dunedan: interesting idea. what you outline sounds to me like a stakeholder association almost, a forum in which organizational expressions of the various groups/interests that would be impacted upon by drilling in the gulf would come to have some impact on drilling in the gulf and the policy orientations that shape it. presumably it would be an intermediate body that had effective power to force shareholder action. that's what a stakeholder forum would sooner or later have to do: in it's more interesting (to my mind) variants, the notion of stakeholder undercuts the primacy of ownership. it de facto forces resources out into the commons and makes claims concerning the management based on the way multiple interests/activities/communities interact with the same "resource context"---so for example, for bp the gulf of mexico is a site for the extraction of oil and a potential management problem should things go wrong---their leasing of a particular spot for drilling from the state (presumably) would from bp's viewpoint also be a redefinition of that space within the gulf as a resource/profit extraction space--which would tend to exclude other meanings, other types of usage, so other stakes in the same environment. which is lunacy. but without that private-property based lunacy, the present fiasco in the gulf would never have happened, i don't think. so i think this a step in a good direction.
i'm not sure i see the link to corporate personhood as directly as you do, but i will say that the notion of corporate personhood is particularly ...um...pungent as an allegory for one of the central problems that the private ownership model sets up, which is that the interests of wider communities are subordinated to the interests of capital. the fiction of corporate personhood simply makes the mechanism for this subordination explicit: a corporate entity engages in contractual relations as a corporation so is de facto acting as an individual, so why not give that individual rights, make it over into the legal fiction that is a person? in that way types of claims are flattened---human beings have no more rights than do corporate abstractions---so conflicts come to a matter of resources. and people almost always loose. it's capitalism in action.
the exception is some massive fuck-up that shakes the passive consent that folk are conditioned (and i use this word knowing what it implies) to give away to this system which is predicated on their subordination to phantoms and fictions....it's stunning to think the magnitude of incident that seems required to jolt people from their political slumbers, but there we are.
legal remedies---lawsuits and lots of em---seem a cumbersome way to substitute for the subordination of shareholders to stakeholders really.
and the basic inequality that is set up through the superficial equalization of persons and corporations reappears in it.
what i am seeing---through all the pr---is the collapse of a type of consent behind the existing arrangement as it pertains to oil extraction, particularly in the form that the right has for some time been trying to use for its own political benefit---as an aspect of a general "concern about the environment is for wimps" viewpoint that plays somehow as reasonable in some quarters--even as i know the way this position is marketed i can't say i understand it's appeal at all. but anyway, i see such traction as that stuff ever got dissolving at speed.
but mostly i see a disaster to the ecosystems of and around the gulf of titanic proportions and it's kinda difficult to imagine what chain of responses in the shorter term could do anything about it. hopefully something. so far nothing's worked.
and it's starting to hit land:
Oil spill from Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion begins to reach land | Environment | guardian.co.uk