Greenpeace Oil Writers Arrested

When I first read about the Greenpeace protest against offshore drilling that took place yesterday, I was heartened. It’s great to see people engaging in protest against the offshore drilling, and I thought that the irony of taking spilled oil arriving on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico and using it to paint an anti-drilling message on a BP ship in a Louisiana port was clever.

But then, I wondered, What’s going to happen to that oil that’s been smeared on the BP ship? It’s going to washed off, with detergents that are made from oil, and then, one way or another, the oil and detergent are going to drain back into Louisiana waters. It’s just a wee bit of oil, I know, but the symbolism in a protest is important.

The thing that occurs to me is that protests in reaction to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill need to be more reflective than the Greenpeace was. It would be easy for us to adopt a traditional protest pose, and go through the motions of what we’ve learned that a protest should look like, but to do so would be missing the ethical complexity of the situation.

First of all, we need to think carefully about just what we’re protesting. Is it just this one particular oil spill? That doesn’t make much sense, given how common oil spills are.

I think that a better target for protest would be offshore drilling in general – against the category. The problem with protests like the Greenpeace action yesterday is that they’re NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) affairs. Note that the Greenpeace protester only demanded no offshore drilling in the Arctic – a weird demand when the big problem right now is a spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Is Greenpeace okay with offshore drilling off the coast of Florida? How about New Jersey? Why should the Arctic be protected, while other areas are abandoned?

The reaction of Greenpeace to the arrest of 7 activists is ethically troubling to me as well. Greenpeace demanded that its activists not be charged with any crime – even though they committed a crime.

“Charging these activists with felonies is a disproportionate response to the peaceful protest that took place today at Port Fourchon. It is outrageous that prosecutors would confront peaceful protestors with such a heavy hand while not a single BP executive has been charged for the devastation they have wrought on the Gulf of Mexico and the people and animals that depend on it. Charge BP, not Greenpeace activists,” wrote the Executive Director of Greenpeace. The thing is that it isn’t outrageous that prosecutors should criminally charge the Greenpeace protesters. They broke the law, and knew that they were breaking the law. Part of responsible civil disobedience is the willingness to pay the consequences of a principled violation of the law. Trying to weasel out of the law weakens the protest, and the system of law upon which free protest depends. Perhaps BP officials should be arrested, if they have broken laws. However, that’s a separate question. No just system of law allows some people to be free from punishment just because other people have not yet been charged with crimes.

My biggest problem with the Greenpeace protest, however, is that it misses the most important target of outrage: Ourselves.

We all use oil – a lot of it. It’s almost impossible to live without using things that are made from petroleum. In fact, we Americans use so much oil that offshore drilling could all be stopped if each one of us would seriously work to reduce the amount of oil-derived products we use. The money that we pay for oil stuff encourages offshore drilling. It’s easy to blame BP, and Transocean, and the government, but we share a great deal of responsibility.

Angry about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill? You should be. Want to do something about it? Look in the mirror. Examine your life, and see where you can make changes to use less oil.