Gulf oil spill: Turtle deaths spark legal actions [Updated]

Appalled that turtles may be getting caught up in BP's burn-offs of surface oil in the gulf, two environmental groups have put the oil giant and U.S. Coast Guard on notice that they intend to file lawsuits.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Turtle Island Institute notified BP and the U.S. Coast Guard of their intent to sue this week.

[Update 4:44 p.m.: A suit was filed Wednesday in federal court in Louisiana, according to the Animal Legal Defense Fund, one of the plaintiffs in the legal action.]

“The spill was tragically timed for sea turtles that are nesting in the Gulf right now,” Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director for the center, said in a written statement. “Newly hatched sea turtles are swimming out to sea and finding themselves in a mucky, oily mess. News that BP has blocked efforts to rescue trapped sea turtles before they’re burned alive in controlled burns is unacceptable.” 

Reports of the possible burning of sea turtles were first published June 17 in the Los Angeles Times. The turtles congregate in Sargassum seaweed, which has been scooped up by vessels and burned, without wildlife officials being able to search for stranded turtles.

Mortality rates for the turtles have been high this year, although the link to the oil spill is not clear. Many appear to have drowned, possibly due to becoming ensnared in shrimp nets. Commercial fishing is the leading threat to endangered sea turtles.

Wildlife officials have announced an unprecedented plan to relocate turtle eggs from nests on beaches threatened by oil along the Gulf Coast, transplanting them to Florida's Atlantic Coast. The move is bound to stir controversy: Biologists already acknowledge that some turtle embryos would die in the procedure. The eggs will be moved late in their 60-day incubation cycle to minimize the risk of deaths, officials have said.

Turtles annually dig about 700 nests along the Florida panhandle, and another 80 in Alabama, according to wildlife officials. Most of the nests are dug by loggerhead turtles, but the endangered Kemp's Ridley turtle also lays eggs in the region. About 50,000 hatchlings are expected to emerge around mid-July, officials say.

-- Geoff Mohan

Photo: A dead turtle on an Alabama beach last month. Credit: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Redd Foxx]

Where will the money go? To the lawyers. It doesn't matter who wins.

[Paul Taylor Examiner]

The first decade of the 21st Century may be seen as the decade in which environmentalism peaked, and then failed from its own hubris and corruption. It has taken about a decade in a deluge of environmental proselytizing, marketing, hysterics and gratuitous lies to expose the greed and fear mongering of a movement that exists now as just another political special interest. Their shameful trade in scary eco-scenarios now falls on deaf ears in the public mind. Except for those for whom environmentalism is a practiced religion or commercial enterprise, eco-themes and incentives have been largely exhausted, and even caricatured in our popular culture.

Radical environmentalism can also be seen as a disorder, where the sanctimonious enviro-activist’s obsessive insistence that you should change your lifestyle toward eco-purity begins to impair their personal and professional relationships. The enduring negative impact of environmental activism is the politicization of your way of life.

As with other obsession and addiction disorders, therapies and counseling in the form of “12-Step” clinical programs may be helpful in moderating radical enviro-behaviors. Here are 12 behavioral modifications that may be productive steps in recovery from ,or avoidance of, radical environmentalism:
1. Avoid the tactic of fear mongering campaigns;
2. Stop giving to taxpayer-subsidized, nonprofit eco-groups and think tanks;
3. Critically view progressive (a.k.a, liberal) enviro operatives in the media;
4. Accept that there are legitimate skeptics in debates over scary eco-scenarios;
5. Stop substituting personal compassion where science is required in environmental issues;
6. Stop assuming that another costly government regulation will fix every environmental problem;
7. Resist socialist initiatives claiming environmental justice and social justice;
8. Ignore the eco-claimed moral equivalence between human life and wildlife;
9. Reduce your associations with the union, bureaucratic, leftist and eco-terrorist political enablers of radical environmentalism;
10. Insist upon economic cost-benefit analyses in all environmental regulations;
11. Don’t accept that any government regulation can dictate any miraculous scientific breakthrough;
12. Accept that 40 years of local, state and federal environmental regulations have embedded cost increases in all of our goods, services and activities. And, understand that most of our real environmental problems are solved, or are under active management.

[Marco]

More attention needs to paid to the people who are becoming sick, and are at risk of dieing do to the level of VOC's and benzene in the atmosphere.

[cproteus]

Each day it seems the tales of horror surrounding this calamity continue to increase into a deafening crescendo of atrociousness that threatens to render our ability to even absorb such information ineffective as our brains seek to dampen the impact in an attempt at mental self preservation. As for myself, I am torn between my need to know, a desire to understand the incomprehensible, abject rage and this overwhelming urge to run and hide from the sheer horror. We as humans are not the only sentient beings on this planet, and yet we affect the lives of every living thing contained herein with our behavior, both responsible and reckless.

The thought of sea turtles being burned alive is simply horrifying. That there is still conversation enabling our denial about the impact of this on wildlife is apalling to me. Yes, there was red tide and fish kills in the Gulf, but any assertion that the changes in wildlife aren't attributable to the gusher are nonsense. The fact is, there is much we aren't being told. If turtles are the collateral damage in the burn offs, then dolphins surely are also caught in the booms when the oil is set ablaze. These animals must surface to breathe, and as they do, they inhale oil, dispersant and flames. There is no way to survive. It is a ghastly death.

We aren't talking about inert things here. These are animals capable of complex thought; they rear their young and live socially. They modify their behavior to suit their surroundings, and surely they are trying to survive this. We as humans must act responsibly to minimize the casualties in our effort to clean up this mess. I am incensed by quotes which do little more than shrug off the impact of our oafish attempts to help on the very wildlife we are trying to help. We are adding insult to injury by terrorizing and then willfully allowing the death of these animals whom we have corralled along with our ever increasing pool of filth out in the open sea.

While anyone will agree that the oil can't just be left to spread, the simple fact is that it is spreading, continues to spread, and will continue to spread. It is gushing up unchecked from the seafloor at an alarming volume. So at this point, killing off animals in a sad attempt to staunch a tide of oil with booms and burn offs is as foolhardy as suggestions of simply clamping a steel plate to the top of the BOP are. If we are to burn off the oil, we must first attempt to rescue and rehab the animals in the area.

All this haste is accomplishing nothing, and the reports of the impact of it serve little other purpose but to obfuscate the true issues here. The administration of dispersant must stop. It has only served to obscure the true amount of oil leaked, and makes the cleanup dauntingly impossible as it is practically nebulizing the toxic globules into the water column. We need more disclosure about the teratogenic effects of these millions of gallons of Corexit which will now infiltrate the aquifer in Florida and less on the number of claims filed by fisherman. The media are just as culpable in this as they give air time to ten year olds and their engineer dads who are positing 'solutions' to the gusher, and yet aren't reporting the actual impact of the oil on beaches, reefs and wildlife. Jimmy Carter suggested that we all learn to live with lower energy needs 30 years ago, and yet like spoiled children we continue to consume, blinders firmly ensconced while we pretend to be seeking enlightenment. It is time to stop the charade and remove the façade, we and our ilk are destroying the Earth, and with it ourselves.

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