This Is The Moment Of True Change
At first the idea of this oil spill in the Gulf seemed comprehensible. I'd long wondered what would happen if one of those giant pipes stretching a mile down to the ocean floor ruptured. Had heard about such fears during Katrina and other hurricanes racing through the area over time. I had read about the great spill off the Campeche coast that took nine months to quell, and the millions of barrels let loose into the Persian Gulf during our first war with Iraq in the early 1990s. I recalled coming across stories about a 60 acre lake of oil that surfaced in California when a gusher went wild for several years, while researching background stirred up by the wild tales of greed underlying the recent film, There Will Be Blood.
Everyone seemed to be doing all they could to shut the thing down. The contraptions and plans seemed wildly inventive, but also wildly optimistic as images of blackened turtles and sea birds, mucked-up marshes and angry fishermen from an area we had visited several times, and grew to love, kept flooding the mind.
That's when the endless video of the oil gushing started showing. And the metaphors started shifting around.
Instead of this being the simple rupturing of a man-made vessel with a finite amount of toxic materials let loose on a landscape, which some of our angriest pundits were saying was still a bigger danger than any deep sea drilling, people started talking about having scratched open a scab and let loose a Pandora's Box of trouble on the world. Simultaneously, predictions for a worse-than-usual hurricane season fast approaching led many to begin speaking in apocalyptic tones.
Within this context, continuing critical assertions of blame backed with calls for even more drilling in other sensitive areas have started to look more and more disingenuous, and have largely stopped by the time we go to press. References are now being made to what was done back in the late 1970s, when the Ixtoc Spill started lapping up onto Texas beaches and thousands of sea turtles were airlifted to new homes. Early assertions that the Persian Gulf spill wasn't as bad as originally predicted have been reversed and suddenly, the idea of environmentalism has risen once again to the forefront of many minds.
Following the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 - a minor one in the context of all that's come since - the nation, under President Nixon's leadership of all people, created a powerful Environmental Protection Agency. A time of growing government responsibilities for the health and welfare of all citizens took over the nation, and world... at least until Santa Barbara's Ronald Reagan rode to the White House 10 years later and started deregulating everything he could, and never mentioning Ixtoc in his campaigning.
Now, we're suspecting the shift away from carbon fuels will accelerate, no matter a few expected set-backs, political and industrial, as our course shifts significantly. The idea of gas drilling in the watershed is doomed... although folks need to stay wary here and in surrounding areas as those businesses still tied to its profits - like wounded beats pushed into corners - continue to fight for their "rights" however wrong-headed.
There's a sad inevitability to all this. What have we been thinking, picking such scabs without any deep thought to what we were doing?
I suspect that, more than 2008, we'll look back at this current season, this 2010, as a time for real change. And we're not talking politics, now, but ones based on livelihood, on the very foundations of all that is civilization.
PS