Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

by Riki Ott, Riki Ott

Betrayed by oilmen’s promises in the 1970s, the people of Prince William Sound, Alaska, awaken on March 14, 1989, to the nation’s largest oil spill. Not One Drop is an extraordinary tale of ordinary lives ripped apart by disaster and of community healing through building relationships of trust. This story offers critical lessons for a society traumatized by political divides and facing the looming catastrophe of global climate change.

Author Riki Ott, a rare combination of commercial salmon “fisherm’am” and PhD marine biologist, describes firsthand the impacts of oil companies’ broken promises when the Exxon Valdez spills most of its cargo and despoils thousands of miles of shore. Ott illustrates in stirring fashion the oil industry’s 20-year trail of pollution and deception that predated the tragic 1989 spill and delves deep into the disruption to the fishing community of Cordova over the following 19 years. In vivid detail, she describes the human trauma coupled inextricably with that of the sound’s wildlife and its long road to recovery.

Ott critically examines shifts in scientific understanding of oil-spill effects on ecosystems and communities, exposes fundamental flaws in governance and the legal system, and contrasts hard won spill-prevention and spill-response measures in the sound to dangerous conditions on the Alaska pipeline. Her human story, varied background, professional training, and activist heart lead readers to the root of the problem: a clash of human rights and corporate power embedded in law and small-town life.

Not One Drop is as much an example of how too many corporate owners and political leaders betray everyday citizens as it is one of the universal struggle to maintain heart, to find the courage to overcome disaster, and to forge a new path from despair to hope.

Genres: Environment, Politics, Nonfiction, Science, History

352 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2008

About the author

A commercial salmon "fisherma'am," Dr. Riki Ott (PhD in marine biology) experienced firsthand the devastating effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spilland chose to do something about it. Ott retired from fishing and founded three nonprofit organizations to deal with lingering harm. She is the author of Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$ and Not One Drop. Riki lives in Cordova, Alaska."

Reviews

[Tippy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Riki Ott is writing this book for the "average person," who apparently doesn't know anything about science, but is okay with tons of legal jargon. Also, the "average person" likes their non-fiction written as a bunch of dialogue, so, you know, it's not, like, boring. The result is incredibly condescending at times and leads to gems like this:

"E-co-tox-i-col-o-gy," Linden counted. "That's seven syllables! Why can't scientists just use simple English if they want people to understand what they've discovered?"
"Okay, so toxicology is the science of poisons and their effects on the body. Ecology, you know: it's the study of relationships between animals and their habitat. So eco-toxicology is..."

You get the point. My favorite is when she was defining a paradigm shift and was asked for an example. She says "Oh. Well, scientists once believed that the world was flat, but all the theories had to shift once Columbus sailed around the world." Um, wow. So many things wrong with this, I don't know where to begin.

Or maybe it's this one: "PAHs act inside cells to disrupt synthesis and function of proteins, hormones, and even the basic coding of life, DNA." "Okay, now I'm sure that means something to medical doctors," said Lisa Marie, "but what did you just say?"

But put that aside and there was some really good stuff in here. Specifically, the many ways in which Exxon and partnering companies turned a punitive penalty of 1 year's net profit in 1994 to four days of net profit in 2008. They were not above the sleezy and disgusting. From wire tapping phones and digging through garbage to firing whistle blowers to bad science (i.e. choosing controls from much farther north, where there has generally not been much wildlife to show that wildlife in the Sound is the same as in other areas. This bad science is also a business cost and gets written off.) to media manipulation, and of course manipulation of the law and law makers.

The author provides a handy list of "corporate defense strategies in adversarial litigation." A few of my favorites are:

-Hire a small army of the best lawyers money can buy. This business cost is written off at taxpayers' expense, while plaintiffs pay lawyers out-of-pocket or on contingency.
-Limit discovery to hide extent of culpability by claiming thousands of documents are "privileged." This forces plaintiffs to argue for individual documents, a time-consuming and costly burden.
-Launch professional and personal attacks to discredit scientists who challenge corporate supremacy in science.
-Use biased accounting strategies to overestimate costs to corporate defendants and underestimate cost to victims. (by some of Exxon's calculations, the fishermen actually owed the oil company money!)
-Retry the case through appeals. Also through appeals, attempt to reduce or eliminate any large damage awards, using the legal system to stall for time to recoup through investments whatever might have to be paid in awards plus interest.
-Advance rights of corporate "persons."

