In These Times Interviews Not One Drop Author Riki Ott
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When the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound, it dumped tens of millions of gallons of oil into the bay, marring the Alaskan coastline, destroying natural habitats, and plunging the residents of Cordova, Alaska, into a grueling and demoralizing decades-long court battle with one of the largest corporations on Earth.
In this interview for newsmagazine In These Times, Riki Ott (Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill) discusses “‘invisible losses,’ the shift from victim to survivor mode, and the battle against corporate rights” with interviewer Silja J.A. Talvi.
In Not One Drop, you write that the damages caused by the oil spill was far more toxic than the obvious damage to the environment and the local economy. You write of the “invisible losses” that the community incurred. Can you elaborate?
The truth is that Cordova gutted itself after the spill, especially after our fish runs collapsed in 1992 and 1993. The stress manifested itself in all manner of horrible things, including substance abuse, alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, depression, PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder], isolation, divorce and suicide. These are the so-called “non-economic losses” in a court of law.
For sociologists who came in and studied us after the spill, Cordova became a case study of what happens when a whole community of people is traumatized. We had a massive increase in PTSD in Cordova, as well as general anxiety disorder, and, of course, this trickled down to the kids. We’re very tight with the children here, and we have always taught them as a community, not just as individuals. Some of these kids own fishing boats when they’re 15 and 16, and it’s the same thing with the native people of this region, with an emphasis on subsistence harvesting, sharing and celebrating resources. We don’t have ageism in Cordova, it’s a very fluid sharing of life across the generations.
So, the adults here were plunged into this situation, and the kids were, as well. The younger generation saw their mothers and fathers change drastically. This external, financial hardship ate people up internally, and the stress manifested in all manner of horrible things. People stopped visiting their friends and family members. Divorces and suicides went up. It was an ongoing disaster.
How did you begin to recover?
After our fish runs collapsed, we had nothing more to lose. When you reach that point, it’s very freeing … you have only each other. You look around at people, your neighbors, and you say, “What are we going to do?” There were groups of people who sat down and started to talk with each other about the possible solutions, the changes we needed to make to our economy and in our own emotional lives.
We had to rebuild our whole reality. Eventually, the way to mitigate this kind of harm is to shift people from victim to survivor mode. We inadvertently created what the sociologists came to study and call “peer listening circles.” This same approach was then used with the survivors of Katrina.
We began to form nonprofit organizations to deal with the grief, the cultural and social damage. It started to draw us out of this bubble of misery. We began to figure out how to diversify our economy without opting for short-term solutions. There were, for instance, proposals to strip-mine, which were ultimately rejected because we would have trashed our chances for future fisheries.
Instead, we began working on building a sustainable economy, and realizing that this is about getting off oil. In order to have a livable planet and pass something onto the next generations, we absolutely have to transition off oil. There’s no other choice.
Out of that effort came “The Copper River Watershed Project” to support the growth of local fishery, sustainable forestry and tourism over 26,500 square miles, encompassing one of the last, intact watersheds in North America. Among many other goals, we sought to protect salmon and upriver habitat from widespread clearcutting.
Related News: Read the Durango Herald article on Riki:
