Oil's Well That Ends Well

Oil's Well That Ends Well

Well, people, looks like we may have done it now.

In our addictive quest for faster cars, plastic everything, more air conditioning, bigger houses and plenty of beef, we have punched a hole right into the core of Mother Earth and she is gushing out uncontrollable amounts of slimy, toxic, all-consuming petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico.

“Beyond Petroleum” was never such a great idea. Thank you, BP.

With no end in sight, apparently no real backup plan and the currents predicted to coat the entire coast of Florida with this deadly slime before heading to North Carolina and then out into the Atlantic Ocean on its way to Europe, we are in for quite a lesson in how stuff really works. Not the hype, not the lies we get told by the oil companies and the talking heads on TV, but reality.

We are all part of this problem, not just BP, not just the oil companies, not just the pocketed politicians and the lobbyists and the apologists. We pay these people to do this insane stuff. We pay them to "drill baby drill", we pay them to enter the center of the earth and try to suck the very essence from her depths.

We are the problem.

We have bought the line that this economy, this way of doing things, this lifestyle predicated on burning concentrated forms of energy is the best and most excellent of all ways of doing things that humans have ever conceived. We are daily fed the line that if we don’t continue this, then all things good and pure about Life in America will come to an end and therefore serious discussions about change, real change, are simply folly.

Our food system is bound up in this oil addiction, the very air we breathe is tainted with its byproducts and finally the government (if not the cancer industry) is admitting that it is chemicals and pollution that are making us all sick.

We are swimming in oil, not unlike those unfortunate pelicans we are seeing wash ashore the beaches of Louisiana. I daresay we are idiots.

We should/could/will eventually most certainly be wiser than this. Why do we refuse to see beyond petroleum? Why do we continue to build massive roadways at the expense of our health and educational systems in a vain belief that we will always have these cars to drive?

Why do we apparently refuse to allow ourselves the vision to see beyond the scenarios that the market has laid out before us? Are we this myopic? Are we this easily manipulated or are we just being lazy, having a short-sighted run of being terribly dense? Mayhaps this is just temporary insanity.

The things we have come to see as necessities in our lives, things like our satellite TV, our iPhones and Blackberries, our iPods and our internet obsessions did not even exist just a few short years ago and yet they now define how we spend our days, how we interface with the world and with our friends and family. They form our opinions about how the world works. They feed us what we know and sometimes that is all we know.

We are bombarded with ads for this that and the other, and this is not news, we as a society talk about this all the time and we casually accept this situation as just the way things are:

The American Way.

Perhaps we should consciously design and choose another way that doesn’t have such an unhappy, unhealthy ending. If we just lay back and pretend to enjoy it, nothing will change. If we do not take the direction of our society into our hands and help to mold our own path to the future, the one that awaits us may not be very nice.

Let’s get back to that slime covering the Gulf of Mexico. Sad thing is, this is typical of what happens when you drill for oil. Oil spills worldwide are rampant and always have been. Nigeria’s coastlines and river basins have been smothered for years by the work of Shell Oil, its inhabitants miserable and angry. Ecuador’s forests have pits of raw oil the size of Rhode Island that Texaco refuses to clean up. Every town in East Texas has those places off in the woods everyone knows about and knows to stay away from, the scenes left over from the great oil rush of the last century. West Texas is just big enough and sparsely-populated enough that people just move to somewhere less polluted.

And it is not just oil.

Coal is its own sooty reward with its black lung, buried miners, destroyed ecosystems and missing mountaintops. Nuclear power is a folly of such proportions I dare not even ponder its ramifications and how many generations will find themselves doomed to watch over those radioactive waste heaps.

I don’t know if we are wise or clever enough to get out of this abyss of bad thinking but we must certainly be willing to give it a try. Doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome I believe has been the very definition of insanity for some time now. I keep thinking that with all the smart and well-meaning people I know that we are not just going to keep doing the same things.

I know that as a people, as a species, we are capable of better.

We must risk a new outcome by refusing to accept that this is the best we can muster, that this is the only way of doing business, the only way to light and heat our homes, the only way to propel ourselves across the land or through the sky. Is this really the only way to wrap our sandwiches or keep cool in the summertime?

All that talent we use to design and produce our increasingly-clever gadgetry, create our art and music and keep us entertained and “informed” in so many ways could surely be enlisted to find ways to stop our fuelish ways and develop a new economic ethic that replenishes the Earth rather than depletes her.

We do not have to keep doing things this way and indeed we cannot.

As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us”.

susan cook

4 june 2010

Susan Cook is a native Texan and a resident of Driftwood.