The Gulf of Mexico was adversely affected by the events of April 20, 2010 — the day the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, spilling unfathomable amounts of oil and gases into the water. However, innumerable questions remain, and the answers are not clear.

Panelists at Wednesday’s Building Bridges roundtable discuss the Gulf oil spill. The panel included scientists and media representatives, including New York Times reporter Justin Gillis. Photo by Frances Micklow

Instead, they’re blue.

“The water, to a marine biologist, is not just water-plus-salt. It’s alive,” Sylvia Earle, the National Geographic explorer-in-residence, said in her keynote lecture Tuesday.

Earle, referred to as the “U.S. Sturgeon General,” wanted to show how the future of mankind was intertwined with what humans do to the ocean.

“We’re a part of nature, not apart from nature,” she said. “What we do to nature affects ourselves. We’ve been disrupting the nature of nature.”

Offshore drilling is a contingent of this disruption, Earle said.

“I personally am in awe of the technology it takes to extract fossil fuels,” she said. “It’s stunning. What’s even more stunning is we don’t have the technology in place to deal with the problems that arise.”

Case in point: Deepwater Horizon.

Earle said she believes it’s not too late to reverse the damages and said the oil spill symposium held this week was essentially a stepping stone in this direction.

“Once you know, you can’t go back. You’re burdened with this knowledge,” she said. “If people don’t know, they can’t care. Thank you for what you’re doing.”

Building bridges

The symposium Wednesday featured scientists, media representatives, government and Gulf-area officials speaking on their challenges and advantages from

interaction with each other.

“We almost had to have our talking points in mind when we showed up to work,” said Monty Graham, an associate professor of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama and senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

Finding the balance between peer-reviewed data and the public’s need for information led to challenges when dealing with the media, members of the science panel agreed.

“There’s some journalists that call you and their story’s written before they talk to you, and they just want you to give the soundbite they’re looking for,” University marine sciences professor Samantha Joye said.

Gulf-area officials and industry personnel expressed their worry about news stories dealing with the people who live in the Gulf area.

“My No. 1 concern is that the great damage done to the human side is going to be forgotten in the long term,” LaDon Swann, director of the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, said.

Rex Caffey, professor of natural resource economics at Louisiana State University and director of the LSU Center for Natural Resource Economics and Policy, said images replayed in the media — such as the video of oil billowing from the broken well — led to negative consumer perception of the safety of Gulf seafood.

Caffey said this leads to potentially devastating economic affects for the commercial fishing industry.

“It’s very hard to compete with images like this. I think we should welcome a free and open press,” he said. “But there’s a cost to this image being out there four months in a row. Perception trumps reality.”

Buck Sutter, deputy fisheries director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association southeast region, cautioned everyone associated with the spill on how they presented information to the media.

“What we do, what we say, how we say it and how we communicate it have huge impacts on people who are the receiving end of that information,” he said.

Evidence of this was provided by Herb Malone, the executive director of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism.

His office learned that oil was expected to hit Alabama’s shoreline via a newspaper headline.

The oil didn’t come to the beach for two more months, costing the area six weeks of tourism dollars.

And what do media representatives have to say?

“If various reporters hadn’t covered this aggressively, I think we’d be sitting here today wondering how much oil was flowing into the Gulf of Mexico,” said Justin Gillis, the environmental science writer for The New York Times and a University alumnus. “My No. 1 problem in life is winning [scientists’] trust. Convincing them that I’m not an idiot who’s going to mangle what they say to me is the hardest problem I have.”

When it comes to the government, Gillis said in Wednesday’s roundtable discussion, it’s OK for officials to simply say, “I don’t know.”

Laura Folse, director of science and technology for British Petroleum’s Gulf Coast restoration effort, said as a scientist working for British Petroleum, the challenge was maintaining transparency while taking a backseat to other scientists.

“It never crossed my mind whether or not I needed to be spinning information for our shareholders,” she said. “What was on my mind was the search for the facts.”

Lessons learned from Deepwater Horizon

“We have got to figure out how we contribute to the solutions as scientists,” said Jim Porter, professor in the Odum School of Ecology, at Thursday’s white paper session. “If we don’t do that, we have failed not only the scientific method, but we have failed the people who trust us to inform them.”

Irv Mendelssohn, professor of oceanography at LSU, cautioned scientists from immediately releasing data to the media.

Instead, he said it was better to review the information for a day or two.

“I think it became very hard to convey to reporters … the nature of the scientific process, the stage that we’re at,” said Joe Montoya, a biology professor at Georgia Tech.

The failures of responding to the Deepwater Horison oil spill were in all sectors, said Ian MacDonald, a biological oceanography professor at Florida State University.

“I don’t think there’s some great single failure,” he said. “There’s some learning on the fly. I think we did a decent job of not getting beyond our facts, and the media did a pretty decent job of doing what we told them.”

Charles Hopkinson, director of Georgia Sea Grant and a University marine science professor, was one of several who brought up training scientists how to handle media interviews.

Charlotte Vick, content manager for Google Earth, said perhaps it simply came down to being “judicious” in whom scientists spoke with.

The public, members of the discussion agreed, does have the capacity to understand complex data -— it is just a matter of how the data is presented.

Though she was not part of the symposium or Thursday’s discussion, Earle expressed similar sentiments about the public in her lecture on Tuesday.

“Don’t think because you’re not a scientist, you can’t be informed and understand,” she said. “Go get wet. Go jump in and see for yourself.”

QUESTIONS RAISED DURING AN EXERCISE AT THE OIL SYMPOSIUM

• How can academic scientists be integrated into the existing crisis response framework?

• How carefully should time-sensitive data be evaluated before being released to the media?

• How will public policy be affected by changes to crisis response structure?

• Do peer-reviewed journals refuse to publish information released to the media?

• Will scientists and journalists benefit from being trained to handle each other?

• What ethical considerations need to be taken into account when creating a crisis response panel?

• Who are the experts to be on such a panel — academic scientists, industry scientists or both?