By Christa Tinsley, Project Associate

Last week I dined on shrimp étouffée in southern Louisiana and fried flounder on the Alabama coast. I enjoyed a Mobile-style gumbo full of oysters and shrimp and caught blue crabs off of Perdido Bay. These seafood meals were bittersweet with the anticipation that the expansive oil spill contaminating the Gulf of Mexico would probably wipe out much of the varied wildlife that contributes to one of the most delicious and treasured regional cuisines in the nation.

The loss of things to fry on vacation is pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of this environmental disaster, but it illustrates how difficult it will be to truly quantify the impact that the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion will have on the southeastern United States. There are the immediate, tangible issues at the forefront of the news – a dying ecosystem, shriveling tourism and fishing/shrimping industries – but there are longer-term costs that will pile up for the next decade or more. Still, we can’t help our capitalist selves and we have to try to attach a figure to the disaster, even if that number is so gigantic we that we don’t understand it!

A Moody’s report last month detailed the effect that the oil spill would have on the Florida economy in the next year, pointing out that it would be more significantly damaged than neighboring states due to Florida’s heavy reliance on tourism dollars. And the impact wouldn’t just be worse in comparison to other coastal states – the oil spill will be worse than the recession’s effect on Florida. The state is still reeling from a foreclosure epidemic, 12% unemployment, a brutal state and local budget cycle, and is now heading into a nasty hurricane season and an even nastier primary campaign season as the first oil slicks seep toward its coastline and threaten to further gut the state’s property values, tax revenues, municipal services, and credit ratings.

The attention on great regional losses in income and wildlife has brought to light what our methods for obtaining energy really cost. A similar conversation started after April’s mining disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia. Of course, we know that both disasters probably could have been avoided to different degrees, but they highlighted the high, usually unseen costs of industry profit.  

A recent Gallup poll noted a shift in Americans’ attitudes toward environmental protection efforts as trumping the need for economic growth in light of the BP disaster. Economic development and environmental resource conservation have often been framed as opposing sides, but the supposed dichotomy is not that simple. However, in economically distressed areas – especially in the South – a hundred jobs at a coal plant is more easily and immediately quantifiable than mercury contamination and cardiovascular illnesses and how these realities could hinder future business development, community growth, productivity, and health care costs. Energy production is a labor multiplier, so it seems downright tacky to talk about keeping jobs from a town hit hard by unemployment, even if we are borrowing against ourselves or shirking basic caution and safety. And that energy produced helps all of us be more productive – from keeping our computers powered to shipping packages across the country in one day.

Economic growth isn’t the zero-sum game it’s been defined as for years. If the national recession has taught us anything, it’s not that there are winners and losers in development – it’s that some winners often end up being losers, and players who weren’t even in the game before may emerge as winners. Regions that focused on rapidly-growing but resource-intensive production often find as manufacturing dries up that their now-scarce water resources are a turn-off for potential firms, even those in service-providing sectors. Communities find that their industrial output – pollution – is hindering tourism growth and driving new residents away.

Chattanooga, Tennessee is a great example of a place that found conserving its natural beauty and nurturing its economic prosperity didn’t have to be mutually exclusive activities anymore. They’ve moved so far beyond their 1969 title as “America’s dirtiest city” that they can mention this former superlative on their CVB website! However, cleaning up a neglected riverfront and an extraordinary case of smog – not to mention a soiled reputation – was still less daunting than what coastal communities along the Gulf and Atlantic, and their respective states, are facing in their near and long terms.

As we tally the oil spill costs each day and for the next several years, I hope that people will begin to see the ambiguity in the environment vs. economics rivalry and see resource conservation as an important economic activity for every community, region, and state. This recent recession made clear that the days of widespread, extremely rapid (and sometimes mindless) growth may be behind us, but with better understandings of the costs and benefits of development, the sustainable balance of businesses and environment is becoming clearer.