I don’t think anything I can say about the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico can be as meaningful as these several things I have seen here and there on the Internet recently:
This photo in particular made me weep. A snowy egret lies dying in the oil-contaminated marsh that was its home:
This map shows you just how many oil rigs are already operating along the Gulf Coast. The impact from just ONE blowing out threatens millions of people and untold numbers of animals. Imagine two, or ten, or fifty of these blowing out because the oil companies chose to save a few bucks on safety and their lapdogs in Washington gladly took the cash and let them do it.
This video, featuring the frank views of someone in the business of cleaning up oil spills explains exactly why BP has done such a shitty job of cleaning up the spill to date and will continue to allow hundreds of miles of coastline to be destroyed (NSFW for very strong language):
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been widely quoted in the media as saying the Obama Administration would “keep a boot on the neck” of BP to pressure them to seal off the leak and clean up the contamination. I recommend he uses THIS boot:
We all find the Gulf Coast one of the most beautiful places in America. What has happened is simply more than a crime.
The Gulf Coast is the only place where I will actually go into the water, because of the fish, the crabs ( shoot me) the sharks. That clear clean, water.
Oh dear.
I felt the same way when I saw that photo, the plight of that one poor bird being symbolic of what we do in the never-ending quest for more and more. It is truly sickening. This also coincided with some reading I’ve been doing in the journals of Thomas Merton (still!) from the spring and summer of 1963 and his observations then about our place within nature rather than somehow outside of it.
Who’s responsible for the ecological disaster in the Gulf? We are. I am. And I am ashamed.