McGill history professors Jason Opal, Thomas Jundt, and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert spoke at a public forum on Wednesday to address last April’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The aim, according to Opal, was to tackle “the legal, cultural and political dimensions of deep-water drilling in and near American waters and relate it to the American sphere.”

The speakers took a historical, rather than strictly environmental, approach to the subject. The idea for the forum, Studnicki-Gizbert said, began by discussing how the Deepwater Horizon disaster could be a turning point in the environmental and political consciousness of the United Sates.

“We said, ‘If we did some history on this, we could look at how environmental crises feed into environmental consciousness, environmental politics, and in particular issues of regulation,'” he said.

History Students Association VP Internal Marni Isaacson coordinated the forum and reached out to the professors.

“They were all very enthusiastic about coming together with the McGill community to both share their insight on the topic and hear what the public had to say,” she said.

The forum, though long after the initial oil well blowout, took place just 10 days after the U.S. government announced that the spill was officially over.  

The forum and discussion were  pertinent to the summer-long fiasco, and allowed academics, students, and the public to reflect on, as Opal said, “what we find to be most troubling, what we find to be most compelling, and above all perhaps where we are now and where we are going to head in terms of environmental disasters and the political response to them.”

On April 20, a fire erupted early in the morning on the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon.  The failure of a “blowout preventer” resulted in a massive explosion, the death of eleven workers, and the release of a continuous stream of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Each professor approached the disaster differently. Opal, who studies early American history, compared aspects of the disaster to the 19th century American frontier.  

“British Petroleum had a reputation as ‘cowboys.’ The terminology of the frontier suffused this disaster and is everywhere if you look carefully,” he said. “A frontier, or horizon, relates to or describes a specific relation of peoples to the environment and the people living there.”

The notion of untouched tracts of wilderness, Opal said, gave people the sense that anything they conquered would be theirs, and the frontier was the future. Now, he said, we see the consequences of similar attitudes regarding oil, and “a sense of being impotent in the face of crisis.”

Studnicki-Gizbert, on the other hand, who researches mineral and resource extraction in Latin America and the involvement of Canadian mining companies in these activities, discussed the spill in the context of other environmental disasters. He linked the spill to similar ones in the last century, like the spills of the Exxon Valdez or the Newtown Creek in Brooklyn.  

“It was a highly mediagenic event, because of the kind of historical resonances with other disasters and other events,” he said. “We inherently relate images of today’s crises to those for which we already have an understanding. This in turn dictates our reactions to current disasters.”

Jundt, an environmental historian, took the most straightforward approach to the disaster.

“In the case of the BP spill, it speaks quite loudly in terms of being representative of issues that characterize 20th century United States history,” he said. “It reflects a long-standing tension between protecting the environment and promoting the economy.”

Jundt discussed the issue of responsibility, and where the blame should lie. While all of the presenters agreed there was no clear-cut answer, Jundt explored the complex relationship between excessive corporate power and governmental involvement.  

“The U.S. government, through tax exemptions and lackadaisical egulation, has helped big companies get a foothold in this deep-water drilling,” he said.

Over five months after the enviromental disaster took place, McGill faculty and students were able to analize the issue from a historical perspective rather than the traditional environmental view, by relating and comparing the oil spill to previous events of the same nature.

Anna Bock

David Suzuki, the famed Canadian author and environmentalist, was welcomed by the McGill Bookstore last Tuesday. With the release of his newest book The Legacy: An Elder’s Vision for our Sustainable Future, the author addressed an eager McGill audience in a full Pollack Hall, presenting what he referred to as “a lifetime of thought distilled into a one-hour lecture.”

“It’s his legacy project, and it’s probably one of his final projects,” said Anna Stein, events administrator of the McGill Bookstore. “He is getting older and he is recognizing that and so it’s his big push to pass it on to the youth.”

To set the right mood, Suzuki began his lecture by taking the audience on an imaginary journey to four billion years ago, when the Earth was unsuitable for life. He stressed that the human race today has a large ecological footprint, due to the vast amount of resources needed to sustain an exponentially growing population, as well as our increased appetite for “stuff,” which has led to an ever increasing consumer culture.

“We have become cut off from the world that keeps us alive,” Suzuki said. “We forget that the word economics comes from the same group word as the word ecology … which means home.”

This way of thinking, Suzuki said, has led to value economy over ecology, an unsustainable idea in a world constrained by the laws of nature.

“We depend for our very survival on ecosystem services, but economists are so smart they figure we don’t need that,” he said. “They’re not even in the economic equation. They refer to them as an externality.”

Suzuki argued that the 2008 economic recession was a wasted opportunity to change the direction of the economy. Instead, trillions of dollars were injected back into the system that led to the recession in the first place.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result,” said Suzuki.

