Wednesday, April 22, was Earth Day, a decades-old celebration of Reduce-Reuse-Recycle marked by festivals devoted to composting and solar panels. It’s a perennial reminder of the small sacrifices we can make to reduce our personal impact on the environment.
But on the day after and for years to come, we continue to be faced with threats of environmental catastrophes, some of which are as much a consequence of decisions made by the people we elect as they are of our own actions.
Last year, the federal government approved seismic testing to explore for oil along much of the Atlantic coast, including Florida. The process uses an air gun to send out a loud blast toward the ocean floor every ten seconds. The affected stretch of coast goes from southern New Jersey to Palm Bay, Florida. The practice could be detrimental to marine life, especially dolphins and whales, which rely heavily on echolocation.
“It disrupts breeding, it disrupts communication between mothers and infants, and it’s shown that they can even kill these whales,” said Frank Jackalone, staff director for Sierra Club Florida.
Environmental activists thought they had won the battle over drilling in Florida’s waters when U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson announced an agreement that Florida’s coastline was off limits for oil drilling, but they later learned that the deal didn’t include seismic testing.
“If we’re not going to allow drilling off of Florida’s Atlantic coast, then why are we doing seismic testing and putting dolphins, whales and other marine mammals at risk?” Jackalone said. “The oil industry and their supporters are trying to get their foot in the door by doing seismic testing, showing that there’s some oil there, and then going back to Congress, maybe back to a new president, and saying ‘Okay, there’s oil there, let’s drill.”
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2015.