You Are Here: Disease as Performance: Beyond 9/11

“The sea is the universal sewer.”

-- Jacques Cousteau 1910-97: Testimony before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 28 January 1971

Can catastrophes and disasters be measured? I suppose they can be quantified statistically, but can they be described in language? Certainly, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis are so blindingly awesome as to present a horrifying sublimity that defies representation. Words fail and images pale.

But what of those disasters of our own doing: like Chernynobyl, Bophal, and the current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (what will we call it?).

Chernyobyl was a level 7 Event on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), the worst nuclear power plant accident in history -- the only accident to ever achieve this rating. The meltdown began on April 26, 1986, and quickly subjected 600,000 people to high exposure radiation.

The Bhopal tragedy has to do with a Union Carbide pesticide plant that spewed lethal methyl isocyanate into the atmosphere, resulting in the exposure of over 500,000 people. Estimates vary on the death toll. A mixture of poisonous gases flooded the city of Bhopal, causing great panic as people woke up with a burning sensation in their lungs. Thousands died immediately from the effects of the gas and many were trampled in the panic. The official immediate death toll was 2,259 and the government of Madhya Pradesh has confirmed a total of 3,787 deaths related to the gas release. Other government agencies estimate 15,000 deaths. Others estimate that 8,000 died within the first weeks and that another 8,000 have since died from gas-related diseases. Some 25 years after the gas leak, 390 tons of toxic chemicals abandoned at the UCIL plant continue to leak and pollute the groundwater in the region and affect thousands of Bhopal residents who depend on it.

And what has seen us through our wonton pollution of the biosphere? Why nature itself. Writing in the april, 2010 National Geographic, Barbara Kingsolver notes that, “Water is the gold standard of biological currency. Unlike petroleum, water will always be with us. Our trust in Earth’s infinite generosity was half right, as every raindrop will run to the ocean, and the ocean will rise into the firmament. And half wrong, because we are not important to water. It’s the other way around”(49).

This notion that the human species’ continuance of a parasitic rather than symbiotic relationship with mother earth has a shelf life was long a concern of American philosopher and natural science writer, Loren Eiseley. In his introduction to Marston Bates’, The Forest and the Sea (1960), he forecasts what we have now come to 50 years later: “Man has lived within nature until now, and taken her for granted. He has lived with nature like an unquestioning child. This is no longer enough. Man must now face the prospect of destroying nature and, in turn, being destroyed.”

The wanton spew of oil and unholy mix of petroleum and dispersant should give we Yoopers great pause in so cavalierly consenting to the degradation of the Yellow Dog watershed by Rio Tinto. Phillippe Cousteau Jr.s images and descriptions of the toxic brew beg the question of how much havoc nature can withstand before it turns our worst B-movie science fiction films into today’s reality show. Ironically, Bates’ work appeared in the heyday of just these kinds of movies, as well as Rachel Carson’s bestseller, Silent Spring (1962), which predicted the consequences of using toxic chemicals to alter the rhythm of nature. Bates sees humankind’s disregard for the importance of renewable natural resources as a breach of reciprocity between ourselves and the environment that sustains us: “It looks as though, as a part of nature, we have become a disease of nature – perhaps a fatal disease. And when the host dies, so does the pathogen”(247).

Technology has outstripped us. As greed has displaced caution in our need for more, so too have we rejected our higher calling as stewarts rather than plunderers of the environment. It is as if the drill has punched a whole in the Godhead, and no one can save us. Hubris defines us. In, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), C. J. Jung wrote: “It seems to me that the high mountains, the rivers, lakes, trees, flowers, and animals far better exemplify the essence of God than men with their meanness, vanity, mendacity, and abhorrent egotism”(45). By separating ourselves from nature we forsake the divine. We betray our best selves. And we neglect the idea of a covenant between our children and the future. Bates’ warning has been unheeded: “In defying nature, in destroying nature, in building an arrogantly selfish, man-centered, artificial world, I do not see how man can gain peace or freedom or joy”(255).

New York Times’ Science reporter, Carl Zimmer reports

that “Researchers studying the migration of bar-tailed godwits surgically implanted nine of the birds with battery-powered satellite transmitter, and found that the birds flew nonstop for distances of up to 7,100 miles from Alaska to their winter grounds in the South Pacific”(NYT 5/25/10).