Gainesville.com: Oil will spoil the best of Florida

 

By Nathan Crabbe
Editorial Page editor
Published: Sunday, July 27, 2014 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, July 25, 2014 at 2:03 p.m.
 
Growing up in Ohio, I liked visiting the beaches of Florida but didn’t realize that the state offered so much more as far as the water was concerned.

I thought that boating meant throwing out a line and catching fish. I didn’t know that you could jump in the water and actually catch things with your own hands.

I was lucky to meet Colleen shortly after moving here and eventually marry her, for a lot of reasons. One nice perk is that she introduced me to the possibilities that a mask, snorkel and flippers provide.

For Colleen and her family, all born and raised in Florida, the month of July is book-ended with the two best times of the year for living in the state. The start of the scallop season falls around the beginning of the month, while the two-day recreational lobster season falls near the end of it.

It was incredible enough to float around the Gulf of Mexico and catch bags full of scallops for the first time. It was absolutely mind-blowing to dive down in the waters around the Florida Keys and grab spiny lobsters with my (thankfully gloved) hands.

This is all a really long way of saying that I can’t believe that the Obama administration is going to allow more oil drilling off the Florida coast.

The administration announced this month that it is reopening the Eastern Seaboard to offshore oil and gas exploration. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved seismic surveys using sonic cannons to locate deposits beneath the ocean floor.
 
You think it’s loud when your neighbor turns on the leaf blower early in the morning? Seismic surveys require the use of sound waves far louder than a jet engine, reverberating through the water every 10 seconds for weeks on end.

This is especially harmful for whales and dolphins, which depend on being able to hear the echoes of their calls to feed and communicate. An expert on fish ecology told The Associated Press that aquatic creatures could suffer permanent hearing damage from just one encounter with a high-energy signal.

But that’s not even the most important reason that allowing more oil drilling off the coast is a terrible idea. Perhaps the Obama administration needs to be reminded of that reason, but I don’t think most Floridians do.
 
Just four years ago this month, the BP oil spill was finally being capped after polluting the Gulf for 87 days. It took months longer to fully seal the well. About 5 million gallons of oil spilled.

In addition to the devastating effect on marine life, the spill also hammered Florida’s economy. I visited some of the beaches near Pensacola around that time, and the only tourists were a handful of them who came to gawk at workers scooping shovels of oil from the sand.

Arrogance is the only possible explanation for reopening the Eastern Seaboard to offshore oil drilling. While it might bring jobs in the oil industry, it certainly won’t help anyone who owes their livelihoods to tourism and fishing.

So when I visit the Keys this week, I’ll try to soak in such pleasures as snorkeling around the coral reef of Looe Key. The reefs are already in decline due to pollution and climate change, and this oil announcement shows we won’t stop until we finish the job of destroying them.
 
It’s just a shame that we wait to learn from our mistakes until it’s too late.
Special thanks to Richard Charter.

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