Frontline Documentarian Responds to My Oil Spill Blog
Were my ideas about taking collective weblog action to confront shipping companies and individuals responsible for massive oil spills too extreme? Well apparently the documentarian Mark Schapiro doesn’t think so.
My ideas were triggered by his Frontline/World investigative documentary on PBS about the wreck of the Prestige and its massive oil spill off the northern coast of Spain.
I promised in my blog that I would contact Schapiro and see what he thinks. Well I did and he responded. Here is part of what he wrote in an exchange at the Frontline comments website:
…having the ability to shine the light on abusers of the system could go a long way toward clearing up some of the more flagrant abuses of the system. Your idea of a steady web-log is an inspired one — though I would caution you as to how difficult it may be to actually find the abundance of information that’s necessary. One place to start is an interesting and very useful Web site, www.equasis.org -which provides a rendering of who, at least on paper, is the owner and manager of most every ship at sea…
Of course, the theory might be good, now the question is who and how does an idea like this get started. Ideas are cheap, execution is dear.
