Government Relations and Policy
Reports from the Gulf
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We Can’t Afford to Forget about This – The Tedx Oil Spill Expedition Begins
Sunday, June 13, 2010
We’re a country with a very serious case of attention deficit disorder. Michael Jackson’s dead and most people don’t much care anymore. Oil’s been shooting from the bowels of the Gulf at a rate of 5,000…12,000…19,000…40,000 barrels a day for 54 days, and somehow the number seems to keep growing as we figure out what’s happening a mile below sea level.
We can’t afford to forget about this. I can only hope that we haven’t already forgotten or no longer care.
Enter the TEDx Oil Spill Expedition, which I have been invited to be a part of. An offshoot of the wildly successful and influential speaker series TED, TEDx Oil Spill will get to the root of the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf, examining solutions for mitigating the spill and helping define an energy future for our country that doesn’t have oil at its center.
The team - Duncan, Kris, Danielle, Pinar, Nate, and I will spend the next week pushing the envelope, traveling the Gulf coast gathering the images, videos, thoughts and ideas that will be the Ritalin and behavioral therapy for our national ADD. We’ll be using whatever means necessary to give you a firsthand account of the spill and tell stories about how this spill has torn apart the cultural and ecological fabric of one of the most amazing (and biologically productive and culturally diverse and beautiful and powerfully strange) places on our planet. We’ll do it as best we can in real time, with all of the good and bad that comes with such an endeavor, and bring our learning’s to you.
What we know so far is this oil in the Gulf is more than an incident. It’s a really hard slap in the face that must wake us all up from a century of dependency on oil. Waiting for one person, whether that’s a scientist, a business leader or the President himself to lead the charge away from oil is not an option. It will take an ARMY of scientists, business leaders, the President and folks from all walks of life to lead the revolution, and TED is the perfect catalyst to move such an army. Read more about TED here.
As such, the TEDx Oil Spill Expedition will be gathering and assembling the nuts and bolts of a presentation to kick off the TEDx Oil Spill event to be held on June 28th, 2010 in Washington, DC. The images and videos and stories we gather will help us all in attendance to get our arms around the Deepwater Horizon disaster and help focus our attention on mitigating the existing damage and helping find ways to make sure none of us has to relive this.
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Tomorrow, braving the 95% humidity, the team meets at New Orleans International Airport, and will head down to Grand Isle, Louisiana, one of several epicenters in this disaster. We’ll make our way east by plane, flat bottom boat, pirogue, car and legs and, yes, we’ll burn oil in the process. Everyone’s got to shoulder a bit of the blame for this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, but hopefully through this expedition and through the TEDx we’ll begin to dig ourselves out of this hole we’ve found ourselves in. More to come…
- Darron
