"Laissez Les Bonnes Temps Roulez" Let the good times roll is a New Orleans expression that fits with the reputation of the Big Easy, and has been easily adopted by the Big Oil interests in the Gulf of Mexico and throughout the world. The Well From Hell brings to light the long-held tradition of big risk, big reward and big egoes held by BP and its counterparts. It's a culture that has led to a sordid safety and environmental record for that company, and culminated in the disaster of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on April 20, 2010. From BP's legendary earliest oil explorer, William D'Arcy, whose 1908 discovery of a gusher in Iran helped to cement Britain's place as a global energy broker, to its more recent leader, John Browne, who took the gamble that deep-sea oil drilling would ward off the 'end of oil' for a few more decades, drilling has increasingly become "a game of high-stakes Texas poker with colossal risks and astronomically high potential gains." The tragedy of the Deepwater Horizon spill claimed 11 lives of its crew. It may be decades before we know the full extent of the environmental damage it caused. Yet, with more than 4,000 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico alone and the future of our global economy and our environmental health at risk, Sargent leads us to question just how high we are willing to let the stakes go in the gamble for our global energy future.
About the Author: William Sargent, relative of the painter John Singer Sargent and son of a former governor of Massachusetts, was primed early for a career in politics, but since boyhood he was far more interested in science than in traditional forms of public service. Nonetheless, at Harvard University he declared himself a government major-a plan that gave way the day he had lunch at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, where huge plaster casts of dinosaur tracks and the smell of formaldehyde triggered in the freshman his inborn love of nature. Sargent immediately switched from government to biology. As a science major in the 1960's, Sargent enjoyed the instruction and guidance of such luminaries as E. O. Wilson, James Watson, Jane Goodall, Louis Leakey, and Stephen Jay Gould, all pioneers in their respective fields. As a sophomore, Sargent joined a crew of scientists and sailors on a six-month cruise, collecting plankton off the coasts of South America, Africa, and the Baltic region. The voyage whetted Sargent's taste for travel and sharpened his eye to the diversity of the natural world. Since then, and for more than thirty years, his subjects have ranged from horseshoe crabs on Cape Cod to Rhesus monkeys off Puerto Rico to the intimate ecology of the Massachusetts marsh where he lives. Pursuing the biological and natural sciences as a journalist, author, and filmmaker, Sargent has remained firm in his principal quest: to make the natural world accessible to all. William Sargent is a consultant for the NOVA Science Series and has written eight books about science and the environment, including Just Seconds from the Ocean (UPNE, 2008); The House on Ipswich Marsh (UPNE, 2005); Storm Surge (UPNE, 2004); Sea Level Rising (Schifferbooks, 2004); Crab Wars: A Tale of Horseshoe Crabs, Bioterrorism, and Human Health (UPNE, 2002); A Year in the Notch: Exploring the Natural History of the White Mountains (UPNE, 2001); The Year of the Crab: Marine Animals in Modern Medicine (1988). His Shallow Waters: A Year on Cape Cod's Pleasant Bay (1981) received the Boston Globe Winship award for the best book about New England and was the basis for a NOVA film, The Sea Behind the Dunes, selected by the National Audubon Society as the best natural history film of the year.