Rhetoric 3371 Questions

Stupid human behavior and decisions seem to be at the core of so many of the problems created by technological advances. With the pipeline there were so many safeguards put into place but then not followed. There was the x-ray fraud during construction and later the deterioration of the entire system set up for handling possible tanker spills. There was the obviously poor decision made by the drunken captain to pilot the ship and also the decision of the harbor pilot to ignore the smell of alcohol on the captain’s breath. In “Nature Devastated” it says, “We are capable of the most elegant reasoning, the most astonishing technical wonders.” That may be true but are we capable of holding ourselves to the high level of morality and ethics required to go with it.

I think it is just obsurd and not acceptiable that the captain of the ship was completely drunk when the Valdez hit ground. Not only was he drunk then, but his blood alcohol content registered a .061 nine hours after the event occured! What makes me even more angry is he did not have to take responcibility for his actions as he got off with a miniscule drunken negligance change. Worster states in the passage that we as Americans tend to view are man made disasters as events that will eventually blow over. He compared Heroshima and the A-bomb to the oil spill, stating that Japan "came out of it alright" and so will the environment. I disagree with this ideology. more than 420 miles of ocean were contaminated with oil, along with over 1244 miles of shoresline. Needless to say thousands of animal species were affected and killed as a direct result. I believe that the ecological community is still feeling the effects of the oil spill today because many species directly affected have become endangered and on the verge of extinction. The big oil companies such as Exon and BP had an invincibility fable that eventually came and bit them in the butt. Do you feel as if we as consumers of oil and gas products still have this invincibility fable, meaning we think nothing bad is going to happen and we will always be able to depend on oil?

I often find myself amazed by natures ability to heal. The fact that a paper cut can disappear in a day, or the strange process of regrowth after a burn (it makes a crater, then you can watch the skin grow back in to the same thickness) before I get too gross with this I just think it's cool. The body heals from these "natural disasters" like the earth from an earthquake or wild fire. The body also recovers, or heals from man made disasters, alcohol, drugs etc, but does so on a limited scale. Complete recovery is harder, and it's not actual recovery, but usually through growth of new cells which have to be taught how to function as the old ones did.
The first thing that came to mind when I started reading this was to compare it to Sept. 11 because of the supposed preperation for an event to happen. Can you be truly prepared? How come in our high security travel environment can a liquid explosive make it onto a plane? Can you ever test and screen for every possible option?
A smart ship didn't make a smarter crew, or prevent a disaster... does technology make a more terror resistant country?

The spill of the Valdez shows that humans care more about money than the environment. Exxon continued to make billions of dollars from the pipeline and they were not about to stop transporting oil because of one large spill. It is interesting that oil companies are willing to sacrifice the innocence of nature for any price. To work in an industry like this, would you need to completely lose sight of ethics? Even the chairman of Exxon did not visit the scene of the oil spill until three weeks after the spill. He only visited it because of public criticism. Was he just careless to the fact that over 200 million barrels of oil spilled into the ocean killing millions of animals and plants, or was he more concerned with how he was going to compensate for the spilled barrels?

Worster's article is well thought. I think any kind of criticism of Ronald Reagan, Adam Smith, and all the other pin striped Ayn Rand reading robber barons should be a task we all put ourselves to very often. I wonder though if he is confounding freedom with whatever kind of options or liberties a capitalist sytem offers. Surely we don't want to say that the ability to buy, sell, and exploit within a marketplace policed by government thugs is freedom. If I did however think that freedom was such a thing, then I might be tempted to want the kind of external checks on hunting and sexual taboos that the Inupiat enforce upon themselves to eek out an existence in the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness. however, I want no such thing. This is the juncture, though where thought on the ideal fly one way and matters of practice fly the other. Practically, Worster's suggestions to keep eyes on multi-national corporate oil companies is right on. With the kind of economic and political system we have, matters of polution, poverty, and abuse are the downsides to production contingent on profits. This is the aim of the government as I see it for the system we have. It's there to keep tabs on one hulled oil tankers, and to make normative checks upon the myopic quest for cash.

It is really amazing how much the oil companies have gotten away with since the day they were formed. They along with GM and Firestone basically ruined public transportation through out america in effort to make people drive cars. They are making record profits at this moment in time when gas prices are nearly at the highest they have ever been. They spill hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil and are only told to do a half ass job of cleaning it up. The government and the oil company must go hand in hand because no other companies would be allowed to get away with what they have gotten away with. They tried to build the Alaskan pipeline and got sued and were stuck in the courts for a couple years, but once the government sensed a threat to our oil supply they immediately revoked all lawsuits against the company and the Alaskan pipeline project began almost immediately.

