Maybe this oil mess is not bad enough to make us change. The good intentions of people who want to preserve life on the planet are up against a bloodless system that seeks only this quarter's profit. Fleshy people are vulnerable and sympathetic. Corporations are legal fictions that exist in an abstract world of spreadsheets and digital stock trades. They don't care because they can't care. Even if they wanted to care they would be sued for failing in their fiduciary duty.
Nature has a huge capacity to absorb the assault we make upon it. Massive as this BP crime is, the whole ocean is not going to die right now in response. Life is resilient and tenacious. We are wounded, scarred and suffering, yet we will survive. Like the frog in a pot of water, we adjust as the heat rises and rises.
I trust my own senses. I have seen oil production. I have walked on the grounds of a refinery. Not a blade of grass grows. Not a pigeon, dandelion, ant, cockroach, . . . nothing lives there except human enablers of the machine. And they leave every chance they get. And they die there by chance too.
I have walked in wild nature (or at least as wild as it can be in the 21st century.) It was not as comfortable as sitting in air conditioned comfort watching the nature channel. Some part of me prefers this comfort. I'd rather drive my own car to my son's school and on to work. I can do all this in half an hour. On bike or bus it would be three times that and quite a hassle. And yet, and yet, and yet . . . I was alive in wildness. I was full, overflowing, thrilled, surprised, calmed and whole.
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