It's not just the pelicans

For the past couple weeks, we've been bombarded with nothing but pelicans. Helpless brown pelicans, drowning in oil, splattered across the front pages of magazines and newspapers. So it comes as a rather macabre reprieve to ponder the plight of a different animal for a change: the sperm whale.

In a blog for CNN's running coverage of the "Gulf Coast Oil Disaster," Heather Heenahan lays out a brief history and status update of the sperm whale--many of which reside in the Mississippi Canyon just off the coast of Louisiana. She's a Duke University masters student in environmental management and summer fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and has spent much time studying whales behavior as social creatures.

Heenahan reminds us that, before our lust for petroleum, humans hunted in the Gulf of Mexico for oil of another sort: the oils from the fatty tissue of whales. The business was so lucrative, in fact, that sperm whales were hunted to near extinction in the very same waters where their lives are now again in grave danger.

Whales are at risk on numerous fronts from the oil spill, Heenahan writes. First, they swim through the deep waters that are now being inundated with oil. Second, they eat other fish that are currently bathing in the same muck. Third, when they surface after 45-minute dives, they take a nice long breath of aerosolized chemical dispersants that contain volatile organic compounds. Thus, the whales soak up, eat and breathe in the leaking oil as well as the foul toxins sprayed to help mitigate the fallout.

But ultimately, it's not about the whales or the pelicans. Heenahan at least pays lip service to the greedy habits of consumption that led BP to forsake warnings from the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission and other federal regulators in order to extract their profit-worthy bounty. Unfortunately, her attempts to attribute this disaster to our mutual complicity as oil-loving citizens of the consumerist First World feel half-hearted and uninspired. This calamity should be received as a sharp kick in the pants to every SUV-driving, solo-commuting, plane-hopping, wasteful American lifestyle-having, finger-pointing one of us. If we ever hope to avoid the next one we better do a whole lot more than "support clean energy" and "decrease oil consumption." The pelicans, the whales, and any future humans who hope to get some enjoyment from life on this planet all depend on it.