They Huey P. Newton Reader

dialectic, 0 nature 305
light or a rose seed blown into the Atlantic. The ocean obeys. It heeds.
It complies. It has its tolerances and its stresses. When these are surpassed,
the ocean falters. Fish stocks can be depleted. The nurseries
of marine life can be buried. Beaches can erode away. Seawater, the
most common substance on this planet and the most life-nourishing,
can be hideously corrupted. It can host substances that in the stomachs
of oysters or clams arc refined into poisons that paralyze porpoise
and man alike.
Or as it became appallingly clear on March 18, 1967, an entire ocean
region can suddenly find itself in direct jeopardy. The Atlantic Ocean
off the southern tip of Great Britain sparkled deep blue, unsullied by
running whitecaps or shadowing storm clouds. Guillemots, auks, redshanks,
herons, and Penzance fishermen dipped into this blue world,
drawing succor from its life-giving energy. At Land's End, hotel owners
ordered new carpets to greet London's annual summer pilgrimage
to the Cornish coast. Since the sapping of its tin mines and fertile lands,
the magnet of ocean beaches alone keeps Cornwall from sinking into
economic depression. (Characteristically, Marx passes over the tin and
land depletions. This is an example of one-dimensional analysis, and
fatal to any solution.)
As the world discovered, the spilled cargo of one ship twenty miles
away managed to shatter this serenity as no gale could do. The cargo
of the reef-gashed Torrey Canyon was a liquid one, totaling thirty-six
million gallons, ordinarily a raindrop in the vast solution of the ocean.
But the ocean cannot absorb oil very efficiently. Within three days,
slicks the color of melted chocolate sprawled over one hundred square
miles of ocean, a moving quagmire that ensnared seabirds by the thousands.
The slicks, with their chirping cargo of flightless birds, rolled
up on the golden beaches of Cornwall. Land's End smelled like an oil
refinery. Like the oil-fouled birds, the oysters, clams, and teeming
inhabitants of tidepools found themselves encased in a straitjacket of
Kuwait crude. Three weeks later, and some two hundred miles away,
the pink granite coast of Brittany received the same greasy absolution
from la marce noire. Silently, without the fanfare of howling winds and
crashing waves, this oil-stricken ocean was coating the coastlines of
two countries with havoc.
Great Britain, perhaps history's most famous maritime nanon,