Earlier this week, my colleague Kelly DeVine (who consults for Reframe Collection, a program of the Tribeca Film Institute) wrote a powerful blog post that brings to light the terrible impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the fact that corporations continue to pollute our environment with impunity. Kelly gave me her permission to republish her post here.

The Tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico
by Kelly DeVine

Dead turtles are begining to wash up on the shores of Gulfport, Mississippi. Fisheries and the local economies in the gulf region dependent upon them brace for the worst - though no one really knows how bad that may be.

Carolyn Scott's TEXAS GOLD, portrait of Diane Wilson's battle against the petrochemical industry, is compelling and Diane's tenacity and principle are inspiring and admirable. It is too bad that so few lessons had been learned from her struggle to educate the industry that a healthy gulf is healthy for local economies. It has been reported that up 20% of the seafood in the US is harvested in these threatened waters. Damage done to the wetlands, in part to streamline access for the petrochemical industry, is implicated in the level of damage caused by hurricane Katrina, particularly to the coastal areas in Mississippi that had once enjoyed a substantial barrier of wetlands in Louisiana that would diminish the energy of hurricanes making landfall.

Perhaps that lesson fails to resonate because the corporations that drill into those waters are multinational giants with no longterm connection to the communities or countries. The Government Accountability Project assembled a list of troubling details emerging in the wake of the explosion here. Among the troubling details is the fact that a safety regulation that might have mitigated the damage resulting from a rig failure required by Norway and Brazil, two other nations with aggressive offshore drilling activities, was not required of BP in US waters. Regulation and regulatory agencies have been weakened over the decades since the creation of the EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other landmark laws and agencies enacted in the wake of the negligent oversight by industry. Regulation is cast by its opponents as "anti-business." Listening to news reporters speculate on the numbers of small businesses that may be disrupted or bankrupted as a result of the explosion along with the effects on businesses indirectly related, one has to wonder how regulation of risky activities can ever be anti-business.

This April we celebrated the 40th anniversary of Earth Day and recalled that it was a mammoth oil spill in 1969 spoiling the coast of Santa Barbara that had galvanized the public and the polititians into action. Will we emerge from this tragedy with lessons finally and well and truly learned?