Exxon Valdez Accident

On a calm, clear spring night in 1989, in Alaska's Prince William Sound, the bridge crew of the supertanker Exxon Valdez felt a strong thump, followed by a prolonged shuddering and loss of steerage way. Their ship had gone aground not violently, not in a way that immediately endangered the ship itself, but enough to rip open the underside of the tanker's single hull, spilling hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the sea.

Within hours, emergency response measures were underway to recover the spilled oil and (above all) to prevent it from spreading out to befoul adjacent shorelines. These measures, however, were too little and too late. By the next day, the Exxon Valdez would be in the world's headlines, the lead story in network newscasts.

By the next week, the circumstances of the accident would be the subject of angry headlines and official inquiries. The oil released would still be spreading, ultimately over tens of thousands of square miles of prime fishing grounds and along hundreds of miles of beautiful and environmentally delicate shoreline. A year later, the cleanup effort would still be underway. It was not clear, however, the real cleanup less by human action than by natural processes would take. Some biologists, the optimists, suggested that the oil would be effectively gone in another couple of years. Others doubted that Prince William Sound would really be clean again in this century (Egan, 1990).

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public concern about the Exxon Valdez spill and also our degree of knowledge about it. Researchers found the logistics of going to Prince William sound relatively simple and straightforward (flights, quarters, supplies, etc.), and the local people spoke English. Had the spill occured along a Third World coastline, access, and therefore public awareness and scientific knowledge, and therefore concern, would have been considerably less. Even had the spill occured, say, off the coast of Japan, it would have drawn far less attention. Japanese culture is certainly not lacking in appreciation of beauty, including the beauty of nature, but there is little organized environmental movement in Japan. On the other hand, had the accident occured off the coast of California closer to media centers, and on the beaches of an environmentallyminded and politically influential population the attention would surely have been even greater. Indeed, the first oil spill to attract widespread attention from the American public was the Santa Barbara offshore well blowout of 1969. All of this is simply to say that "environmental ethics" cannot be regarded abstractly, apart from other human concerns, and apart from the realities of p

Category: Science - E