s last students. A life long birder, Ott senior was aghast at the effects of the neurotoxin DDT on disappearing songbirds. In fact he had once placed a trembling dying robin in his daughter’s cupped hands. Watching as the fierce green fire went, the future Dr. Ott wanted to know how to make the world safe for robins (xviiii), and subsequently, it would turn out, herring, salmon, otter, orca, eagles, and a plethora of near neighbors. As though cementing matters, her father also gave her a copy of Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring, setting in motion her trajectory as a publicly-minded marine scientist and ecological warrior. Last but not least, the young Ott also watched as her father, together with a coalition that included the fledging Natural Resourced Defense Council, successfully sued the State of Wisconsin to outright ban the use of such dangerous chemicals as DDT.

Destiny is also a term that suits Ida Tarbell, the Riki Ott of her time. Born in 1857, Tarbell, together with other writers like Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair, launched what under Progressivism would be dubbed “investigative journalism.” Tarbell is perhaps best known for her 1904 book, The History of the Standard Oil Company, an exhaustive treatise on the effects of John D. Rockefeller’s ruthless tactics in the Pennsylvania oil fields. Trained in biology, Ida Tarbell was the only woman who graduated from Allegheny College’s 1880 class. A subsequent teacher, editor, biographer and historian, Tarbell exhaustively researched, eloquently wrote, and unflinchingly exposed the same oligopolistic forces that had once put her father out-of-business. Her serialized expose and subsequent book helped provoke public sentiment again Standard Oil that became codified in the US government’s May 1911 Anti-Trust Act. Within six months of the act’s passage, David looked on satisfied as Goliath was dissolved into thirty discrete companies.

Don’t think for a moment that Tarbell’s prior example was lost on either citizen Ott, nor on the recently merged giant, ExxonMobil, for that matter, which posted net profits of $40.6 billion for 2007. We learn through Ott’s riveting expose that her phone was repeatedly tapped, that while attempting to speak at an Exxon shareholder’s meeting she was thrown into a Texas jail, and that the “Wackenhut” private investigative firm had been hired by Alyeska to shadow her, other whistleblowers, and, as it turns out, to set up California Congressman George Miller on a trumped up indictment. Unfortunately for the perpetrators, they got caught. Luckily, Congressional investigations turned up ample evidence of wrong doing, and, in this instance, levied convictions and hefty fines.

In Not One Drop, Ott has written a deliciously rich and complex book, told through her eyes and those members of the Cordova community that she loves. In it you follow children and their parents coming to terms with bankruptcy, community economic collapse, marriages blowing apart, suicides, blockades of the Port of Valdez by irate fishermen and women, and democracy breaking out in the face of oligopoly, a fractured legal system and myriad captured public agencies masquerading as government. As a whodunit alone, Not One Drop reads like fiction masquerading as non-fiction. One is struck at the countless instances in which you couldn’t make up a more incredulous nor compelling story.

First there is the heartbreaking tale of ecological stressors, of collapsed keystone herring and salmon fisheries, and of utterly silent beaches reminiscent of Carson’s haunting book title. In the wake of the tanker’s grounding, four feet of crude oil floated atop parts of the once pristine waters of Prince William Sound. The controversial use by Exxon, State and Federal governments (including the Coast Guard) and Alyeska of chemical “dispersants” on the spill added yet more deadly chemicals to an already unsavory mix.

An incoming storm further complicated matters, turning the stricken tanker like a weathervane and releasing yet more indigestible oil. Among surrounding trees alone, winds bore the heavy, toxic and persistent crude oil as high as forty feet high. Most adjacent life forms received something resembling a suffocating death sentence. Oiled invertebrates, fish, ducks, shorebirds, otters, and a plethora of proximal and migratory species became ensnared within a rapidly expanding blot on the waters and land. Nor was that all.

Geographer Kenneth Hewitt makes a useful distinction between catastrophe and calamity. Catastrophe occurs when a volcano like Mount Saint Helens suddenly erupts sending mountains of volcanic ash into the atmosphere and triggering massive magma flows and land slides. Calamities, on the other hand, are largely the product of human agency gone awry, of “rational” decisions made that place the entire planet—humans included—in harm’s way. Writing in Acts of God, environmental historian Ted Steinberg observes that by divorcing natural calamity from their social, ecological and political context, we’ve tended to “. . . overemphasize the natural factors at play while diminishing the human, social and economic forces central to these phenomenon. . . . Seen as freak events cut off from people’s everyday interactions with the environment, [such events] are positioned outside the moral compass of our culture. . .” instead of being the products of lengthy decision chains intended to externalize, to the greatest extent possible, economic, social and ecological costs.

Exxon’s and Alyeska’s decision makers placed the Cordovan’s and yet smaller affected native subsistence enclaves directly in harms way. As Ott points out, despite Exxon’s verbal assurances to “make [the Cordovans] whole again,” the fact is that “disaster traumas” of this sort are stored within human memory with no time tag other than being eternally “present.”