The Exxon Valdeez spill was terrible. But according to the Gross Domestic Product for that year the economy actually boosted from the spill, adding billions of dollars to the GDP for the necessary clean up. This is how we measure economic progress. That sucks.

It seems like everyone got off too easy. For such a tremendous environmental disaster, there should have been far greater consequences for everyone involved. It’s hard to believe that one person was talking about how “nature will recover.” It is obvious that no one was prepared for such a disaster. Maybe they thought that the environment wasn’t that big of a deal, who knows. It is impressive how far oil can travel (thousands of miles) from just one ship’s spill. It is hard to imagine the mess this left both out at sea and at shore. Oftentimes, everyone suffers a rude awakening because of an eye opener such as this. However, many times this eye opener fades away quickly, and some forget completely about it. For maybe a year or two, captains may have navigated more carefully and seriously, but did this eventually fade back into their normal lifestyles?

I agree with Stephanie. Sometimes we fear or blame technology, when the fact is that technology is only as good as the people using it. And no, we don't hold ourselves to high enough standards of morality and ethics. We blame others for design issues and level frivolous lawsuits, and we blame technology for malfunctioning, but rarely do we blame ourselves for misusing it.

I find this really similar to the energy crisis that we were talking about last week in class. When there was an energy crisis, people were really scared and worked up about it, then when it went away it was like people forgot about it. That is the impression I get in the article. The oil spill was something terrible that really opened the eyes to a lot of people. But like the article and others are stating, better times began to follow and a lot of people wanted to forget that it happened. They were just happy the economy didn’t fall and they demanded more and more oil once again. It’s like what is it going to take for us to truly learn our lesson?

Economics come first. This was made incredibly clear with the Alaska Pipeline. For years, the pipeline was fought by Congress and Court. Environmentalists had their way for a short time however. A major oil crisis led Congress to decide the American economy was more important. Enter Exxon Oil. With Alaska as a hotbed for oil extraction, there was a need for ocean-going oil tankers for transport. Though oil companies spent hundreds of millions on the pipeline itself, they still managed to cut corners and under man supply lines for the oil tankers. As made evident in the article, “sailors have been getting drunk since the time of the Phoenicians.” Honestly, hoards of men alone on a ship…what does one think will happen? There is no single person to blame for the incident—a major disaster was bound to happen with such great interests at stake. The greatest interest of all being profit. Profit drives recklessness. Recklessness in turn drives disaster.

"Greed had been widely viewed as one of the worst human vices." I think Worster pretty much sums it up right there. We as humans are full of greed. And we are mostly greedy with our convenience. Reading this piece reminded me of other situations such as when a child is kidnapped or a person you know gets into a bad car accident. Weird, I know, but just hear me out. In the first couple months of a tragedy (such as a kidnapping or a fatal car accident) the community has a kind of caution about life. Parents are now driving their kids to school before they go to work, adults and teens alike are buckling up before they turn on their ignitions, and so on. But pretty soon being cautious just takes up too much time. People soon forget about the disasters that happened and begin to go back to the life they had before. It's more convenient that way and we begin to feel comfortable again in our surroundings. We let our guard down, until something else happens to make us become cautious once again. It's a weird comparison, I know, but it's also 2am and that's how my brain is working right now. I feel as if that's is what we were doing when the oil spilled in Prince William Sound. We felt sorry for the animals and the beautiful shoreline. We quickly started to take action to help restore the beauty of that body of water, but it became too much work in the end. We began wanting more oil and spending less time cleaning up the mess the spill had caused. I just think it's horrible and we really do need to stop being selfish and start thinking about what we are doing to ourselves and our children's children. Because frankly, I don't think the future of our environment is looking too good...you start purchasing your gas masks and 1000 SPF sunscreen on Ebay now.

First off, how would you feel if you single handedly polluted 1,244 miles of shoreline, killed thousands of otters, ducks, loons, cormorants, golden and bald eagles, cost your employer $1 billion, and then lost your job? That is a pretty high price to pay for a couple drinks. The text said we as humans have unlimited freedom and unlimited power. How can we thrive with these attributes? How can ethics and our sky is the limit potential exist side by side? I agree with the text when it says we as consumers regularly assume that neither we nor our immediate friends and neighborhood will suffer from the destructive consequences of our unleashed desires. Nature will recover, as mentioned, but nature can become a lot less pleasing to be around for the thousand or so years until it does recover. That should be a consideration as to how we treat the world we live in.

