Alba Atomica

UL II

University Library

Kings' Cows

Spills

After reading Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant comment After the Oil Spill in the London Review of Books, one could not help noticing certain parallels with another “spill” that has been going on right in front of our own door for years and years. The constant flow of immigrants from Africa on small boats and their equally constant drowning have made the small passage in the Mediterranean between the Libyan coast and the small island of Lampedusa one big mass grave. Solnit, writing in times of increasing awareness over environmental issues and yet a general sense of post-Copenhagen disillusionment, finds that the real environmental catastrophe would have consisted in the proper usage of the oil and its blowing into the atmosphere. So how are the two events linked? One might say rightly that the European Union’s agency for external border security FRONTEX is doing a much more professional and discrete job in keeping immigrants from entering our waters. Together with the Italian coast guard they turn the small immigrant’s boats home mostly before they can even reach the shore. The media ban is as effective as in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and what is worse, the public has lost its interest. After a few courageous attempts in the past to shed some journalistic light on the conditions inside Italian reception camps which revealed the shocking reality on the ground and some EU representative’s laments nothing much happened. Yet Italian’s prime minister struck another deal with Libya’s Gaddafi settling decade old claims about compensations for crimes during colonialism about oil and gas supplies and, on behalf of the EU, to build fences in the southern desert to keep immigrants from even reaching the shore. If one adds recent UN reports about the consequences of climate change gloomy picture begins to emerge. While Europe and the US continue to burn North African oil, the situation in the oil-less Sub-Saharan countries becomes bleaker from day to day. Just as mostly afro-American inmates from New Orleans’s prisons clean their country’s beaches, the European Union answers to the economic and social threats of climate change by striking exclusive oil deals and increasingly militarize their effort to keep its consequences off their coasts.