Also, Riki Ott does a fantastic job of providing solutions for the future. Solutions to prevent damage from future oil spills (i.e. double hulled tankers). Solutions for communities torn apart by the actions of others. (Obviously, in this situation, the oil spill destroyed an entire community's way of life. But also, one of Exxon's tactics to divide the community was to provide "clean up" jobs to some. These folks were not properly supplied, and years later, oil was still on beaches, but it made a great photo opp. The community was torn as some people put themselves on Exxon's payroll and others refused. This also created "have" and "have-nots.")Solutions to better regulate oil companies. Solutions to improve the legal system (i.e. requiring punitive damages be put in escrow, so neither party benefits from stalling case closure and eliminating tax breaks for litigation in certain situations.) Her solution oriented focus alone makes this book a worthwhile read.

I also learned that for the first 40 years after the 14th Amendment passed, there were 307 lawsuits brought under it. 19 were cases from African Americans and 288 where corporations trying to claim the privileges. Corporations where recognized as persons 34 years before women were. There is also a great list of the Amendments and how corporations can exploit them.

And lastly, here's my favorite quote:

"...unlike our current economic measure, the Gross Domestic Product, which thrives on a sick society. By its count, wars, pollution, prisons, divorces and cancers and other chemical-derived diseases result in exchanges of money that are "good" for a suicide economy. But a living economy needs a new measure of true wealth, a measure of progress toward a sustainable future for all, grown in self-reliant communities."

[Kate Sherrod · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without a doubt, Riki Ott has become one of my heroes. I sought out this book after hearing her on the American Scandal podcast. She is a knowledgeable and passionate communicator, with a hell of a story to tell, but one element of this book put me off a bit: her habit of setting expository pseudo-Socratic dialogues between herself and her best friend, Linden. While the scenes and backdrops thus depicted were nice slices of Cordova life, the "conversations" felt forced and artificial. No fiction editor would allow this much info-dump-disguised-as-dialogue, and hers shouldn't have, either. I mean, I get wanting to break up the dryness of the scientific, economic and political facts under discussion with something more relatable, but her own narration of her own experience did that perfectly well without that gimmick.

Despite that, well worth the read!

[FMLDNR · Rating 5 out of 5]

very good book.

[Weavre · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first free pre-release from Amazon Vine! What fun! So far, I'm happy with this book. The author lays out her perspective and biases clearly right at the beginning, and it's written as a rather nice piece of narrative nonfiction--which I love. Her loving descriptions of Alaska's coastal landscape and wildlife are almost beautiful as Prince William Sound itself must be.

Here's my Vine review:

Fresh out of graduate school, a young Riki Ott sought respite from academia by joining a salmon-fishing crew in Alaska. “Hooked” on the joy and excitement of the salmon runs, she bought a boat with a partner and settled in to build a life for herself as a fisherwoman in Prince William Sound. Making an effort to become part of her new community, she attended a few local political meetings. When the old-timers raised concerns about Alyeska’s oil-producing activities, Riki’s academic background resurfaced: “Maybe I can help there … I have a master’s in oil pollution and a doctorate in sediment pollution.” Her stunned neighbors promptly voted her onto their organization’s board, passed her a towering stack of papers, and—in the case of the now-former lead person on the Alyeska issues—made plans to go moose hunting.

Two years later came news headlines about the Exxon-Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, and Riki was right in the middle of the chaos of an entire community’s shattered lives. Not One Drop chronicles how, over the next two decades, she and others fought to restore to the families of the small fishing community all that had been stolen when a tanker crashed and broken promises spilled across human lives as thickly as oil coated once-pristine beaches. Riki’s firsthand account ranges from makeshift office space to Congressional offices in Washington, DC, from the sweeping wilds of Alaska’s remote spaces to the crowded pen of her Dallas prison cell. Everpresent are the friends and neighbors struggling to regain their footing in Cordova, Alaska.

While Riki’s uniquely well-informed perspective allows her to tell the story of this accident in a way that sheds light on corporate power-plays and profit-seeking platitudes, her narrative occasionally bogs down in the very literary device that at first seems to make the science and politics truly accessible to a lay reader. Much of her story is told, not directly to the reader, but to her best friend—who asks for clarification and simplification frequently enough that the reader can’t possibly get lost in the details. This device can be very effective, but the effect in Not One Drop reminded me a bit of the cheesy management-advice books that rely on questioning characters who find unexpected mentors in trains, airplanes, and amusement parks. The information is great, but the characters feel forced. I’d have preferred that Riki Ott simply continue her narrative as it began, telling her story without the artificial intermediaries of townspeople who ask her to simplify science that’s already been adequately explained.

