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I can't help thinking about that oil gushing into the gulf. It darkens my dreams like smoke from a burning forest. My eyes sting, my throat burns, I'm choking, panicky. Stop, I want to scream, stop, but it won't stop. On and on it pours.
The Gulf is not my particular shore, but it is our shore, our country's, our earth's. Think if you owned a nice little house there, which you'd saved up for, and paid off, and your kids loved it and called it home. You remember the long days swimming and the ducks and snakes in the marshes and the sweet smells of morning and now suddenly, all is grimed and deadened and abhorrent, a toxic zone, until the end of time.
It is easy to get mad at BP, and we should, for their failures to take proper care. It is easy to get mad at government for promising to fix the unfixable. There will be hearings and lawsuits and legislation and penalties and appeals and insurance squabbles till today's kindergarteners graduate from college. The legal consequences, like the environmental consequences of this calamity, will go on and on.
We will get mad at anybody in sight, because that's how anger behaves. It keeps lashing out till it exhausts itself and this anger will take a long time to subside. We will blame everybody but the person most responsible. We don't want to blame that person. We'll glance in the mirror and say, no, it wasn't you who destroyed our planet. You wouldn't have done such a thing.
But it was you and I and all of us who endorse and encourage our reckless consumer culture that gobbles all that energy and spends and spends on our comforts and pleasures while ignoring the inevitable costs. Did any of us doubt, in our heart of hearts, that this spill would come and worse disasters in the future? If you dump all the guck into our rivers and skies and drill to depths beyond human reach; if you throw away all that shrink-wrap and Styrofoam and infuse your lawns with toxins to thwart insects; if you continually spend more of earth's resources than you replenish, isn't a day of reckoning inevitable?
I'm no angel when it comes to the environment. I mix my soda cans with my trash and drive a gas guzzler (but I love it so!). I prefer plastic grocery bags to paper because sometimes the paper ones leak. Jane and I accumulate waste at the rate of about 13 gallons a day. When we've got three 13 gallon plastic bags, we gather them into a 45 gallon plastic bag, which I knot and lug to our bin. I think nothing of it. And if, on the rare moment, I do think about what I'm doing, I pardon myself with an easy shrug. Am I breaking the law? Am I being evil? No way! Nothing I can do will make a measurable difference so I do nothing. I'm innocent. Geez, I don't even drive a Hummer!
Environmental activists argue that if we all changed our behavior we'd make a dent in these problems. They're correct, of course. It is also correct that if pigs had wings, they might fly. Truth is, we won't inconvenience ourselves or change our lives until we have to. Some folks will good people of conscience but the majority won't, and sooner or later, the good people will start to feel like fools for complicating their lives to no end.
What will save us from ourselves? Count me a pessimist. I doubt anything can. My hunch is that we will keep manufacturing mechanisms for mass destruction and one day they'll all start malfunctioning and that will be that. The great human experiment that wondrous five-millennium moment, which brought us the Pyramids and Manhattan and Mozart will vanish like the dinosaurs, leaving only rubble. Nice try, people, but no luck.
If something prevents our species' suicide, it will be a big big scare, big enough to make us recognize our mistake. It will be our kids and grandkids facing certain incineration. It will be our oceans so filthy we need gasmasks to walk the beach. It will be the flooding of coastal cities because of icecaps melting and the transformation of farmlands into deserts. It will be malformed uteruses and mangled mentalities and such loss of joy and security that life hardly seems worth the struggle.
Big changes in human behavior do not occur gradually. They come in lurches. Something spectacular happens that wakes us into changing our ways.
The BP oil spill is looking like our worst ecological catastrophe ever. But it won't hold the top spot for long. There will be another twice as bad, then another ten times as bad, then maybe, before it's too late, humanity gets the message and says, "Wait a minute, we like life, we want to hang around for awhile." This is a prayer, not a prediction. I wouldn't bet on it. But we can always hope.
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