Update: In the comment thread below, Southern Beale reminds us that conservation is a collective responsibility. Wise and timely words, here is SoBe's post on How to Kick the Oil Habit.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
IF ALL THE ANIMALS CEASED TO EXIST, HUMAN BEINGS WOULD DIE OF A GREAT LONELINESS OF SPIRIT
If Chief Seattle were alive today to witness what we have done to our world, he would be shocked, heartbroken, and demoralized. When words fails, all we can do now is look upon our mighty works and despair:
Update: In the comment thread below, Southern Beale reminds us that conservation is a collective responsibility. Wise and timely words, here is SoBe's post on How to Kick the Oil Habit.
Update: In the comment thread below, Southern Beale reminds us that conservation is a collective responsibility. Wise and timely words, here is SoBe's post on How to Kick the Oil Habit.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is certainly eye popping. Now I think I'll go throw up.
ReplyDeleteThis is so moving I put it on my FB and posted a link on my blog.
ReplyDeleteIt is too sad for words. The photos are heartbreaking.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget a photo of the parking lot full of cars at the local mall.
ReplyDeleteWe need to realize these animals didn't die in vain.
They died so we could motor about and buy more useless s**T.
It is all so heartbreaking and discouraging.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I've lived long enough to understand that we never learn anything from our man-made catastrophies.
"If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?"
It's heartbreaking and makes us all furious. But to say we are to blame because we drive or heat our homes is not logical. But we MUST hold BP accountable and we must also show the GOP who choose to pussy foot around this horror, that we will not lie down and take it any more. ENOUGH greedy big oil!!! ENOUGH!!
ReplyDeleteBut we are all to blame, on some level. That's just reality. Granted we don't have the influence over our national energy policy that we'd like but each one of us has a personal choice to make every day. We can all choose to do one thing every day to lessen our consumption of fossil fuels. We can raise (or lower, depending on the season) our thermostats. We can eat less meat. We can car pool, take public transportation, ride a bike, stop using plastics as much as feasible.
ReplyDeleteAlready this country has curtailed its demand for petroleum and we can continue to drop our consumption. We can pressure our representatives in Washington to initiate policies that promote green energy and conservation.
But bottom line, we can no longer wait for politicians to act. We have to act. We have to lead the way.
It's just a fluke that this accident happened to BP. It could easily have happened to Exxon or Shell or any other company operating in the gulf. They're all evil, but we all have a role to play in this tragedy. Denying our responsibility is to say we are all powerless to change our world.
SoBe, thank you for emphasizing our collective responsibility. It is always easy to find a scapegoat for our problems and disasters but, in the end, ours is a consumer society and all of us are consumers.
ReplyDeleteWhat I do to reduce energy consumption: I have driven a hybrid car since 2004; always recycle cans, bottles, paper, and plastic; combine or delay errands to avoid unnecessary trips; live in a condo where my heating and AC costs are less than a third of what I paid when I owned a house; and shop at local farmer's markets instead of the supermarket.
On the last point, I live in Florida and one would expect supermarket oranges and other fruits and vegetables to be sourced locally. In fact, they are not. Supermarket oranges come from California, and our produce comes from as far away as Mexico and Chile. That is why I patronize local farmers' markets. Locally grown produce is fresher and tastes better, notwithstanding the economic benefit to local farmers who can use the business ... especially now.
Later I should research this on Google: How much gas can be saved by keeping tires properly inflated. If everyone cooperated on this (assuming I recall this correctly), our national gas consumption would decline by 2% per year ... which is roughly the same amount of petroleum being pumped out of the Gulf.
There is much we can do to reduce our energy consumption. Recently, SoBe has been writing about energy conservation; maybe this is where we should shift our focus ... on pooling ideas and reinforcing this message.
SoBe and Octo - excellent points all. The "energy" that used to be behind recycling, less fuel consumption and more conservation seems to have waned a bit over the last few years. Once the gas crunch and gas prices fell, people seem to have forgotten all about driving more fuel economy cars and are reverting back to the big trucks and SUVs.
