Sometimes an intersection of possibilities comes along for teaching a lesson, and this one has dredged up a lot of painful memories for me.
There was a hearing today in the US Supreme Court about whether Exxon should have to pay punitive damages for the Valdez oil spill in 1989, nearly 20 years ago. I also happened to notice a story about the oil spill in a literature anthology we have at school. The kids read it and made lists of the environmental effects mentioned in the text:
- Beaches became tar black.
- Oil covered birds washed ashore.
- Sea otters licked their fur and died.
- Bald eagles lay paralyzed after diving into oily water.
- An official count of 36,468 birds died, officially, but that may be only 30% of the total number.
- Bears ate clams and seaweed poisoned with oil.
- Oil seeped more than 12 inches into beach sediments, and storm waves sent oil more than 50 feet above the high tide line.
- Oil spread more than 400 miles south of the orginal spill zone.
The human impacts are incalculable. Yet, the oil company argues that the punitive damage award of 2.5 billion dollars is excessive, and that all compensatory damage claims have been resolved. This is not the sentiment among Alaskans.
The kids were incensed. Many of the them didn’t know this ever happened, it was so long ago. And when I told them about the Supreme Court hearing and the position that Exxon is taking, they got pretty worked up. One of the other teachers suggested that we write letters to the Justices, and when I mentioned this to the students they were surprised: “We can do that?!”
Never mind blogging about it, they want to speak directly to the Court. I put together some web resources they can use for research, and I went to the library after school today to see if they had any videos I could use to let the kids see and hear what it was like. Surprisingly, nobody else has checked them out. Watching them at home this evening, they stirred up a lot of sad memories for me.
One of the fishermen in an interview pointed out that if any Alaskan, for example, shot a stellar sea lion, his vessel would be seized and he’d be jailed. But Exxon goes to court for 20 years and argues that they’ve already cleaned up their mess. Even still, oil lays just beneath the surface along hundreds of miles of rocky beach:
This pretty much expresses my point of view on what this is all about:
…it’s about more than an oil spill, the world’s largest oil corporation, and a small fishing community in Alaska. It’s about America’s failed legal system that inherently cannot dispense justice in the face of corporate globalization.
So I’ll be doing some persuasive writing instruction. A few of the kids wrote about it already, and I’m curious now to see if their writing becomes more critical after we work on this. We should have those letters to the Justices in the mail before the end of the quarter, next week.
7 Comments
Doug – They could put their letters on their blogs too. That way more people have a chance to learn about the situation and comment about it.
We’ll do that, yes, so everyone can see what they have to say.
Doug,
When your students finish their letters, we’d love to read them and comment. I am working with 4th graders who are very interested and concerned about the environmental and economic effects of oil spills. We just finished a big project to share our thoughts about winter shipping on the St. Lawrence River. Students learned about an accident back in 1976 that caused 300,000 gallons of crude oil to spill into the river. The effects are still visible today. The students feel that navigation is more difficult in the winter and could lead to a greater chance of another accident and spill. Their final video can be viewed at http://wssmith.edublogs.org/2008/03/02/students-work-to-save-the-river/
Wendy, thanks for your comment and the link to your project. My students began writing their letters today. I want to show them your project, and maybe they’ll begin to generalize their understanding of some of the problems we face with water pollution.
Thanks for that piece. I’m also a teacher, and I’m in Alaska. My law students have been going through the Supreme Court arguments with me. The esoteric arguments are a bit difficult to follow, but I have to say they were interesting. I thought it interesting that Exxon would raise the idea that the shipping industry is inherently dangerous because that’s the classic definition of a party who is found guilty under the strict liability theory of law, as opposed to the negligence theory. (Strict liability applies classically when no amount of care can prevent injuries to others or to their property. Negligence theory requires more: a showing of a duty of care, a showing of a breach of that duty, a showing of causation, and a showing of damages.)
I also thought the question asked by the Chief Justice (what else could a corporation do other than have a standard or policy?) was amazing. Later he answered it almost off-handedly when he said they could implement the policy. So having a rule against drinking on the tankers should have been implemented. Gee, no kidding.
I’d be interested in seeing your students’ letters. Both my law students and composition students could learn from them
Thanks.
Hi Russ,
We’re on spring break at the moment, and didn’t get the letters done beforehand, so it’s still a work in progress.
The kids are mostly focused on a couple of things. We all know that the person that makes the mess should clean it up, and the company that hires the person is just as responsible. Especially if they let him drive after they know he has a drinking problem. A schoolteacher, by the way, would have been dismissed after a single DUI conviction. The kids also have observed in the videos that Exxon’s “clean-up plan” was no plan at all, that they were slow to respond, and that they merely threw money at the problem, washing the oil back into the sea to make the beaches look clean on the surface. They are outraged at the number of animals that died, and at the human suffering this all caused.
As for the chief justice’s comments, the kids do not buy the idea that having rules is the same as enforcing them. They know the difference – being boundary pushers, themselves.
I’ll post their letters to their website as soon as they finish them.
I just found your site, if you are still teaching, can you imaging how much worse the Gulf spill is going to end up? How sad that we didn’t learn from that first tragic mistake. Thank you for teaching the children compassion among other things.
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