If We Could Talk to the Animals – They Would Tell Us We’re Idiots

By Bloggingdino

Woke up this morning to headlines such as “Oil Could Gush for Months.” Now, I may be simple, but even I knew that when oil company executives and politicians were telling people that today’s oil-drilling technology is so sophisticated, we’ll never have to worry about major spills like the ones we had years ago, their words carried about as much weight as a used car salesman’s assurance about some clunker, “this baby’s sound under the hood and will get ya 25 miles to the gallon even in the city.” Do they make “Sounds Like BS to Me” hats big enough to fit a large dinosaur?  ....



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The fact is, “today’s sophisticated technology” is by no means catastrophe proof, and now that such a catastrophe has occurred, it’s equally clear that nobody has much of an idea what to do about it in the short and critical term: perhaps the firm in question (BP) genuinely believed that there was no spill so big they couldn’t deal with it, but any such assumption was obviously mistaken. As so often, human cleverness far outstrips humanity’s capacity to deal with the contingencies such cleverness brings. There’s a well gushing deep offshore and the currents are sending a massive and, for practical purposes, inexhaustible store of oil towards the shores of America’s Gulf Coast states. It’s diabolically clever of us to drill a big hole miles offshore, but not so very clever that when it blows up and starts gushing millions of gallons of sticky stuff, it may take us weeks or even months to stanch the flow, to cap the disaster-spewing well so far below the ocean’s surface. Ah, “the deep sea swell / And the profit and loss,” so far beneath the billowing waves. Thalassa, we’ve done you a great wrong, again.

I could have added the cliché-phrase “ecologically sensitive” to the word “shores” above, but it would have been pointless because all shorelines are fragile and easily damaged to an extent that will take us years, and perhaps decades, to fix, even partially. This is likely to turn out to be another Exxon Valdiz spill, another Santa Barbara, almost another Chernobyl, though the agent of damage differs. We will clean up much of the toxic gunk with great effort and at considerable expense, and perhaps twenty or thirty years from now the Gulf will be back to normal, or nearly so. But for many marine creatures and birds, no amount of scrubbing and fixing will make any difference because they won’t be around to benefit from it: they will suffer and die silently, in the sense that they have no voice with which to tell us what we need to hear, “no language but a cry.”

The cry should be ours – in favor of moving as quickly and fully as possible away from this ugly, destructive, depletionary fossil-fuel technology as the engine of economic growth and towards sustainable forms of energy that can be retrieved or generated and distributed without damaging the world around us. It won’t be cheap or particularly easy, but when we see the results of disasters like the one now unfolding before us, it should not be thought anything other than imperative. Sustainable energy is a goal we need to set for ourselves as a society and as inhabitants of one planet – to me, it does not make sense just to stand around waiting for “the private sector” to gather enough impetus from slowly developing market incentives: that would take several decades, I suspect.