ReplyDeleteAs horrendous as this spill is, maybe, just maybe, it will motivate an environmental sensitivity and movement like we've never seen before - at least for a year or so. I think we bloggers have a responsibility to educate our readers on how to adopt a more environmentally friendly life style. As SoBe says, we can't wait for Congress to act - especially with this one - but we can do our part while putting pressure on them to get off their duffs. Maybe if everone would dedicate one blog a week to the environment?
Octo - you are right. We are a consumer nation but somehow we have to learn to conserve rather than consume.
Octo:
ReplyDeleteExcellent point on the produce. Here in TN we grow strawberries, yet the strawberries in our stores are from CA and FL.
Last year I joined a co-op that provides locally grown organic produce and yes, even meats. The produce is excellent and it's all grown right outside of Nashville. Unfortunately it is almost prohibitively expensive. I can't afford to do all my shopping there, much as I wish I could. I did start growing my own tomatoes and peppers.
The biggest thing I did to help the planet was put a 5 kW solar array on our roof last year. It pretty much generates all of our electricity though we buy green power switch units from the utility to make up the difference.
I'm now in a waiting list for a Nissan Leaf, the electric car that supposedly comes out in December. I love the idea of an all-electric vehicle and want to look at enlarging my solar array so I'm using solar to power my battery not coal.
By the way, on the farmer's markets: I noticed our farmer's market carries fruits from Chile, Mexico, etc. Very disappointing. Seems they get all their stuff from the same distributor here.
ReplyDeleteSoBe: I think a lot of that depends on the season. Too early in or too late out, locally grown fruits and plants just aren't as available as they are in warmer climates.
ReplyDeleteMeant "fruits and veggies."
ReplyDeleteA lot of the produce that comes out of Mexico and parts south come from farms and plantations owned by Americans who used to own U.S. land. They moved south of the border bacause land and labor are cheaper! Get that Arid-zone-a?
A dino-thought:
ReplyDeleteI don't believe liberals and environmentalists like myself can make any headway against the devastation by mainly advocating that people reduce their consumption profiles. As I see it, the only way out and up is to change our technology and approach to "clean and responsible" instead of the dirty and irresponsible approach to energy we now take. We should be able to have a thriving economy without ruining the planet or exploiting everyone else.
I just say this because back in the sixties and seventies, it seems like a lot of people were suggesting a wholesale rejection of consumer culture. If one tells people they can't buy lots of things and travel wherever they like, they'll ignore the suggestion, so achieving a sustainable life has to revolve mainly around excellent application of tech and sound macro-level planning; not enough people will make (or be able to make, given economic constraints, if they're living on the edge) the individual choices -- buy local, etc. -- that might make a difference.
The best choice any individual can make, in my view, is not to vote for the chuckleheads who keep advocating the perpetuation of our current bad-tech ways. That's easier said than done, I know -- to some extent, they ALL seem to be advocating this perpetuation, or at best they think we ought to transition to the clean stuff over some agonizingly long period, which sounds great until you realize that the period in question may be inadequate to avert a world-wide catastrophe.
I do think voting the rascals out of office is vitally important but all the other actions are part of the equation and, taken as a whole, are just as important.
ReplyDeletetnlib, I think what Bloggingdino is trying to tell us is that it is difficult to reduce one's energy footprint when you are a very large dinosaur.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, at 3,000 lbs. I don't have a very light footprint of any kind....
ReplyDeleteI remember the 1973 crunch, too – those long lines, reports of people siphoning gas from one another’s cars. I wasn’t an adult at the time, but I remember it well.
What explains the cultural forgetfulness we are referencing? Seems like a bit of Nietzsche is in order today: “the necessity of forgetting for life,” and all that. He liked to point out just how ruthless human cultures are when it comes to forgetting whatever they need to forget. People are mostly oriented towards the present and their projections of a felicitous future – the past quickly ceases to be of much interest to them, other than as an occasional curiosity. So maybe that’s why it’s so easy for these cycles of irresponsibility to keep returning: does one generation ever really transmit its wisdom (if, that is, it has any) to the next? Seems to me that the transmission is either spotty or garbled or almost non-existent, and every new generation ends up having to learn all sorts of lessons one would think they might have been spared the need to learn. Experience, as Wilde’s Lord Henry Wotton says, “is the name we give to our mistakes.”