Those near the spill developed something resembling unending post traumatic stress disorder. Extending and self-compounding the trauma was Exxon’s protracted legal battle over its shirked liability. Unresolved litigation extended the spill’s cascading after-effects, reopening a wound that, like a scab, could never quite heal itself. As sociologist Steve Picou has documented, natural disasters tended to pull people together while human-made calamities of this sort tore communities apart. No wonder Picou identified Cordova as a classic “corrosive community,” inwardly polarized by intense infighting over issues. His advice: “Drawing together to create . . . positive outcomes will help people heal” (176).

Not One Drop chronicles the cumulative aftereffects of the spill and its legacy, together with Ott’s own personal healing journey that came to include, among other gifts, the writing of this book. This legacy is perhaps best embodied in native carver Mike Weber’s commissioned “Shame Pole,” nine feet of yellow cedar that Ott observed, spoke volumes:

“At the top, the upside down head of ExxonMobil’s retired CEO Lee Raymond spewed the Death Wave down the top third of the pole. Exxon’s unfulfilled promise, “We will make you whole,” floated on the black oil. The slick was littered with dead wildlife and red dollar signs from the divisive cleanup, painted in the carver’s own blood. The middle of the pole spoke of lingering harm to the Sound with sick and “disappeared” herring in ghostly outline, and lingering harm to people with boat foreclosures and families that no longer fished together—or at all. Below this, the scale of justice tipped in Exxon’s favor, weighed down with time and money to show injustice for all, especially those who died without compensation. A ring of people with linked arms were carved around the pole’s base to illustrate our community’s long journey of reconnection and healing. The forms had holes for hearts—a play on Exxon’s promise to make us “whole.” [The carver] said,

Exxon “put a hole in our hearts and they’ve taken part of our soul as well” (249).

Ott observes that there are profound parallels between Cordova’s disaster and the looming calamity of global climate change. In a sense, the spill and its aftereffects are a chilling dress rehearsal for our continuing reliance on highly toxic, persistent and bioaccumulative fossil fuels. Add in the poisonous effects of atmospheric pollution together with the entirely plausible argument that we’ve reached the stage of peak oil—when all of the “cheaply” available accessible oil has been identified—and you’re at the threshold of a major looming global energy transition.

Ott continues: “Despite this ugly picture, oil companies and their industrial alliances are still pressing to wrest the last drops of oil from shelves deep offshore and from shales and sands under mountain and forest. It is past time to get off oil. Yet the people’s movement for a sustainable world has run smack into an entrenched Corporate—State block that is loath to begin a transition to clean fuels, even ones well within reach of our technology” (254)

Within a closing section, fisherma’m Ott’s and Ida Tarbell’s voices compellingly blend in an intergenerational call to revisits American Civics, Ott arguing that “. . .the evolution of large corporations [like ExxonMobil] from short-lived, single-purpose entities, chartered for the common good, into conglomerates that dictate drafting of law and policy to support one and only one purpose: [profitability]” . . . is over (255). She points out how the 14th Amendment that was intended to protect post-war civil rights among Black Americans and due process was, through persistence, pressed into service on behalf of erstwhile corporate sovereignty. In effect, she argues that natural citizen rights have been usurped by increasingly intrusive corporate challengers. And arguing for the creation of a Twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution, Ott unambiguously calls for “the separation of corporation and state.” (262)

How is such a monumental move going to be accomplished? Through reestablishing meaningful relationships. “If [, as Ott argues,] people don’t network with each other, they don’t get involved in their communities. They don’t participate in the democratic process in its most elemental form: community. If you’re networking, you’re familiar with local problems and solutions. And the local process mirrors the regional, national [and global] process” (262)

Echoing former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s recent arguments, we’ve got to begin separating “supercapitalism” from democracy. It’s really quite simple: “We have to get off oil, because it’s killing us and the planet. And we have to fix the U.S. legal system so corporations can’t keep polluting for profit” (263). Then and only then could we begin to “. . . turn the Exxon Valdez oil spill into a civil rights movement!”

There is much to recommend in this highly readable and easily accessible story. In effect, Ott uses the blot on our land, waters, air and within our hearts and souls to unmask the “dream” that has come to be misconstrued as everyday US politics.

The fact is, as she well demonstrates, there is a healing path home. If, as Plato once admonished, “Love” itself is foundational to politics, and if the term that best defines ecology is “respect,” then we could immediately begin navigating from these moorings instead of fueling additional cynicism, fear and separation that appear to be the province of supercapitalism.

Sometimes great inspiration derives from small communities struggling against great odds. Ott has written an impressively compelling story about individuals banding together to overcome betrayal—or worse—while preserving what is precious to them. Communities must become the armature about which to reconstitute a vibrant renewable civic and spiritual order. Brava to citizen-fisherma’m-scientist Ott for having brought us on such an odyssey! Now it’s up to the rest of us to begin acting as though love, respect and community truly matter.

Book Review: Riki Ott, Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008, pp. 327. ISBN, 978-1-933392-58-5.

--also available--

Riki Ott, Sound Truth & Corporate Myth$: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Cordova, AK: Dragonfly Sisters, 2005, pp. 562, ISBN 0-9645-2266-7.

Riki Ott, Artist’s for Nature in Alaska’s Copper River Delta, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998.

Michael Black, Pacifica, CA