Year after oil spill, Gulf seafood rebounds

Presidential tasting tours credited

President Obama is doing stomach stimulus this week as he eats his way across the Midwest, but exactly a year ago he had more riding on the presidential palate as he ate his way across the Gulf of Mexico coast, trying to revive the region’s tourism and seafood industries one shrimp po’ boy at a time.

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion killed 11 people, and the resulting spill belched nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the bountiful Gulf waters over late spring and early summer 2010 as the Macondo well resisted efforts to plug it, leaving a slick that threatened beaches from Florida to Louisiana.

The slick disappeared faster than just about anyone predicted — the result of what scientists say was shockingly fast-acting bacteria and the use of chemical dispersants — but not before it canceled vacations, ruined seafood meals and left people out of work coastwide.

Now, a year later, the vacationers are back in force, and the local seafood industry is steadily reviving, but the national markets are still down as former customers found new suppliers outside the Gulf.

“It’s not really, and it never has been, an issue of contamination; it’s been an issue of perception. And that perception is something that, at least here locally, we’re gaining some ground on, but nationally, we’re not,” said Joe Jewell, deputy director of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources' Office of Marine Fisheries.

“We do have safe seafood. It is well-tested. All tests indicate it is good and will continue to be good. We want national markets to know they can enjoy safe Gulf seafood,” he said.

Officials are still surveying commercial fishing operations to tally the total monetary losses to an industry that was worth $660 million a year before the spill, but the known numbers are stark. Mississippi’s crab catch, for example, was down 35 percent in 2010, the shrimp haul was off 60 percent and oysters were down by a whopping 85 percent.

Avery Bates, vice president of the Organized Seafood Association of Alabama, said his state had 39 oyster-processing shops before the spill. At the height of the spill, they were down to four, and are now only at seven.

Oysters have been hit hard again this year because the Mississippi floods poured fresh water into the Gulf, changing the water’s salinity and ruining important oyster areas.

Outside of that, state officials say, Gulf seafood continues to be the best-tested product in the world and that no case of contamination in the food supply has been reported since the spill.

The spill marked a rough time for Mr. Obama as the oil well initially resisted all efforts at plugging. Polls at the time showed voters increasingly disenchanted with his handling of the matter — so much so that they rated it worse than that of President George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina.

Seeking to counter that, the president demanded that BP PLC set up a compensation fund to pay those whose livelihoods had been hurt. Mr. Obama also made repeated visits to meet with cleanup officials and local business owners.

At nearly every stop, he managed to be photographed eating seafood.

In early June, he ate crawfish and boiled shrimp at Camardelle’s Seafood in Grand Isle, La., while meeting with small-business owners. Later in June, he slurped lemon-lime ices with Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour at Cyndi’s Sno De-Lites in Gulfport, and stopped for crawfish tails and crab claws at Tacky Jack’s in Orange Beach, Ala. On a final trip in late August to New Orleans, he ate a shrimp po’ boy and turkey-alligator gumbo.

The high point was in mid-August, when he took his family on a mini-vacation to Panama City Beach, Fla., eating fish tacos at Lime’s Bayside Bar, taking his daughters for mint chocolate chip ice cream at Bruster’s and swimming in the Gulf.

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Here's to a long life for Occupy Wall Street

Here's to a long life for Occupy Wall Street

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Forgiveness is impossible. This was the thought of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, and he has a good point.

There are some things that we say are easy to forgive. But, Derrida argues, they don't actually need forgiving. I forget to reply to an email, and my friend remarks: "Oh, it didn't really matter anyway." It's not that he forgave me. He'd forgotten about the email too.

Then, there are other things we say are hard to forgive, and we admire those who appear to be able to forgive nonetheless. The case of Rais Bhuiyan, who was shot by Mark Stroman, is a case in point. Bhuiyan says he forgave Stroman, and asked the Texas authorities not to execute him for his crime. But did Bhuiyan really forgive?

He writes of how Stroman was ignorant and had a terrible upbringing. He had seen signs that Stroman was now a changed man. So, it does not seem that Bhuiyan forgave his assailant. Rather, he came to understand him. He saw the crime from the perpetrator's point of view. There were reasons for the wrongdoing. That lets Stroman off the hook. It's not really forgiveness.

CS Lewis wrote: "Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive." Which is again to imply that those who think they have offered forgiveness really find they don't have anything to forgive after all.

The ancient philosophers appear to have thought that forgiveness is something of a pseudo-subject, too. They hardly touched on it, for all that they dwelt on all manner of other moral concerns. It is not on any list of virtues.

