Environmental Defense: Our Oceans

About 100 miles off the coast of Texas, at the edge of the continental shelf, giant salt domes soar from the sand to form a dazzling underwater mountain range. These mountains, called banks, protect some of the healthiest coral ecosystems in the world and provide critical habitat for sea turtles, manta rays, whale sharks and all maner of ocean creatures. Three of them are protected by the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, which prevents oil and gas interestes from blasting through the coral and the fishing industry from exausting the local ecosystems.

Environment Texas joined with other local environmental organizations to call for an expansion to the sanctuary in the Spring of 2020.  Despite pushpack from the fishing industry and oil and gas, we will continue pushing for the largest possible expansion to this beautiful sanctuary to provide as much protection as possible to these beautiful ecosystems and the communites that depend on them.

From California’s Big Sur to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, our country is blessed with beautiful coasts and abundant ocean wildlife.

These are the beaches where families and friends come together, where kids experience what Walt Whitman called the “continual miracle” of the sea. These are the waters where dolphins and seals surf the waves, sea turtles patrol the reefs, and the last great whales migrate up and down our coasts. They remind us, as Rachel Carson did, that “in every curving beach, in every grain of sand, there is a story of the earth.”

In 1969, an oil platform blowout spilled tens of thousands of barrels of oil onto nearly 40 miles of coastline in Santa Barbara County, California.

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spreading to 1,300 miles of coastline.

In 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded, releasing more than 200 million gallons of oil that washed up on beaches from Louisiana to Florida and spread far into the Gulf of Mexico.

Exploring for new oil and gas deposits can also damage ocean wildlife. For example, whales and dolphins depend on their hearing to navigate and communicate. “Seismic testing” subjects these animals to loud booms every 10 seconds, 24 hours a day, for days or even weeks at a stretch.

In an age of remarkable advances in energy conservation and renewable energy technologies, at a time when global warming poses an existential threat to future generations, sacrificing our beaches and ocean wildlife is no longer, if it ever was, the price we must pay for progress. That’s not a world we have to live in anymore. Nor is it the future our children deserve.

That’s why, after the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, our national network urged President Obama to ban all new offshore drilling off America’s coast. In 2016, he did and we applauded him.

In January, the Trump administration lifted President Obama’s drilling ban and vowed to allow drilling in nearly all of America’s coastal waters—even in areas where oil companies have expressed zero interest.

Under the Trump administration’s January announcement, oil and gas exploration and drilling would be allowed off the entire Atlantic Seaboard, the entire Gulf of Mexico, the entire Pacific Coast, and Alaska’s Arctic Coast.

In other words, we’d allow drilling nearly everywhere, putting hundreds of our beaches and millions of animals in the ocean at risk for oil we can live without.

Faced with strong opposition from Gov. Rick Scott, the administration reversed course—although tentatively, and amid some confusion—on one state: Florida. The reversal left other coastal state governors, leaders and citizens wondering: If Florida’s beaches are too precious to risk for the sake of oil, why not ours?