Page:Niger Delta Ecosystems- the ERA Handbook, 1998.djvu/173

Environmental Impact of the Oil Industry 15.3.4 THE ADVERSE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS AND THEIR RESULTS

The oil industry has a significantly adverse environmental impact upon the human environment of the Niger Delta. It's activities not only exacerbate other environmental problems but create unique problems which are worse than they need be because the industry as a whole is corrupt and careless and clearly does not operate to the standards which are expected elsewhere in the world.

In terms of costs and benefits, the great majority of the local people bear all the environmental costs and receive no economic benefits. When the oil reserves have been exhausted the human environment will have been unnecessarily degraded and the local people will be worse off than they would have been had there been no oil industry. The primary beneficiaries will be the shareholders of the oil companies, the highly paid technical and managerial staff and, most of all, the plethora of corrupt officials, politicians and military personnel. The wealth generated by the oil industry has been concentrated in a very few hands while the avaricious desire for a portion of the wealth directs and has thoroughly corrupted and criminalised the political life of the state to a degree where civil society is collapsing.

A thorough assessment of the environmental impact of the oil industry in the Niger Delta would take up an entire book. However in this chapter, only the major impacts together with their human ecological results are considered. Nonetheless it is worth stressing again what was said in section 1.4 of this chapter, which is that the environment upon which the impact of the oil industry is being assessed is the human environment in all its manifestations. Thus there are four layers of the human environment upon which human activities have an impact. These are:
 * basic ecological conditions;
 * environmental health conditions;
 * social conditions; and
 * political conditions, in terms of how social conditions influence people's political views and actions.

Many of the environmental impacts of the oil industry are common to a wide range of oil industry activities and thus the impacts will be looked at first as
 * Impacts common to a range of activities (Common Impacts); and then as
 * Impacts specific to specific activities (Specific Impacts).

15.4 COMMON IMPACTS

15.4.1 SPATIAL EXTENT

Map 5 shows the geographical extent and the intensity of oil industry in the Niger Delta. Furthermore, it must be appreciated that the industry operates in an area that is densely populated and that it is expanding all the time and that, like all mining operations, it leaves a mess behind it.

What the map does not show, of course, is the wide array of other impacts that the industry has generated, both economically beneficial and costly: gas flares, employment, migration into the area, urban development, additional roads, road traffic, air traffic, noise and pollution. 171