oil and water

Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war" -- except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.

If we wait, and do not act... We will feel mounting pressure to plunder the environment. We will have a crash program to build more nuclear plants, strip-mine and burn more coal, and drill more offshore wells than we will need if we begin to conserve now. -- Jimmy Carter, 1977

I haven't written about the Gulf oil disaster. I've tried to be adopt that great modern American attitude and simply ignore it, but as John Adams stated in his defense of the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." Facts are indeed stubborn things and the facts about our oceans are not simply stubborn, but sublimely desperate. Twenty years ago, I was working in San Diego advocating the implementation of better treatment facilities before the dumping of sewage into the Pacific. I had a public debate at a college and the opposition simply stated, "It's no problem, the current carries it away."

I replied, "To where?"

And he said, "It gets diluted, it's not a problem."

And that has been our attitude toward the oceans, the whole planet in truth, but the oceans were the last real wild, far too vast for us to screw-up. But about twenty years ago, the facts started coming in, gruesome facts. Here's the stubborn facts in an excellent short presentation by Scripps Jeremy Jackson. I cannot recommend it more highly. It is not in anyway pleasant, but facts are stubborn things.

Once you watch this video, you'll see in the big scheme of things the oil gusher is just the latest atrocity. It is one caused by our addiction to oil, which will, as any addiction does to any addict, eventually destroy us. The question is what are you, not DC, not BP going to do about it? It is your addiction. So, if you think you're concerned about this oil mess, then make it an opportunity to do something. Park your car one day every week -- carpool, public transit, walk, ride your bike. Once you figure out your life isn't going to end, then park your car for two days. If you're not going to do this, don't bother writing your elected official or complaining about the oil companies, this is your addiction, it is your problem.

Of course, as Carter pointed out, our oil addiction has many more implications, -- war and peace, economic, political -- but they are all dependent on the planet, the natural systems which conceived us, and if we continue in our quest to destroy these systems, it will destroy everything on top of it. Mr. Jackson concludes his talk:

In the final analysis the thing we really need to fix is ourselves. It's not about the fish. It's not about the pollution. It's not about the climate change. It's about us and our greed and our need for growth, and our inability to imagine a world which is different from the selfish world we live in today. So, the question is will we respond to this or not? I would say the future of life and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that.

Facts are stubborn things. So, what are you going to do?