The impact on our children

Today as I tooled around on my computer, my four year old son (well he's almost five, next month) came into the room and I heard a sweet, innocent voice behind me ask,
"Mommy? Will the oil spill be cleaned up soon?"
This took me by surprise as I wasn't aware that he even knew much about the oil spill, or what oil even was. I checked the TV in the living room to see if he'd put it on a channel that might have had a news blip about it prior to his question, but nope, just good old Spongebob being yellow and porous on Nick Jr. Though, judging by the tropical sea floor location of Bikini Bottom, I suspect that ol' Spongebob might share our concern.
"No sweetie," I told him, "The oil spill won't be cleaned up soon."
"Will the oil spill be there forever?" he asked with a very concerned and slightly sad look on his face. I immediately thought of recent footage I saw taken from a pebbly shore of Prince William Sound, where the famous Exxon Valdez spill occured over twenty years ago, and in this footage you see someone dig only a few inches into the seemingly clean pebbles and pull out black, slick, smelly rocks before the water quickly fills the hole with a visible oily sheen floating on top. And the estimates of the amount of oil spilled there are just a fraction of what has come from the Deepwater Horizon well. (The Exxon spill is estimated at between 250,000 and 750,000 barrels while the Deepwater Horizon is at nearly 5,000,000 barrels) With a heavy heart, I answered my son's question as honestly as I could.
"No, it won't be there forever. But it will be there for the rest of my life. And probably yours too. They may get it looking clean on top, but the oil is still going to be in the sand and deep in the water for a long, long time. And the damage done to the wildlife may never recover. I'm sorry, sweetie."
"Oh," he said, as he dropped his head and moped back into the living room to resume his cartoon watching.

Literally just yesterday I was thinking how I'd give anything to know what my little boy thinks about when he isn't thinking about Super Mario or Transformers. I never thought in a million years that my child was thinking about the worst environmental disaster in history. I find that quite heartbreaking. And even more heartbreaking than his thoughts is my knowledge that he will live out his entire life never knowing the gulf, and quite possibly the entire ocean since we don't yet know the extent of impact this will have, in the way my generation and those before it knew the waters and the beaches.

Even if the beaches seemingly recover (aesthetically, anyway) what about the long-term effects on wildlife? The Gulf is home to one of the world's most endangered animals, the sperm whale, and thanks to the chemical dispersants allowing the oil plumes to sit much deeper than they would if left alone, these amazing aquatic mammals may very well perish. Whales and dolphins, whose lives I consider almost as valuable as humans, are facing enough challenges for survival thanks to humans hunting and polluting their waters. But now THIS on top of it? Thinking of my children growing up in a world where they can only be told stories of whales and dolphins and see their pictures in books, is enough to bring me to tears. In fact, I'm softly sobbing as I write this. I don't want to have to tell my children about the time a whale came so close to a boat I was on that I could reach out and touch the barnacles on its back, and know that they will never have an opportunity for close contact with one of these animals because they simply don't exist any more.

The world is a changed place since the day that rig exploded into flames, and I am deeply saddened that my children will never know the world as I knew it. I had plans this summer to take my kids to a beach on the Gulf coast for the first time and let them splash in the warm water and build sand castles and do whatever else four and two year olds do at the beach. I've never been to the Gulf either, despite having lived in Mississippi for the last six years, and I was really looking forward to it. Obviously, those plans were cancelled. They probably will be for the rest of our lives.