The horror in the Gulf has prompted a lot of outrage directed at BP and the government, but what responsibility do we the people have for this disaster?
There is a saying that when you point the finger of blame at someone, 3 fingers point back at yourself. Why was BP looking for oil 5000 feet down in the ocean in the first place? The easy answer is: to make money. But the rock-bottom reason is: to feed an addiction. Our addiction.
The drilling and the killing of the earth will never stop until we the people rise up and say – and show – that we don’t need to get in our cars every day. That we will carpool, walk, bike, or take the bus. That we will fly only for emergency needs. That we will give up foods from across the country or halfway around the world. That we will stop and consider the true costs behind the things we buy. That we will do whatever we must to protect and honor the immense gift of this world.
Easily-accessed oil is a thing of the past – now we’re squeezing oil out of tar sands, ripping apart shale, and going to extreme depths to drill. Fracturing shale can contaminate groundwater, and extracting oil from tar sands requires the destruction of forests while producing 3-5 times the emissions of conventional oil refining. And now we’re seeing the price of deep water drilling.
We can sign all the petitions we want to hold people to account but until we recognize our own culpability and pay more than lip service to the need to change, politicians and corporations will not take us seriously. Because they know we’re addicted. They know we don’t really want to make the changes that life with less oil requires.
Are they right? Are we too weak to give up the poison that is killing us, along with the earth that sustains us?
A new way starts with us. Government and corporations will continue business as usual as long as we remain hooked. We have to say, and prove by our actions, that what we need and want is clean air to breathe and water to drink. Healthy oceans and soil. A bountiful diversity of creatures enlivening our days. A planet not fouled and sickened by our presence.
IT STARTS WITH US.
…and from Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute: “This is what the end of the oil age looks like. The cheap, easy petroleum is gone; from now on, we will pay steadily more and more for what we put in our gas tanks—more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a failed foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in the lost integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet. The only solution is to do proactively, and sooner, what we will end up doing anyway as a result of resource depletion and economic, environmental, and military ruin: end our dependence on the stuff.”
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