Last week I was at the US Naval Academy for a leadership conference. There were many speakers and panels that talked about the topic of the Leadership in Crisis. On one of the panels was Jonathan Messinger who was in charge of the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. An oil tanker spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska and affected around 1,300 miles of shoreline. I found hearing Messinger’s side of the story very insightful.
Messinger’s came across very unapologetic for the spill during his talk (although at the end he did say it hurt him to see pristine nature destroyed). He seemed to think the whole clean up effort was pointless legal action forced on the company by radical environmentalists. At one point he even said that the ecosystem would have recovered on its own if it was just let alone. However, regardless of his person views on the need for the clean up he explained the great lengths that he went to to ensure they followed the legal actions required of the company.
I was surprised to hear him say that an ecosystem could recover from such a bad oil spill. It made me think of the saying “dilution is not the solution to pollution.” I think this idea is very relevant to issues of pollution in watersheds also. While the affects of the oil spill would eventually seem unapparent with the expansiveness of ocean, but with watersheds issues of point source pollution could have a huge impact.
Messinger also brought up the difficulty that they faced with the clean up and how the process of steaming the shoreline to get rid of the oil slick actually stripped the land of all nutrients, and how they had a very hard time finding appropriate fertilizer and spreading it along all 1,300 miles. The whole process of procuring helicopters, boats, and people to help clean up this remote area made me wonder if the clean up used up more natural resources than were restored through the clean up. The relationship between environmental impact and legal restoration interested me greatly, especially since I think these issues were exemplified well in such a major crisis but could be applied to smaller conflicts over water pollution.