All of which is why I think the case needs to be made at high levels, hard and urgently, that we need to transition with something like moon-race intensity away from the fossil fuels that have been and are the cause of so many potentially fatal problems. If this sounds like shock theory or legislation by catastrophe, so be it. In a year or two, after the responsible parties have put out a nice feel-good misinformation blitz to tell us how safe deep-water drilling is, and after we have done a halfway decent job of cleaning up at least the most obvious traces and effects of the Gulf oil disaster, the majority will promptly forget the whole thing ever happened, and their only concern will be that gas prices be kept low. Most people just accept the choices offered them by the society and economic order in which they live – Americans like to think of themselves as cowboy-hat wearing, tobaccy-juice-spitting individualists, but most are no such thing. They’re passive. This whole business of cultural transmission of experience and wisdom is certainly the cause of much “vexation of spirit” for anyone who has tried to get to the bottom of it.
The reason I think anti-consumption campaigns are never going to work is simple: the objects we make and purchase and use/consume fill an existential void in our lives. People will continue to want them and won’t listen to those who tell them they shouldn’t have them, or that they should have fewer of them. Reducing one’s denominator to zero so that even the smallest numerator yields infinity, as Carlyle advocated (though in a different context) has never been popular, and however excellent Marx’s analysis of “the fetishism of the commodity” may be (it’s a favorite of mine), every culture has probably found its own special way to fetishize objects and use them as vehicles for the achievement of desire. I honestly don’t think the problem lies with the desire for lots of things – the problem is the thoughtless modes and materials involved in producing, distributing and transporting those things. Getting us away from fossil fuels quickly and thoroughly would be an incalculable gain for humanity.
bloggingdino, an interesting perspective on the Nature vs Nietzsche argument, one that has support among unlikely disciplines - behavioral, neurochemical, even theological.
ReplyDeleteI don’t have the link right now, but I recall a recent study on political behavior that demonstrated a tendency among study subjects to cling tenaciously to partisan viewpoints even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We certainly do not need a behavioral study to confirm what we know of wingnuts.
Behold the power of dopamine, those neurotransmitters present in both vertebrates and invertebrates that function as a kind of ‘reward system’ in the brain. Dopamine makes us dopey with enjoyment and reinforces our craving for anything that confers pleasure, i.e. alcohol, drugs, food, sex, thrills and chills, or whatever floats the Captain’s boat. Increases of dopamine in the mesolimbic reward pathway seem to play a role in addiction behaviors.
In nature, of course, an invertebrate such an octopus, or a mighty Dino, have the same chemical propensity to indulge our pleasure centers; but the struggle to survive in competition with other creatures keeps us in check ... and lean and mean. Human beings, OTOH, have an uncanny ability to exploit nature on their terms with no moderation or consideration to the have-nots among them. Even their house pets have the ungainly appearance of a wingnut. How can one justify Huge Ugly Monsters Mainly Eating Resources just to intimidate their own kind on the road.
From a theological viewpoint, I am thinking of hardened hearts when I see photos of distressed and dying creatures, and how callous human beings can deceive, dissemble, or dismiss this tragedy, and the voices that will surely return to demand a resumption of: Drill baby drill. It reminds me of the story of how Pharaoh’s heart was hardened to execute a divine plan. Hardening of the heart is a negation of Free Will.
Whether driven by inner impulses, or acting as players on the historical stage, human beings have little capacity to make moral choices beyond their immediate comforts and addicitions. So I guess you are right about the Nature vs Nietzsche argument. Nothing will really change unless change is forced upon them, and it always amazes me how much suffering a human being is willing to endure before freeing onself from bondage.