Oil spill’s local, impact’s global

BOSTON — Among the problems with oil spills is that they don’t recognize international boundaries.

In the words of GlobalPost’s Mort Rosenblum, “Americans appear to regard the BP calamity as a domestic matter. Yet as details leak out of ignored risks and a gusher left too long unplugged—the fury is global.”

Indeed. In some places, it is a fury—like France, where Lucky Li’s Vietnamese takeout shop is as good a place as any from which to assess the global mood. Elsewhere, like Cuba, it’s not so much a fury as it is a flurry. And, in Canada, it’s more a giant worry.

In Cuba, what’s bad for the environment at large may have positive economic ramifications. GlobalPost’s Nick Miroff looks into Cuba’s untapped offshore reserves, which are growing increasingly attractive to U.S. oil companies with every barrel gushing into the Gulf.

And it took the BP blowout off America’s coast to jolt Canadians into considering the fate of their own shores. For months, oil companies were lobbying to relax regulations for offshore drilling in the environmentally sensitive Beaufort Sea.

Follow GlobalPost to foreign countries, each affected in its own way by the oil still spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Also check out previous GlobalPost coverage of the oil spill and its devastating ripple effect:

10 animals most at risk from Gulf oil spill, which introduces the most vulnerable species in the open water, along the coasts and in the wetlands.

For immigrants, an extra challenge in Gulf oil spill, which focuses on Vietnamese immigrants in Louisiana, who comprise a large portion of the U.S.‘s shrimpers, crabbers and oystermen. They also rarely speak English — and, as a result, get locked out of cleanup efforts and have trouble filing for lost income.

10 worst man-made natural disasters, which takes a harrowing spin through history to revisit catastrophes both infamous and forgotten, from the Dust Bowl to Bhopal.