Is the Gulf Oil spill the beginning of the Apocalypse? Armageddon? Is there anything left to say about the disaster? I believe that there is.
1) For one thing, the magnitude of the catastrophe bears repeating - over and over again: the oil is escaping at a rate of up to a million gallons a day. This is not just the worst environmental disaster in US history. It may become the worst one in world history.
2) We read a lot about the poor pelicans, ducks and dolphins dying. Terrible, indeed.
3) We also hear about the terrible economic losses - in jobs, to the shrimp industry, to the people in the region, to the US taxpayers, to BP, to the consumer, etc. Crass partisans such as Bobby Jindal, the conservative Republican governor of Louisiana, suddenly find that the federal government should do more, after clamoring for years that the government should butt out and give business a free reign... Our culture does what it is accustomed to do: Reducing all problems to, and measuring their severity by, their $$$$ cost.
4) But the Gulf Oil spill is much more than that: What is going on there is the destruction of the earth, of Gaia. Gaia is a living organism. We humans are killing it. Gaia is the host and we are the virus, the parasite. Host and virus often live in symbiosis. We have done this for millions of years. American Indians are always depicted as having mastered this art. But sometimes, the virus (e.g. the Ebola) is dumb and it kills its host. We have become a dumb virus.
5) In the Gulf, we are not just killing pelicans and dolphins. We are now killing all life. We are causing havoc below the Ocean surface. We are killing everything, in a swath of the Atlantic thousands of feet deep, thousands of square miles, and expanding.
6) Places, lakes, islands, lands, oceans, even planets can die. Just like people. A few years ago I was on a train traveling along the shore of Lake Champlain. I looked at the large, pretty green/blue lake. But you know what? It was dead, gone, finished. There was nothing left but algae. Some years earlier, Lake Erie had also been declared dead. And now we are taking on the Atlantic Ocean. Our quest to eradicate life on Earth becomes bolder.
7) I would have hoped that the Gulf oil spill would be a wake-up call, like TMI and Chernobyl. Just as those accidents contributed heavily to the (near-)demise of the nuclear industry, the Gulf oil spill could be a major nail in Big Oil’s coffin, forcing us to wean ourselves from oil. It doesn’t look like it
8) We are the dwellers of the Easter Islands in Jared Diamond’s "Collapse." Who will be the last man alive, cutting down the last tree, and then crawling away to die? leave comment here
10 comments:
Tom,
Good blog...
You may have already seen this article in NYTimes... "Don’t Get Mad, Mr. President. Get Even."
http://nyti.ms/cPMeVt
Check it out
Bill H
well said
Thanks for your comments, Bill and Pieter.
The New York Times article is right on.
It is true that the Gulf Oil crisis can become either Obama's opportunity to provide leadership, or Obama's Iranian Hostage Crisis, which damaged Carter's presidency beyond repair, as people perceived him to be weak and wishy-washy.
Should'nt the whole world be involved in this disaster? The oil won't stop spilling over into other countries' waters just because it is not US territory. A disaster of this magnitude is everybody's problem, not just America's.
Right. It's everybody's problem. I'm not sure what "involved" would mean.
The 1979 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, when Mexico's lxtoc 1 well blew, spewed out 140 million gallons of oil, over an 8-months period. I don't know how that one was handled.
Tom,
I don't generally agree that humans are parasites. However, when I find a person who states that humans have been around for millions of years, and that person has been able to suck tuition money from students as a professor, then I have to admit that some of us are parasites.
It sounds like you've done a lot of travelling in your life. Did you walk and row all that way, are are you just an fuel-guzzling liberal hypocrite?
Like a little child, someone says something you don't like, and you holler, "ooh, I don’t like that man, he is bad," offering only personal insult.
What kind of argument is that?
Your arguments are personal and irrelevant. Can't you talk about a topic intelligently?
I'll leave your comment posted for a while, as an example of immature response. You should try to tell us why you favor continued off-shore drilling, addiction to petrol, the destruction of half a continent, interminable wars in the Middle East, etc.
Professor's grade: D+.
What about human population control? Why are people still having 3-4 children. I believe that humans are a parisite on the environment. It is clearly evident. It is a simple equation more people=more demand on the natural resouces. I firmly believe that if we control that explosive human pop. then the envirnoment would have less strain and everybody could have a better quality of life!!!!!!
Nobody has ever suggested human Pop control. Why???
To the anonymous comment made on July 4:
Thank you. You are quite right, that population is part - maybe the most important part -of the problem. 7 billion people in the world now is a lot, and there will be at least another 4 billion more before the growtn curve flattens out.
Many people have warned against this, starting with Malthus. And there is Planned Parenthood,etc.
I am a neo-Malthusian. Even tough
human genius has been able to avert Malthus' dire predictions so far, this doesn't mean that Malthus is wrong in the long run.
Birth control is of the essence. China is doing it.
You are right. And you are in good company.
People in the US are having 2.1 children, not 3 or 4. The birth rate is at replacement level. Population in the US is increasing only because of immigration. Should current US citizens stop having children altogether to make room for immigrants?
Chinese families care for their own elders. In the US, elders live “independently” at taxpayer expense for as long as they can, and then more directly dependent in health care facilities. Any plan for state-enforced birth control in the US would accelerate economic disaster because of the massive entitlement programs that depend on workers.
I have a relatively large family by modern standards, and know other large families. I can tell you that we are not the big consumers in this country. You won’t see us on an airplane (or travelling much at all), or at a professional sporting event, or more than rarely eating out. We also tend to care for our own elders.
The Italians have a good lesson for Americans. They tend to live as lavishly as they can, don’t have more than one child, retire on the back of immigrant workers, and will cease to exist as a country and as a people in the not-so-distant future. But that would just represent extinction of one species of parasite by your way of thinking, right?
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