Time to dig that old summer camp song out of the trunk: "There's a hole in the bottom of the sea, there's a hole in the bottom of the sea, there's a hole, there's a hole...." Only now it's morphed into a nightmarish dirge: "There's a hole in the belly of the world, there's a hole in the belly of the world..." and the hole really is at the very bottom of the sea, five thousand feet down; and through it, our planet is discharging into our oceans at a rate of hundreds of thousands of barrels a day a fossil fuel treasure created over hundreds of thousands of years
We've literally poked a hole in our earth's skin, punctured its innards, and are now helplessly watching as its vital fluids gush into the planet's ocean mantle, threatening to despoil the very waters from which our living species once came and that is the source and substance of all life.
We are trying to plug the hole, but it is way too far down, way too vulnerable to pressure and cold for the bleeding to be staunched. Imagine open heart surgery on a patient at the bottom of a deep well where the doctors must operate as they stand around the well opening. Imagine tying the shoes of a running man after your hands and feet have been chopped off.
We will eventually (very eventually) find ways to plug the hole, after enormous environmental damage is wrought. But will we have learned the lesson? No, not the lesson about corporate greed or government duplicity or human obliviousness, but the one about hubris. The lesson whose moral is:
STOP POKING HOLES IN OUR EARTH!
The issue is our hubris -- our age-old tendency to delude ourselves that we have answers when we don't, that fire isn't flammable, that technology and tools are omnipotent when they will always be subject to the our own defining frailties.
STOP POKING HOLES IN OUR EARTH!
When we poke holes in deep rock, we fracture stone, catalyze earthquakes, and poison ground water. When we puncture earth's skin in deep water, it's impossible to apply a fix at all. And even when we succeed in poking holes without incident, we avoid immediate pollution of earth and water only to assure eventual pollution of air and atmosphere. What is transpiring today in the Gulf of Mexico far below is a prelude to what will happen tomorrow far above, when we spew the residue of safely drilled fossil fuels into the air. Perhaps the gift of the Gulf is that we can see and feel what we have done in the water, wring our hands over spoiled environment, while we do not see and cannot feel what we do daily to the atmosphere with the poisonous fumes left over from our misuse of fossils fuels.
STOP POKING HOLES IN OUR EARTH!
For energy, use the sun that is all around us, no hole-poking needed; use the ubiquitous wind, no hole-poking required; use the tides and hydro-power water affords us, no hole-poking necessary.
STOP POKING HOLES IN OUR EARTH! It is our world we are killing, one puncture at a time.
Follow Benjamin R. Barber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/BenjaminRBarber
Really?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TNV89PxS-I
If climate change becomes recognized as the planetary life-threatening emergency, that it appears it could become when coupled with this oil catastrophe, strong suggestions need to be listened to and urgently turned into action.
A White House command center, staffed by the most able individuals who can be found, to develop strategy and tactics appropriate to the cataclysm, seems necessary.
This calls for the kind of bold leadership so far been lacking.
The half-measures taken are totally insufficient.
This is a national emergency with potentially planetary impact - if a tipping point is reached with massive, unstoppable, Methane release, earth could experience a wipe-out of most life.
This has happened twice before, 55 million and 251 million years ago, probably caused by volcanic eruptions. Life on earth was once reduced to single-celled organisms.
As John Atcheson wrote in Ticking Time Bomb: "According to the U.S. Geological Survey, burning fossil fuels releases more than 150 times the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by volcanoes - the equivalent of nearly 17,000 additional volcanoes the size of Hawaii's Kilauea."
Add to the Greenhouse Gases emitted by human activity, the potential additional warming effect in the arctic, a consequence of a thin oil sheen in the Atlantic that could result from this catastrophe.
See Worst Case Scenario and Ticking Time Bomb http://www.aesopinstitute.org
Might human survival be at stake? Poke no more holes...
We have to keep on top of the President's Commission charged with investigating this and get as much info as possible out into the public. Then if they continue to drill, there have to be disaster plans which are so well rehearsed, so well equipped, that they find it to expensive to do the drilling in the first place. That is the only way I see the necessary resources going into adaptations to a post petroleum based society. I thought Pres. Obama would be the leader in this enormous undertaking, shifting us away from oil and fossil fuel. We may still have a chance under this President if he can get a bit excited and commit himself to getting it done. I agree we have to keep up the independent, grass roots pressure for MAJOR CHANGE, not just more of the same blah blah blah that inevitably ends up with catastrophes like Exxon Valdez, the breaking of the dikes in N'orleans during Katrina, and this latest horrendous disaster at the Horizon Rig site in the Gulf of Mexico.