The pelicans are damned. They are damned in that they are doomed — doomed, many of them, to wear viscous brown cowls of oil until they die. They are damned as individual creatures struggling to survive and reproduce, and they are damned as a species, their habitats befouled and destroyed. From television screens, from Internet slide shows and the pages of magazines, they look at us, their round eyes peering out of their grotesque vestments, until we can't look at them. Their dignity is both utterly violated and implacably intact. Entirely mute, they still manage to say, You did this. You did this. You did this.

But the pelicans are also damned in that they are damned pelicans. As in, "those damned pelicans." As in, "Every time they show that damned fire, they have to show those damned pelicans." As in, "I'm sorry, but eleven human beings died out there, not just a bunch of damned pelicans." As in, "My husband is more important than some damned pelican." The people who say these things are not lacking in sympathy or pity. They like pelicans. But they loved their husbands and they loved their sons and they loved their fathers and they loved their fiancés and they loved their friends, and they have suffered the experience of having them taken away. They were taken away when the oil rig they were working on fifty miles from shore in the Gulf of Mexico exploded on the night of April 20, and then they were taken away again when the tragedy of the environmental apocalypse — the environmental judgment — unleashed by the explosion outstripped the tragedy of their loss. They were taken away when our loss, as a nation whose health is dependent on the health of our oceans, was deemed greater than the loss of those whose individual worlds were obliterated. They have been taken away every time the story has been told, and the story has been told endlessly. There were eleven of them who died on the Deepwater Horizon. They died on the black ocean, in the black night, far...