Shhh... Do you hear that? The silence is deafening. It's the sound of the mainstream media covering the one year anniversary of the BP oil disaster.
One year ago today, the largest oil spill in American history took place in the Gulf of Mexico. For four months, the nation's attention was focused on a geyser of oil coming up from the ocean floor. Then one day the oil stopped flowing and the well was capped.
I had the good fortune to meet some fantastic people during the BP oil spill. Working with Sierra Club and Environment America we flew up three victims from the Gulf Coast to tell their story to folks in Virginia. They were here the day the oil stopped flowing.
Chris Seaman, who owns a chain of restaurants along the Gulf Coast of Florida was in my car when the well was capped. He turned to me and told me how happy and worried he was at the same time.
He was happy because the oil had stopped flowing and the American public would come back to his beaches again. He was worried because he knew the media crews were leaving, and along with them the commitment to restoring the Gulf Coast that had just began to take hold across the country.
The worries that Chris had that day were well-founded. The media stopped covering the BP oil tragedy, most folks assumed the oil disappeared and politics as usual returned to Washington, DC. In the year that has passed since this unspeakable tragedy occurred off the Louisiana coast, the United States has not taken meaningful action to break our addiction to oil. |
