11 Lives
The oil will have stopped gushing into the Gulf. The shoreline and the estuaries and the beaches will have been scrubbed clean by man and nature. BP and Transocean will have resumed business as usual. But the original wound will never heal. This is the story of what's been lost.
The pelicans are damned. They are damned in that they are doomed — doomed, many of them, to wear viscous brown cowls of oil until they die. They are damned as individual creatures struggling to survive and reproduce, and they are damned as a species, their habitats befouled and destroyed. From television screens, from Internet slide shows and the pages of magazines, they look at us, their round eyes peering out of their grotesque vestments, until we can't look at them. Their dignity is both utterly violated and implacably intact. Entirely mute, they still manage to say, You did this. You did this. You did this.
