Tuesday, May 18, 2010

The Planet Is Having A Stroke
How Soon Will We Be Crying Tears Of Oil?



When you think of the earth as a living thing, it is having a stroke. With the Gulf Oil Catastrophe, instead of blood leaking into places where it should not be, the fluid is oil.

How is this any different from that of a person or animal? A stroke incident is serious. Parts of tissue dies, and it is often fatal.

I'm guessing that it won't be long before people from Texas to Florida, Cuba, and the eastern coast of Mexico, will smell the stench of the dead. Just look at a map and the affected areas. Trillions of lives lost, algae and other sea plant life, fish, sea turtles, dolphins, octopuses, and birds.

Rotting away in a watery mass grave.

One of the strategies has been to add a chemical dispersant to the water. The problem with this is it keeps oxygen out of it. Ocean life needs that to breath. The problem is compounded.

And then I think of the dynamics of rain.

Moisture rises from oceans, forms clouds, which make rain. What will the rain be like in those areas a month or three months from now?

Will it rain oil?

Will people find clumps of tar on their cars and roofs?

How will the chemicals and oil residue in the rain affect agriculture? Will Florida oranges begin to smell and taste funny? Is our food production imperiled?

What happens to all the inland animals that eat the plants which soak up the rain? Most of us eat animals, and if they're contaminated, how will that affect our health?

Our fresh water reservoirs are refreshed by rain. This is the water we drink. How can it not be affected?

Just thinking of hurricane season - which is all about rain and wind - makes me unbearably sad, and nervous for the near and far future. I live in the DC area, but when a hurricane is powerful enough in the south, often a few days later it's windy and rainy up here. I'm no expert, but my intuition screams at me that this can't possibly be good under the circumstances.

I think the broadcast news media isn't covering this story as non-stop as they should, not only because of corporate interests, but because it frightens and pains them too on a primitive, fear-of-death level.

I have barely been able to read or write this about myself. Most of the times when I've tried in the past three weeks, I felt paralyzed. It's like looking at the sun, you know it's there, but it's too painful to stare at directly. Unlike the sun, however, this is a catastrophe that brings death, not life.

Albert Einstein once said, “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”

If this planetary stroke cannot be stopped soon by the greatest minds in the world, we may all be crying tears of oil later, and maybe sooner than later.


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5 comments:

  1. I've been wonidering too just how far and wide that mess is going to spread. Oil in the Keys already, I hear . . . And then, there will be refugees, who've lost livelihoods because of this.

    I think it's a huge disaster; we probably haven't even begun to realize how huge.

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  2. Macon, You may be right. I hadn't even thought of refuges outside of the US, just the beach front property dwellers on the Gulf Coastal areas or within a few miles if the stench gets too bad.

    We can smell one dead animal a few feet away in the bushes, so I imagine the stench of a dead ocean will be far worse than that. Hope not...

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  3. Sad thought indeed KIT, but you maybe right. All of this can mean no good in the long run.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I lived in Louisiana for almost 9 years of my life. As beautiful and unique a place as it is, it's environment just that delicate as well. With all that oil in the gulf, it can't be good for the gulf and everything that lives in it.

    Shrimps gonna cost a mint this summer.

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  5. The messed up thing about this entire situation IMO is how little attention anyone seems to paying to it. By and large there really is not a great deal of media coverage considering how great the impact this is. Sigh...

    Another great post as usual.

    ReplyDelete

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