Despite that flaw, I found this book enlightening and informative, an enjoyable read well worth my time. I’d recommend it to anyone who cares about any community or natural space touched by any megacorporations, as the lessons Riki learned in Alaska seem likely to transfer all too well to the site of the next human-made disaster. Perhaps, if enough people read Cordova’s story and others like it, that next disaster can be prevented before it destroys a community and an ecosystem.

[Anna Ligtenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

ISBN 1933392584 - With oil and the price we pay for it, in both dollars and planetary damage, the center of so many discussions right now, Not One Drop appealed to my need for information. The copy I've read and am reviewing is an uncorrected proof, so if anything I write doesn't apply to the copy you read, you know why.

Riki Ott's family has a track record when it comes to seeing a wrong and fighting to right it, so it should surprise no one that she jumped right in when her recently adopted and much loved new home in Cordova, Alaska is nearly destroyed by the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. Her father (who, very weirdly, she never names throughout the entire book), among others, fought to get DDT banned. Their win, without a doubt, influenced Riki years later. After just one season fishing in Prince William Sound, she's clearly in love and just as clearly heartbroken at the devastation that the spill caused - and continues to cause almost 20 years later. Ott organizes and joins, creates and fights, learns and teaches, all to see justice done. The story spans 20 years, including her one year in Cordova before the spill and the 19 years since, and covers legal battles and the personal conflicts that arose for residents who lost their income, their businesses, and their hope.

This is not, by any stretch of my imagination, a flawless book. The first glaring problem for me was that there was no index in the back, so if (and when!) I became lost in the details, I had no easy means to find specific information that I'd already read. There is a ten page timeline, 35 pages of notes and a 2 page glossary, so the lack of index is inexcusable. Ott is obviously aware of language - once, she mentions people being taught to speak "Alaskan"; at several points, she mentions a speech she'd given during which she'd lost her audience by speaking in scientific terms to people unfamiliar with the terminology. Despite that awareness, the book begins with a lot of occupation-ese, language specific to the world she lives in, with fishing terms, boating-speak and other things that just don't draw a reader in. You really have to push through those pages to get to the heart of the story, and it's worthwhile, but it shouldn't feel like work. Ott eventually begins to make the story more personal, working in incredibly awkward "conversations" that probably never happened but at least are easier to follow.

The timing of this book feels almost as awkward as the conversations. 2009, next year, is the twentieth anniversary of the spill and would have seemed a more expected publication date for this book. Without tying it to that anniversary, it feels a bit like a lost opportunity to use the publicity from either event for the other. Most of the country probably thinks this is history, a done deal, over, in the past - and the fact that it's not deserves more attention. Two things in particular highlight the horrific aspect of the way this has dragged on and on: one, the little kids at the beginning of the book are adults by the end and this is still not over; an entire lifetime has gone by. Two, in 1999, the tanker Erika spilled millions of gallons on France's southern coast - within 90 days, French oil companies, ship owners and charter companies signed an agreement that would start to change things for them. 90 days, when Exxon has kept this case going for two decades in the U.S.

- AnnaLovesBooks

[amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

spent a lot of time choked up in the subway reading this. the biggest wtf is that the punitive damage award went from 5 billion (which exxon called an unjust ruling) to 507 million (that's million, not billion) in almost 20 years of judicial process. the area of the spill is still covered in oil, uninhabitable, and completely dead of wildlife.

[Meg]

Hadn't really followed the Exxon spill or Riki Ott's work until recently; she's come to the point where she sees corporate personhood as the issue to tackle to prevent the type of social/environmental harm created by groups like Exxon. You can see her new website here: http://www.ultimatecivics.com/?p=233

[Rob Prince · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read by my burnt-out old guys leftie book club a couple of months back. Story of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill and the 20 year effort of Exxon to limit and cover up the incredible damage which they perpetrated on the S. Alaska coast as a result of the Exxon Valdez's captain having `one more on the rocks'. Well written and well reseached.

[Katherine]

met the author -- she was very engaging and had been quite involved in the aftermath.

to read later, when i'm in a place that i want to read this type of story.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear look at the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.

[Anita Schweppe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eye opening but very depressing.