Shell-Shocked

I haven't written for about a month now, and it came to me last night what may be the reason why. I think I'm suffering from some kind of PTSD-like trauma-induced haze following the start of this massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

It's out there, spewing oil into the sea with nothing to contain it, washing up onto the fragile marshlands of the Louisiana coast as of today, and there seems to be nothing I can--or we can--do to stop it.

As with any great environmental catastrophe, the media has turned to hand-wringing and finger-pointing as the crisis deepens and intensifies. Our culture of guilt seems geared towards blaming someone, and the blame gets passed around in endless cycles like a game of hot potato. BP is now saying the Federal Government has been negligent in its failure to adequately respond to the crisis. The Federal Government says BP should have had some contingency plan in place for just such a disaster, while most acknowledge that the absence of Federal regulations requiring such a contingency plan might explain why there was no such plan in place.

Blah, blah, blah. More people talk and an aquatic ecosystem succumbs daily to the encroaching swells of an oily annihilation.

Hair collected in salons across the U.S. to be used to soak up oil are instead sitting in warehouses on the coast. BP, while using the plastic booms, has also been treating the spill with "oil dispersants," which are nearly as toxic as the oil itself. The EPA, in recommending that BP use the "least toxic" dispersant possible, acknowledges that all dispersants are toxic and we are simply treating poisons with more poison.

So I'm numb. I want every off-shore drilling rig shut down and dismantled. I want every oil executive crucified on the steps of Capitol Hill. I want every "drill here, drill now," fatheaded Republican toolbag doused in the toxic sludge washing into the Lousiana wetlands and set on fire, so we can use their bodies as a searchlight to retrieve pelicans from the muck at night.

Most of all, I want everyone to acknowledge that even the most high-tech solution to solving our energy problems, our food problems, our land use problems, our waste problems, our toxification problems, no matter how "sophisticated" that technology may be, is only going to be one more agent of ecocide when our system of rapidly increasing complexity starts to cave in on itself.

The bottom is beginning to fall out. This bubbling geyser of ancient sunlight is a harbinger of the dark things to come.