ThinkProgress reports that Don Abrams of OilSpillVolunteers.com has compiled a list of nearly 8000 volunteers, many with significant expertise in oil spills, hazmat, and the like. BP hasn’t contacted any of them.
Of course there are many experts available and only so many slots in the organization. Cooks and broth time. But there’s a bigger issue on gatekeeping, which also shows up in the Businessweek article reporting 35,000 ideas submitted to the BP oil spill web site, combed over by 43 engineers, resulting in 4 ideas in testing. What’s the principle for deciding what gets a look? I can imagine it’s a standard cost-benefit analysis, where the risk of untested technology and the cost of trying to use it in the context of the already allocated resources is high, and therefore the apparent benefit will come out low. That would be typical, reasonable, just what one expects from a middle-management directed approach.
One wonders along with some commentators if other gatekeeping strategies might result in broader access. For instance, what if the first screen was potential harm, rather than proven/unproven or cost/benefit. If there was little potential for harm, then perhaps folks outside BP or the government could have a go, to save a beach, or a reef, or a wetland, or some birds.
I come to this odd thing. Here we have a potential century disaster, and the public appears to be largely excluded from dealing with it. Instead we have BP, with a history of doing things on the cheap, apparently leading to this disaster playing gatekeeper. The Coast Guard is forming its own panel. That might help, but it may suffer from the same cautions and reasonableness.
It’s not that the dichotomy is between cool reasonableness and wild creative hysteria. It is a question of different forms of cool reasonableness plus the motivation to put an intervention in play. And here is the odd thing.
The Second Amendment has to do with militia, security, and arms. This is usually discussed these days in terms of gun control. But let’s drift laterally a bit–with the oil spill, we are facing a huge security threat. It is an attack on property and livelihoods, even, albeit an environmental one unleashed by a corporation and government regulators. So are the volunteers who would take up technology interventions protected from federal infringement of their right to bear “arms”, if here those “arms” are technologies that would protect their beaches, fishing grounds, wetlands, power station intakes? That is, is a federal government attempt to pre-empt technology used by individuals unconstitutional in this setting? If so, this would appear to extend to EPA restrictions on a precautionary principle, just as gun control legislation has problems this way. Citizens, communities, and states would then be free to use whatever technology they could.
Just a thought as we consider how to triage research and technology ideas that would address a disaster of this magnitude.