While reading this i immediately thought of all the things i used to read about in my weekly reader when iw as akid or read about in national geographic. The destruction of our rainforests, the steady decline of potable drinking water, the issues of global warming. it seems to me that a big part of the human psyche in the course of what we do about these happenings is the ability to forget and move on and assume that it will be taken care of. I remember a simpson quote here homer says refering to something i can't remember, "see lisa these things just take care of them selves, like that rainforest thing that happened a few years back." The rainforest is still being destoryed at a ridiculous rate. but with the dmy all so important daily enterprises of seeking human acceptance in some form or another, these things eem distant and not fixable. Worster mentions the size of the population we live in. it is almost unimaginable. we are told to act a one and if every one did it we'd be fine. yet there is this feeling of forgive and forget and things will work out. WHAT IF THEY DON'T. WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO HELP. maybe the captain should have been held to the flames a little more. this tolerance for human folly leads to problems yet if i try to abandon it i feel so cruel. OH AND EVERY ONE SHOULD STOP HAVING BABYS NOW.

At one point in time, the enviromentalists had so much power that were able to halt a huge pipline from being built through the middle of pristine wildlife. Then, a basic human instict, hunger, drove us to accept the changes to make life easier and cheaper. I know for a fact that it has helped the Alaskan economy to have this pipeline. However, as we dream up bigger and better ideas, we have to cross certain barriers. The addicent caused by the Valdez was unimagineable, but also just an accident. Just as mother nature intends, life is unpredictable. I'm not trying to push aside my feelings or ignore problems, but its hard to not view events like these as a learning experience. Sure, it is easy to think about how it could happpen. I can't help but think, "So why aren't we dead yet?" We are versitle creatures, we will find a way to survive most things. I know we should be more careful, but as time goes on, we will learn about life more so we can make better choices.

It just blows my mind that Valdez thought that they were beyond the need of an emergency clean up crew. So much of the damage could have been contained to a smaller area. The oil spread for 400 miles and there was nothing being done!!! Are there not laws that require some sort of plan if a spill was to occur? I mean come on, everyone knows that humans are not flawless and an accident or two were bound to happen, I don’t believe that there are any acceptable excuses; Valdez should have been prepared to handle something of this magnitude. As if cutting across Alaska’s untouched land wasn’t hurtful enough to the pristine landscape, the coast had to be darkened by the thick viscous layer of oil.
I understand that the high relentless demand for oil by humans may have caused Valdez to lack in their emergency plans; it would be easy to get caught up in a rhythm that seemed flawless. But to completely veto the purchase of any emergency equipment and lack a plan entirely is beyond forgiveness.

"Man plans, God laughs." --Yiddish Proverb

Despite the best laid plans, the worst case scenario was an eye-opening experience for Exxon and for Alaksa. (Ok, they weren't the best; engineers had to change and adjust their plans throughout the construction.) The complacency and response over the spilled oil from Exxon Valdez reminded me of the morning America stood still as plane after plane crashed into unsuspecting targets on 9/11. Shocked & awed, we idly waited for those in charge to respond in a blaze of American glory. A human-made mistake passed off as an act of God—inevitable, though never anticipated. Or was it anticipated and never believed? When deregulation was in place and Exxon was faced with cost-reducing, profit-driving opportunities, did anyone speak up to say, “Hey—we put these safeguards in place for a reason. Are we sure it won't happen?” Instead, we found consolation in a sociopathic corporation that kept saying, “Don't worry, everything's fine.”

I like the opening statement made by a local Minneapolis music group:

“Compare the six days of the Book of Genesis to the four billion years of geologic time. On this scale, one day equals about 666 million years.
...
At one-fortieth of a second before midnight the industrial revolution began.
We are surrounded by people who think that what we have been doing for one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely.
They are considered normal, but they are stark raving mad.”
--Six Days to Madness, Cloud Cult, http://www.cloudcult.com, August 11, 2006

The whole Exxon-Valdez debacle is the perfect small scale example of how humans have come to deal with nature. So much time is spent assuring ourselves and others that everything will be ok. We do whatever we can to build a sense of optimism and security about our future. At Exxon, they wrote a 28-volume manual full of emergency procedures. Now, this was partly to appease environmentalists, but also a way of making people at the company feel better, more confident, about performing a potentially dangerous task. Their plans lulled them into a false sense of security, so that when disaster struck, the result was pure shock and confusion. As they organized the movement of oil, disaster had been considered, but obviously not taken seriously. It is this fact that seems most integral to the disaster - that no matter how much it may have been discussed, no one ACTUALLY expected anything bad to happen. It scares me to think that we could be getting ourselves into this same mess on a more global scale (see: global warming/oil dependency). The film we watched last week was a bit shocking because of its extreme pessimism, but maybe that's just because they are the ones actually starting to take our oil dependency seriously. It seems clear that we need to imagine the bad things happening or we'll be just as paralyzed by shock and confusion as they were at Prince William Sound.

