The BP Oil Spill: An Outrage, or an Overblown Incident?

Morgan Goff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY-PikuXTYY

Question: In your opinion are environmental hazards something we should be concerned about on a daily basis?

1. I think that it's that important because ecological disasters can cause many problems in an environment. However, I think that the disasters are often overstated, and I don't think that change is needed. Large scale disasters are few and far between, and it would be much more costly to step up the standards of high-risk industries than to figure out how to properly clean up after ourselves. Also, by increasing the standards, a failure, while less likely, would have the potential to become a larger problem than it would otherwise be. I think that Luke is correct in that the information that we receive through the media is distorted, and it is difficult to get accurate even without the distortion.

2. The real issue here is the fact that it is still so difficult to get quantitative and accurate information on this subject.

3. I think that we need to make preventative moves so that things like this do not happen again, but if we were to do that, I don't think that there would be a need for such measures.

4. As a citizen of Provo living in a cloud of smog, I am concerned for my lungs. I am also concerned for all the fishes in the sea covered in oil.

5.   Well, as a public health major, I think environmental factors are very important.

6. To your question, I think YES we should be concerned with environmental concerns, especially since it's so easy for us to be distanced from environmental concerns because the effects of our actions (like the oil spill is indirectly related to our individual consumption of oil) happen so far from our actions.

7. I think we need to be concerned about it and something should be done about it...but I don't think we do think about it on a daily basis...in all honesty...

8. The problem with externalities like environmental hazards is that the individual effect is so minuscule that it's really difficult to get individual people to care enough to involve themselves. That said, just because something is difficult doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. The sorts of terrors we inflict on our environment are things that will come back to haunt us and our children for generations to come. And, as always, it's easier to prevent a problem now than to fix it once it's gone horribly wrong. So if we can show some real maturity and prevent disasters before they happen, we'll all be better off. And yes, that means that on a day to day basis, we should probably be making better decisions than we now are.

9.  YES, we should be concerned. Humans like to think they are above caring about the environment but we are very much an integral part of sustaining it. If the environment is overly damaged, we go down with it. Even if the hazards aren't near us (ha, as if we can escape them) they can still have devastating effects. BP oil spill: over 8000 dead wildlife including endangered species...mutated fish unsafe to eat, and nobody even truly knows the long term effects on the environment. Another example is over-fishing. To think that the oceans take up around 70% of the Earth's surface and we are running out of fish is incredible. Not to mention the effect that our own contamination is severely crippling marine ecosystems. (Have you heard of the Great Pacific Trash Patch?)
Local hazard examples: pollution & contamination of water. My mother grew up in Tucson in an area where the water was contaminated with TCE from industrial dumping and people are now discovering that this causes genetic issues, even cancer and such. (Shh, I'm telling you this for your project). As you know, I live in Tucson for school and I wouldn't say every day, but I do often wonder about the quality of the water that I am drinking. I could essentially be poisoning myself without even knowing it...but that could go for anybody considering that environmental hazards tend to be covered up.

10.  Reading the articles made me sad that people don't care for our home, Earth, anymore. The environment plays a huge role in our daily lives; it's time people started treating it better.

Personal Responses:

Were you aware that environmental tragedies of this magnitude still exist today? 

     Honestly, up until now, I had blithely assumed that government agencies and regulations took care of hazards, and that companies were sincerely doing all they could to minimize risks. It's interesting that I felt this way, even though I remember the BP oil spill; I just didn't realize that hazards were this prevalent even now.

In your opinion are environmental hazards something we should be concerned about on a daily basis?

     The key word here, for me, is "daily." I don't necessarily want to be thinking about possible contaminants in my produce every time I go to the grocery store, or the smog in the Provo air every time I go running. That train of thought would lead to paranoia, at least in my case. But I think it is something we, as consumers, would do well to be educated on, so we can at least identify hazards and perhaps participate in activism, even if those activities aren't necessarily a daily occurrence. 

Why should we care about something that happened over 30 years ago?

     Events often have long-ranging consequences. This is particularly the case with environmental hazards. The specific issue with these hazards is that they often change the makeup of environmental aspects (soil, water) or organisms themselves, which have self-perpetuating consequences (drastic pH shifts, DNA mutations).