Carl Safina has been hailed as one of the top 100 conservationists of
the 20th century (Audubon Magazine) and A Sea in Flames is his
blistering account of the months-long manmade disaster that tormented a
region and mesmerized the nation. Traveling across the Gulf to make
sense of an ever-changing story and its often-nonsensical twists, Safina
expertly deconstructs the series of calamitous misjudgments that caused
the Deepwater Horizon blowout, zeroes in on BP's misstatements,
evasions, and denials, reassesses his own reaction to the government's
crisis handling, and reviews the consequences of the leak--and what he
considers the real problems, which the press largely overlooked.
Safina takes us deep inside the faulty thinking that caused the lethal
explosion. We join him on aerial surveys across an oil-coated sea. We
confront pelicans and other wildlife whose blue universe fades to black.
Safina skewers the excuses and the silly jargon--such as "junk shot" and
"top kill"--that made the tragedy feel like a comedy of horrors--and
highlighted Big Oil's appalling lack of preparedness for an event that
was inevitable.
Based on extensive research and interviews with fishermen, coastal
residents, biologists, and government officials, A Sea in Flames has
some surprising answers on whether it was "Obama's Katrina," whether the
Coast Guard was as inept in its response as BP was misleading, and
whether this worst unintended release of oil in history was really
America's worst ecological disaster. Impassioned, moving, and even
sharply funny, A Sea in Flames is ultimately an indictment of
America's main addiction. Safina writes: "In the end, this is a
chronicle of a summer of pain--and hope. Hope that the full potential of
this catastrophe would not materialize, hope that the harm done would
heal faster than feared, and hope that even if we didn't suffer the
absolutely worst--we'd still learn the big lesson here. We may have
gotten two out of three. That's not good enough. Because: there'll be a
next time."
