Just to make everyone's day a little bit
worse$1:
BP has good, if shocking, reason to want to kill these turtles. The Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle is on the Endangered Species Act list. Harming them is punishable by prison sentences and fines of up to $25,000 per violation – per turtle. But rather than allow rescuers to collect injured turtles from the burn boxes before the containment fires are lit, BP is choosing to deliberately burn the animals alive, thus incinerating the damning evidence.
Blair Witherington, a research scientist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, who has been part of the sea turtle rescue mission observed the destruction going on in the sargassum waters. ‘Ordinarily, the sargassum is a nice, golden colour,’ he said. ‘You shake it, and all kinds of life comes out: shrimp, crabs, worms, sea slugs. The place is really just bursting with life. It's the base of the food chain.’ But now those areas are dying or already dead. ‘We'll see flying fish, and they'll land in this stuff and just get stuck.’ The sea jellies and snails that drift in these currents that form the major food sources for turtles have been almost totally exterminated. ‘These animals drift into the oil lines and it's like flies on fly paper,’ Witherington said. ‘As far as I can tell, that whole fauna is just completely wiped out. Most of the Gulf of Mexico is a desert. Nothing out there to live on. It's all concentrated in these oases.’
Destroying the planet used to be the stuff of scary movies and second-rate science fiction novels, something that might happen in the future, maybe, someday. So we ate our popcorn and alphabetized our battered collection of paperbacks, and continued to believe it was all still safely in the future, at arm’s length, a few accidents here and there distressing, but always with the faith that we’d recover.
But we’ve run out of the future, and it’s here. Now.
The Gulf of Mexico is dead.......
Y'know, I actually think I'm about to throw up from dwelling on this too much.