The Price of the Pelican

* By Derrick Z. Jackson The Boston Globe *

The subtitle of the BP oil spill is the Price of the Pelican. We will never fully know the cost of this spill to wildlife and wetlands, because it will continue its slow-motion rampage long after the lawyers have settled. Rowan Gould, the acting director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said the spill “in all likelihood will affect fish and wildlife resources in the Gulf and across the North American continent for years, if not decades to come.’’

We also will never fully know the spill’s cost because of its unprecedented depth of 5,000 feet below the water’s surface in the Gulf of Mexico, beyond the reach of sunlight and human beings. Rich Ambrose, the director of the environmental science and engineering program at UCLA, told the Associated Press that he fears the worst impacts will be to zooplankton and invertebrates that fuel the fisheries in the deep. Roger Helm, the head of Fish and Wildlife’s contaminants division, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “What we know about spills up to this point in time is almost entirely based on surface releases or near-surface releases. We don’t understand exactly how the oil is moving from depth up, whether it breaks into a zillion little particles or droplets or whether it comes up in a stream.’’

Read more at The Boston Globe.