The spill of the Valdez represents the reality behind a lack of interest or concern for the environment, and yet another instance of how the oil companies get away with literally murder. This also leeks into a concept from the movie on the pipeline, something that was mentioned in the film was an interview with a school teacher making 1,000 a month and comparing that to how the pipeline workers made at minimum 1,000 a week. That is disturbing to me because it shows that the money goes wherever the oil executives want it. Notice how teachers are paid minimally for such an important job in society yet someone doing pipeline work, makes 2, 3, 4 times the amount of a school teacher. It’s one of the issues with this country that never seems to get resolved, matching pay to the tasks at hand, or figure out a system for compensating people fairly for the work they do. This country definitely values its entrepreneurs, doctors and lawyers, but I don’t think it always does a good job of taking care of other noble professions.

The enviormental issue of the Alaska Pipeline is a continuous burden to the surrounding communities and could lead to more accidents of oil spills and leaks if it is not address. The Alaska Pipeline was built to provide the United States with a backup resource to an ongoing fight over oil in the Middle East reserves. In return, the Alaska Pipeline has provided oil, but has posed an environmental and social threat to the communities that live in Alaska. Alaska was known as a place of nature, but when the pipeline was put into place, it not only destroyed the environment surrounding the pipeline, its affects on societies has been detrimental as well. Is there a solution to our nation’s dependence on oil? Are we able to adapt to another lifestyle to counter our destruction of nature? The United State needs to find a more efficient, cleaner, and effective means of fuel to not only address the environment issue, but the social issue of preventing backward progress. The automobile certainty does not help this transformation.

Nature Devastated:

I had mixed feelings about this text. In general, mankind is the only species that can harness and shape its surroundings to a noticeable extent. While there are often repercussions to this, such as pollution or other destructive results, I believe that the benefits of new technologies mostly outweigh the bad. Also, we are not the only species that causes harm to nature. Beavers cut down trees to make dams for example. The reason they don’t cause noticeable harm to the environment is because their population is kept in check by predators. Unfortunately for nature, we are the dominant species and there are no real predators to keep our population under control. The only thing keeping us in check is disease and natural disasters. So I agree with the text when they believe that it is up to the human race to keep checks against environmental damage.

Our country is based one money and regulations. We make the most money off of disasters or hindrances. But, to please the public, we draw up 1,000 page documents describing every possible way to sue someone over coffee that is too hot. Ridiculousness surrounds us. No, we are ridiculousness.

The oil spill by the Exxon Valdez was a terrible disaster. Complaining about it after the fact is a terrible waste of time. Not learning from your mistakes is a terrible fault in character. The article by Worster was a little too emotional for me although I do understand that he was intending it to be that way. He writes about how awful the oil companies are how innocent the wildlife killed were and in the end he blames the whole thing on Adam Smith and human weaknesses. I would have to blame it all on a drunken ship captain. Now I know that he was working a lot of overtime etc. etc. but you have to take personal accountability for your actions. If I get loaded and drive my car through someone’s front door I am not going to blame it on the fact that beer companies advertisements make it so appealing I can’t help myself. When you are in charge of something with the ability to cause great harm if mishandled you damn well better be responsible and be compensated so. The oil companies aren’t the only ones to blame and neither is the captain. What happened was the result of failure on so many levels by all those involved from the CFO’s and CEO’s trimming labor costs a little too lean to the government agencies that should be checking on emergency cleanup readiness not doing so.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was a major blow to Alaska fishermen but the state itself made a lot of money on the disaster. People received dividend checks after all the money the state brought in. These people that were against the building of the pipeline in the first place were then getting paid after an environmental disaster. This was what they were in court about before the building of the pipeline. They were trying to show what kinds of environmental impact the pipeline could have. The oil companies were aware of such disasters as a spill but had all the cleaning up equipment hidden behind many other things. There was always the possibility but there was money issues and having a good cleanup system to go into place fast was not in the budget.

One thing that I liked about this article was when the author commented that rationalized greed equals “growth.” I see a pattern for justification that has been used for many irrecoverable projects. It is as if we know that what we are doing is wrong and perhaps potentially devastating, but we put that in the back of our minds and continue in our ways by creating euphemisms for our actions. Such “justifications” will eventually lead us to a brick wall. Moreover, I do not understand why it took Exxon so long to respond to the problem that they created. It was as if they intentionally let the oil spread out to a point where it was “too late” to do anything. This is disgusting. The more I learn in this class, the more I’m disgusted with this corrupt world.

The film and reading really made me think about how the Alaskan pipeline affected Alaska and how much we really are depended on oil. When I think of Alaska, I immediately think of oil pipelines. I felt the Alaskan pipeline project was the best thing economically to happen to Alaska. Money and making a profit surpass environmental concerns when individuals constructed the pipeline. This seems to happen with every new technology or invention. People are concerned with profit that they don’t even worry about the negative consequences it may have on the environment.