Dead baby sea lions, oiled cormorants laboring to preen themselves, and sticky swaths of oil covering the rocky shores of North America's legendary pristine wilderness, were the images that invaded the world's consciousness via television after the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska on the night of March 24th, 1989. This spill, the largest in US history, dumped nearly 11 million gallons of Alaskan North Slope crude oil into the wild and ecologically rich waters of this spectacular corner of the Northeastern Pacific Ocean.
While the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (EVOS) galvanized the Pacific Northwest and the nation, it was hardly exceptional by global standards: EVOS ranked 40th in volume among large spills worldwide between 1967 and 1994. Major oil spills have occurred, and continue to be a real risk, all along the Pacific Coast, as oil is being shipped by sea from Alaska to Puget Sound in Washington State and being drilled for off the coast of California.
Black Gold. Texas Tea. The Beverly Hillbillies struck it rich because they were lucky enough to live on top of something. American society is addicted to the use of fossilized fuel. As long as we have this fossil-fuel thirst to quench, oil, like milk, will occasionally be spilt. Oil spills have occurred as long as humans have been moving the stuff around the globe, (through pipelines, off ships, tankers, trucks, and humans). As such, oil spills are inevitable as long as we live in a world where human error (a sleepy tanker pilot) and the fickle finger of fate (high seas, submerged rocks) cannot be controlled.
While the spilling of oil into nature by humans occurs vastly more often now than it has historically, it is important to bear in mind that oil is a natural product and it does occasionally seep out on its own. In places where this happens frequently, such as the submarine canyons off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, the organisms that live nearby have evolved, through many generations of natural selection and metabolic adaptations to living in an oil-rich environment.
The critical difference for the sea otters, seaweeds or mussels hit by the crude oil in Price William Sound in March of 1989 was that they didn't have the Santa Barbara passports -- or genes. Millions of gallons of crude oil arriving all at once was not something their ancestors had experienced for thousands of years, and so it took them by surprise. The sticky, toxic oil killed individual organisms outright by making them sick. It reduced their populations indirectly by interfering with their reproduction. And the spill interfered with the heat-trapping insulation of fur or feathers that otters and birds use to stay warm in cold high-latitude waters. EVOS was a massive perturbation of an ecosystem accustomed to the physical disturbances by the ocean but not to the extreme of the EVOS.
The oil was not the only insult to the environment of Prince William Sound. Exxon spent $2 billion cleaning up the spill in 1989 and 1990. However, much of this effort was focused only on cleaning the beaches by washing them with high-pressure heated seawater. This caused the death of many of the intertidal organisms that had survived the oil itself. Additionally, the sediments washed offshore by this procedure smothered the subtidal organisms that had not been affected by the initial oil spill. While there undoubtedly is some value in cleanup activities after oil spills, it will take careful research (virtually absent prior to the spill) to ensure that our cures for oil spills are not worse than the initial sickness.
As with many human diseases, an ounce of prevention in environmental crisis management is often worth a pound of cure. Many of the habitats and populations affected by the EVOS have started to recover while others are lagging behind. Despite all the money spent on cleanup, legal expenses, and research by Exxon, state, and federal governments, it is difficult to assess the real effects of the spill for many kinds of organism. For many species, there was no prior knowledge of population data; and therefore, it is difficult to say specifically how they were affected by the spill. While this paucity of prior data, critical in learning from the spill, is one of its greatest tragedies, efforts to restore Prince William Sound based on available data are ongoing.
Important for the aftermath of future spills is planning ahead for their inevitability despite our best regulatory and technological precautions. This means knowing enough about the basic ecological interactions and population dynamics of species to be able to gauge the environmental consequences of spills with some degree of accuracy. Only with quality basic research, will science be able to prevent the uncertainty that fuels tremendous waste of time and money in legal battles or dubious cleanup practices.
The 1990 Oil Pollution Act was written in the aftermath of the spill in Prince William Sound. It defines much more clearly the elements of, defenses to, and limits on legal liability of companies responsible for oil spills. The Act is designed to compensate the public for losses in natural and economic resources caused by an oil spill. Governments of states, tribes, or foreign governments must then use funds recovered under the act to restore, rehabilitate, replace or acquire the equivalent of resources that are harmed by the spill. The complete text of various provisions of the Oil Pollution Act makes interesting reading.
The mechanism of evolution (of traits such as oil tolerance) by natural selection is discussed on pages 110-120. The photograph on page vii is typical of the assemblages of rocky intertidal organisms on the shores of Prince William Sound, where EVOS occurred. The sources and effects of chemicals in the environment (including crude oil) are discussed on pages 346-351. A perspective on media coverage of EVOS is given on page 450, and a discussion of the general effects of pollution on organisms (including a photograph of oiled seabirds) occurs on pages 473-474. Finally, pages 536-546 contain an excellent discussion of the nature of the American oil resource, including its extraction from sensitive environments in Alaska and elsewhere in the Far North.
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