Take Aristotle. He wrote about pardoning people, but only when they are not responsible. "There is pardon," he says, "whenever someone does a wrong action because of conditions of a sort that overstrain human nature, and that no one would endure." When nature has not been overstrained, justice must meet wrongdoing. Forgiveness doesn't come into it.

All this calls into question a theory in evolutionary psychology. Here, the argument is that forgiveness is essential to our evolutionary success.

It's because we forgive one another that we are able to live in large groups. People in collectives like cities are bound to offend one another all the time, the theory goes. It's because we are so ready to forgive and continue to co-operate that we don't, as a rule, destroy ourselves in spirals of retribution.

But I'm not sure that's right. Evolutionary doctrine itself undermines our capacity to forgive. Rather, it teaches that we learn it's in our own self-interest to co-operate. We put up with others because, at some deep level, we know we serve ourselves in so doing. That's not forgiveness.

Surely, you might be thinking, Christianity teaches forgiveness, a forgiveness that is real. But once more, that can be challenged. Take the parable of the prodigal son. You may half remember it as the paradigmatic tale of forgiveness, the father forgiving the son in spite of his profligacy. But read it again. Forgiveness is not once mentioned. The son does not ask for it. The father does not offer it. Rather, when the son returns, the father spontaneously throws a party.

It is as if the biblical story shares Derrida's analysis. Forgiveness is impossible. Instead, what it reveals is another virtue in operation, the love the father has for his son. It is wildly extravagant. It gratuitously throws a party. The past is not forgiven. It is simply sidestepped.

Is this what God's "forgiveness" is like too?

Quote:
We Can't Forgive, We Can Only Pretend To

published August 2, 2011

Evolutionary doctrine teaches us that it's in our own self-interest to co-operate and to put up with others.

by Mark Vernon

Forgiveness is impossible. This was the thought of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, and he has a good point.

There are some things that we say are easy to forgive. But, Derrida argues, they don't actually need forgiving. I forget to reply to an email, and my friend remarks: "Oh, it didn't really matter anyway." It's not that he forgave me. He'd forgotten about the email too.

Then, there are other things we say are hard to forgive, and we admire those who appear to be able to forgive nonetheless. The case of Rais Bhuiyan, who was shot by Mark Stroman, is a case in point. Bhuiyan says he forgave Stroman, and asked the Texas authorities not to execute him for his crime. But did Bhuiyan really forgive?

He writes of how Stroman was ignorant and had a terrible upbringing. He had seen signs that Stroman was now a changed man. So, it does not seem that Bhuiyan forgave his assailant. Rather, he came to understand him. He saw the crime from the perpetrator's point of view. There were reasons for the wrongdoing. That lets Stroman off the hook. It's not really forgiveness.

CS Lewis wrote: "Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive." Which is again to imply that those who think they have offered forgiveness really find they don't have anything to forgive after all.

The ancient philosophers appear to have thought that forgiveness is something of a pseudo-subject, too. They hardly touched on it, for all that they dwelt on all manner of other moral concerns. It is not on any list of virtues.

Take Aristotle. He wrote about pardoning people, but only when they are not responsible. "There is pardon," he says, "whenever someone does a wrong action because of conditions of a sort that overstrain human nature, and that no one would endure." When nature has not been overstrained, justice must meet wrongdoing. Forgiveness doesn't come into it.

All this calls into question a theory in evolutionary psychology. Here, the argument is that forgiveness is essential to our evolutionary success.

It's because we forgive one another that we are able to live in large groups. People in collectives like cities are bound to offend one another all the time, the theory goes. It's because we are so ready to forgive and continue to co-operate that we don't, as a rule, destroy ourselves in spirals of retribution.

But I'm not sure that's right. Evolutionary doctrine itself undermines our capacity to forgive. Rather, it teaches that we learn it's in our own self-interest to co-operate. We put up with others because, at some deep level, we know we serve ourselves in so doing. That's not forgiveness.

Surely, you might be thinking, Christianity teaches forgiveness, a forgiveness that is real. But once more, that can be challenged. Take the parable of the prodigal son. You may half remember it as the paradigmatic tale of forgiveness, the father forgiving the son in spite of his profligacy. But read it again. Forgiveness is not once mentioned. The son does not ask for it. The father does not offer it. Rather, when the son returns, the father spontaneously throws a party.

It is as if the biblical story shares Derrida's analysis. Forgiveness is impossible. Instead, what it reveals is another virtue in operation, the love the father has for his son. It is wildly extravagant. It gratuitously throws a party. The past is not forgiven. It is simply sidestepped.

Is this what God's "forgiveness" is like too?