Seeing the suffocating animals in the Gulf is making me want to leave the planet. The picture of the pelican gulping for air on the home page of nytimes.com was enough to give any who saw it a visceral feeling of what it would be like to be coated with oil so that it was impossible to breathe. Where do we put our grief from witnessing such suffering? How do we handle such loss?
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the five stages of grief as a way to help in the process of recovery from terrible loss. It is quite clear the geyser in the Gulf has me touching all the stages of grief -- except acceptance, the fifth stage.
The first stage of grief is denial. This is the "this can't be happening" stage. I'm right there, every time I think of the photo of the pelican, of the decimation of the Gulf Coast culture, livelihoods and ways of life.
The second stage of grief is anger, and we collectively have plenty of that to go around about this situation. This is the "I can't accept this" stage. Fortunately enough people in the Gulf states have vocalized their anger that more help is being shored up, but the geyser still gushes. Given that I don't live on the Gulf Coast, my anger is a bit more abstract and makes me wish for a complete reckoning for Cheney's secretive energy policies. It is painful to be a human.
So what about the third stage, the bargaining stage? In the case of the catastrophe in the Gulf, with whom do we bargain? The government? Oil companies?
Depression is the hallmark of the fourth stage of grief. I expect we are all dipping in and out of this when we think about the Gulf. After all, the situation brings us face to face with the practice of putting untested and untried enterprises into production without heed of the consequences. The world absolutely needs to practice The Precautionary Principle instead. But will we ever learn?
Acceptance is the fifth stage of recovery from grief. Is it possible to accept the dying birds and ruined marshes?
One person has reached this high pinnacle of grief resolution about environmental degradation and been able to move on productively: the primatologist Jane Goodall. I once heard her speak, and if anybody knows about grief due to humans' impact on the Earth, it must be her. How can she bear it when she hears about her beloved chimpanzee's being slaughtered? How can she stand to hear about the bushmeat trade? When someone in the audience asked her that question, she answered, "I just do the best I can every day."
A friend notes to heed His Holiness the Dalai Lama's words: "Our hearts fill with compassion or bodichitta to move us to alleviate the suffering of all beings. How we each do that is up to us."
Jane Goodall's quote sat on my desk for a number of years. I need to put it back. I must admit I am wavering between stepping up the grief ladder to do the best I can every day, to bringing healing where I can, and wanting to disown humanity. The pain of our wrongs is hard to handle.
Please share how you are coping with your grief about the Gulf disaster. There is no right or wrong about feelings of grief, just that they need to be cared for with compassion.
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Jim Beaver: 'Life's That Way': Grieving Change
The last straw for me was today, when I saw the photo and headline on MSNBC's home page, that
the oil is now 100 or more degrees on the beach in LA and the oil soaked birds are cooking! Lord
what a HORROR!
So I went to my daughter and told her I wanted to go help...she said I should go.
So I have spent many hours on the net, trying to find a place to actually go and volunteer..it
is very hard, because they don't want untrained people, and the gulf residents get first dibs...that makes sense...but I actually got a real person who took my info down at this site:
http://www.fws.gov/home/dhoilspill/whatyou.html
It's the feds fish and wildlife site....they could just be being courteous, but who knows.
The other links I found, send you to the states themselves, and there you just go in circles...ultimately, being told to volunteer in your area, or donate money. I am not employed and
can't afford to even go...also, I live in Portland Oregon....but if I could really be helpful, I would go...anyone had similar experiences trying to volunteer?
http://www.greenchicafe.com/the-best-blogs-on-how-to-help-the-gulf
Many offer volunteer opportunities
As someone who was diagnosed with breast cancer and almost died five years ago, I know firsthand about the five stages of grief.
With the oil spill, I am still stuck in the anger stage. I feel that our society has a lot more control over environmental disasters than I had over my illness.
Maybe I am wrong, but I feel that our short sightedness and greed are making us blind to our long term health and survival.
http://graciouslivingdaybyday.com/2010/04/06/six-month-checkup/
The gusher in the Gulf may have the potential to trigger a Global Warming tipping point, a far greater catastrophe than is currently imagined.
An oceanographer states that: “Trapped in water pockets, the oil from Deepwater Horizon will ride the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic.”
A scientist has written “…a thin petroleum film floating on the surface of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans …will also impede water evaporation. If the solar energy that evaporates water is blocked, the only alternative is for the surface water temperature to rise. Warmer water will accelerate Arctic Ocean melting … mammals such as polar bears …will probably not survive."
See Life Threatening Danger at http://www.aesopinstitute.org
Kevin Costner has been supporting development of a centrifuge which can clean up oil. These should be in round-the-clock production, on as massive a scale as possible and deployed as rapidly as they are completed.
Here are links to short videos that illustrate a little known way to dramatically attack the oil itself, as well as the damage to wildlife and marshes resulting from the oil gusher.
http://thejaghunter.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/bioremediation-six-weeks/
http://www.ospreybiotechnics.com/fox13.html
Methane in the arctic may conceivably soon pass a tipping point, which could extinguish millions of human lives in a matter of a few years.
Several alternatives are pregnant. See Moving Beyond Oil and Running on Water on the Aesop website!