We'll be living for decades, or longer, with the consequences of the BP disaster. That much seems clear. So the question now is, how -- how will we proceed after Deepwater Horizon? What lessons will we take in and use?
Randy Kennedy, in the New York Times' Week in Review suggests one possibility. He likens BP's reckless pursuit of oil to the obsession that brought down Captain Ahab in his pursuit of Moby-Dick. The lesson we still haven't learned, Kennedy implies, is a moral one: the dangers lurking not only in oil hunters' greed and in the hubris of believing we can control nature, but in our own self-indulgence as well.
Kennedy closes with the admonition from Columbia University's Melville expert Andrew Delbanco -- that the BP horror is in part of our own making because, "we want our comforts but we don't want to know too much about...what makes them possible." In the same issue, Thomas Friedman seconds the point in his it's-our-fault column "This Time is Different."
While greed, hubris and denial have contributed to the worst single environmental catastrophe in our history, to suggest they are "causes" gets us nowhere. A character diagnosis is the evasion, the real denial, we can't afford.
For one, it leads to despair -- since few of us can imagine the end of human greed, hubris, or our tendency to deny what's uncomfortable.
Worse, the diagnosis diverts us from the first essential step in avoiding continuing global ecocide: that we accept what we now know about our nature and work with that. We know, for example, that concentrated power and lack of transparency bring out the very worst in us. Yet we've fallen for an economic and political doctrine with rules certain to speed both.
Nowhere is that concentration more evident than in the fossil fuel industries, where, in 2004, just five companies controlled two thirds of gasoline sales. Their economic might dwarfs that of most countries. Such concentrated economic power infuses and distorts political decision making in its interests.
So we've ended up creating the systemic danger FDR warned us against: "the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than their [the people's] democratic state itself." That "in its essence, is fascism," he told Congress in 1938. Such concentrated power is at the root of what has greased not only massive public subsidies for Big Oil -- pushing aside safer, renewable energies -- but also BP's ability to stack up egregious safety violations with impunity.
Corporate lobbyists for companies like BP have become so powerful, that in 2009, for every single legislator elected to look out for our common interests, two dozen, mostly corporate, lobbyists spent $3.5 billion working Congress for their private interests. That sum has doubled in less than a decade.
We humans can't change our nature but we can change the rules that bring out the worst in our nature.
So rather than focusing on "greed or hubris" as a cause of this disaster, let's tackle the systemic problem that lets these traits triumph: rules that encourage concentrated power - such as those tolerating monopoly power and corporate secrecy -- and its sway over public choices.
Let our takeaway from the BP nightmare be that we as a people get serious about removing the power of private wealth in our nation's governance: enacting, for example, the Fair Elections Now Acts, pending in both houses of Congress that would usher in voluntary public financing of congressional elections.
Only as we move to democratic accountability do we have a fighting chance to enact commonsense rules to keep power dispersed, mandate transparency, and align our need for energy resources and basic fairness with nature's unbendable rules. This, not redesigning our nature, is the road to preventing another Deepwater Horizon.
If I'm right, maybe I need to become more nuanced in my objections to a focus on character; for there is part of our moral makeup that sure needs fortification: courage. To move toward democracy by and for the people, and against established interests, takes guts.
Yes, we've been told that the "meek shall inherit the earth," but I've become convinced that if that turns out to be true, it will be a scorched earth. The only human beings who will be able to inherit a flourishing earth are the courageous. So let's bulk up our civil courage and go for real democracy.
Frances Moore Lappé is the author of Getting a Grip 2: Clarity, Creativity and Courage for the World We Really Want (March 2010) and 17 other books, beginning with the three-million copy Diet for a Small Planet. Find more on living democracy at the Small Planet Institute.
Follow Frances Moore Lappe on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fmlappe
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We are craven maniacs for quick fixes and simple solutions, whether it be easy credit or 'Drill, Baby, Drill'. We have lost our collective moral compasses; disengaged from civilized, intelligent public discourse; and twittered our way into the most banal of existences.
We point our fingers at anyone other than ourselves for the problems that WE have created. We expect to much accountability and responsibility from everyone BUT ourselves, whether it be our politicians, our teachers, our employers.
We gorge ourselves on fast food, easy credit, cheap oil, and then bemoan the fact that we are fat, lazy, and broke.
In short, we are HYPOCRITES.
We are the enemy and only when we face that enemy will we ever have a chance of breaking him.
The question Frances Lappe raises is: why do we allow such greed to grow, unchecked, when we know ways to limit it? Greed will happen. But it can be limited by putting in place clear legal and social rules that inhibit greed. As Lappe points out, concentrated power and anonymity, such as we now permit, leads to greedy behavior. Just look at today's news item on the power that the IRA is having over the DISCLOSE bill. That bill requires those who pay for political ads to identify themselves in the ads. It appears that this rule will apply to virtually everyone -- except the NRA. That is a totally unreasonable exemption that has been designed just for them. They seem to have the power to make it happen. Just about all the "good guys" have buckled under. It is another example of no guts.
Greed will happen. But we know how to limit it. We need the courage to assert the power of citizens over the power of such vested interests. No better time than now. No better issue that the DISCLOSE bill now before Congress.
And so the cycle continues.
And if you don't work for a solution, you are part of the problem.
They wanted as much money as possible by doing as little as possible. They didnt care about the safety risks...they just wanted as much oil as possible through any means
"The meek shall inherit the earth"-- Who would else would want it after the greedy have finished with it?