Last week I was at the US Naval Academy for a leadership conference.\u00a0 There were many speakers and panels that talked about the topic of the Leadership in Crisis.\u00a0 On one of the panels was Jonathan Messinger who was in charge of the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.\u00a0 An oil tanker spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska and affected around 1,300 miles of shoreline.\u00a0 I found hearing Messinger\u2019s side of the story very insightful.<\/p>\n
Messinger\u2019s 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).\u00a0 He seemed to think the whole clean up effort was pointless legal action forced on the company by radical environmentalists.\u00a0 At one point he even said that the ecosystem would have recovered on its own if it was just let alone.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
I was surprised to hear him say that an ecosystem could recover from such a bad oil spill.\u00a0 It made me think of the saying \u201cdilution is not the solution to pollution.\u201d\u00a0 I think this idea is very relevant to issues of pollution in watersheds also.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week I was at the US Naval Academy for a leadership conference.\u00a0 There were many speakers and panels that talked about the topic of the Leadership in Crisis.\u00a0 On one of the panels was Jonathan Messinger who was in … Continue reading