As the night proceeded, Suzuki moved on to climate change and the federal government’s inaction on the issue.

Stephen Harper’s government, Suzuki said, has decided to focus on the economy, and has failed to act on climate change. He used the example of Sweden, a country that has managed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 8 per cent below 1990 levels and at the same time achieve an economic growth of 44 per cent over the same period of time, to demonstrate that the two targets are not mutually exclusive.

“Our prime minister for more than four years has said there’s no way we are going to act on climate change […] because it will ruin the economy,” Suzuki said, “How dare you tell us that? It’s time to put the ecology back into the economics.”

As the talk progressed, Suzuki said that the exponential growth of the human population, coupled with the ever-present desire for growth in a fixed biosphere, is leading humanity on a “suicidal path.”

“The only two systems that think they can grow forever are cancer cells and economists,” he said, adding a little humour to his lecture.

Suzuki, 74, also took the lecture as an opportunity to reflect on his legacy.

“We’ve gone off on this weird tangent to think that stuff is what makes us happy, [but] the most important things in life have to do with people and the things that we share and do together,” he said.

“At this stage in my life, whatever governments, corporations do or do not do will have very little impact on my life,” he continued. “But what corporations and governments and society does or does not do will reverberate through the entire life of our children and grandchildren.”

After the talk, a question-and-answer period followed. Befitting Suzuki’s desire to pass on his knowledge, a 12-year-old boy asked the final question.

“It’s amazing to see he’s doing this decades after and still going strong, and it’s an inspiration more than anything, that you can’t let anything let you down,” said Ana Vadeanu, a U3 Environment student who attended the talk.

“We’ve partied as if there’s no tomorrow, and we’ve forgotten to think about future generations,” Suzuki said. “Well, the party is over, it’s time to silver up, and clean up our mess and work towards a future that we can imagine into being. We’ve done it in the past, we can do it in the future, all it takes is the vision and the will to do it.”

The Engineering Undergraduate Society Council banned the Quebec Public Interest Research Group from using its resources for up to one year at their meeting last Tuesday.

The ban will prevent QPIRG from booking table space in any engineering building on campus.

The ruling followed last week’s incident between members of QPIRG and the QPIRG Opt-Out Campaign, a campus group that encourages undergraduates to opt-out of paying QPIRG’s $3.75-per-semester fee. According to the QPIRG Opt-Out campaign, QPIRG supporters allegedly attempted to prevent Opt-Out Campaign members from distributing their fliers, which resulted in Opt-Out members calling McGill Security.

But Rae Dooley, a member of the QPIRG Board of Directors, said the situation wasn’t enitrely one-sided. Members of QPIRG alleged that Jess Wieser, leader of the Opt-Out Campaign grabbed Maddie Ritts a QPIRG board member.

“We weren’t the only people being confrontational in that environment,” Dooley said. “Our students could have just as much called security.”

Allan Cyril, vice president internal of the EUS, said that although QPIRG could have also acted in formal avenues at the time of the incident, they did not.

“QPIRG didn’t call security and didn’t make a complaint to us at the time,” he said.

The EUS Council responded by passing the ban last Wednesday, citing concerns about how the incident reflects on their ability to manage table bookings in Engineering buildings.

“We have to show we are responsibly administering [our resources], or there’s a risk we might lose those privileges in the future,” Cyril said.

Dooley lamented that QPIRG was banned because of last week’s event but said that “[QPIRG is] in an open dialogue with EUS and we are interested in working with them, reaching out to more Engineering students, and hopefully over the next year we will gain that ability back.”

QPIRG and the EUS met on September 27 to discuss scheduling a moderated discussion between QPIRG and the Opt-Out Campaign. However, QPIRG requested that the EUS wait at least a week before holding the session in order  to allow tempers to cool. The EUS has also considered bringing in an outside mediator.

The proposed session between QPIRG and the Opt-Out Campaign would facilitate discussion on the proper handling of issues between conflicting interest groups, especially in the context of using EUS facilities.

 “We are trying to speak to QPIRG Opt-Out,” Dooley said. “We are trying to make sure events like that don’t happen in the future.”

Dooley also expressed concern regarding how the incident is being “sensationalized.” She said QPIRG is trying to move on and that their “major concerns are running QPIRG right now and challenging the entire opt-out system.”

According to its website, QPIRG is an organization that “conducts research, education, and action on environmental and social justice issues at McGill University and in the Montreal community.” According to a press release, QPIRG Opt-Out argues that QPIRG has “grossly violated their mandate, funding organizations whose basic principles are opposed to those of McGill students” and therefore informs students how to opt out of the organization.