Ancient Oceans: The Planet’s Plunder Will Continue in the Name of Progress
by Robert C. Koehler
“Salt remnants of ancient oceans flow through our veins . . .”
Now, along with endangered species, the Gulf spill has given us a new category: endangered oceans.
The challenges presented by the disaster lay before us in their incomprehensible enormity. To what extent have the hundreds of thousands of gallons of the highly toxic dispersant Corexit 9500 that BP has poured into the Gulf aggravated the ecological horror? How will hurricane season complicate the cleanup? Will the flow of crude continue till Christmas? How many cleanup workers have gotten sick, and why? Might the “relief well” also blow?
We can’t solve our problems, as Einstein said, with the same kind of thinking we used to create them. This sums up the situation for me as well as anything – and pushes my despair up against the door of possibility. We’re at the far edge of the industrial age: the age of fossil fuels. How do we proceed beyond it?
I opened this column with the words of Theodore Roszak, who coined the term “ecopsychology” in his 1992 book, The Voice of the Earth. The concept puts human beings back into context. We are children of the earth – literally. “Making a personality, the task that Jung called ‘individuation,’ may be the adventure of a lifetime,” Roszak writes. “But the person is anchored within a greater, universal identity.”
This is my meditation for the day: the trans-human context in which we freely create ourselves. This context binds us to the Gulf of Mexico and its fragile ecosystems, which may be in a danger we can scarcely imagine. We have not reacted to this with indifference – with a cold shrug. Our well-being is profoundly at stake. The ancient ocean within us stirs.
Maybe what we’re seeing in the Gulf is the mirror of something internal. Maybe the deep alienation we feel from nature, from our trans-human parentage, contributes to the psychosis and dysfunctionality of our species.
Roszak writes: “The ecological ego matures toward a sense of ethical responsibility with the planet that is as vividly experienced as our ethical responsibility to other people. It seeks to weave that responsibility into the fabric of social relations and political decisions.”
I read this and think about the wars and violence that circle the globe. Maybe this insanity begins with our decision to dominate Mother Nature – and once that sense of fundamental respect is broken, moral relativism is all we have left.
“Forgive me, all life forms of the Gulf, and all exquisitely unique and diverse sentient beings,” writes James O’Dea, author and former director of Amnesty International, in what he calls his prayer for the Gulf. “I have colluded in your poisoning.”
Perhaps this begins to get at it – the state of mind we need to cultivate simply to come to grips with the complexity of what we’ve done in the Gulf. A sense of alienation permeates modern society and drives its markets. It spawns a value system that permits pollution and war in service to these markets, and feeds the hatred and mistrust that fragment the planet.
“Help me now to return to deep community. Help me to commune with Nature, not as a tourist but as a co-inhabitant . . .”
The prayer is a bridge across the chasm of our alienation. It embraces the idea that all of us participate in the fossil-fuel culture; it is a cry for awareness: “May consciousness witness the travesties and crimes that humans have committed against Nature; and may this consciousness not seek guilt and punishment as its new distraction.”
I understand what he’s saying. Public fury directed at British Petroleum, the government or the president can simply be a convenient diversion of consciousness, leading to a futile, feel-good quest for revenge that results in no fundamental social changes – and no advancement of human thought beyond the level that created the disaster.
However, a prayer for personal awareness simply isn’t sufficient. There is another form of alienation that permeates society, as we devolve ever more deeply into spectators of life. This is alienation from our own power.
Public fury at BP’s cost-cutting decisions, secrecy, limited liability, choice to use a highly toxic dispersant in staggering quantities, lack of public remorse and whatever else it has done in violation of its unwritten contract with humanity, has a legitimate basis, and demonstrates the extent to which corporations do what they want. They consume the planet’s limited resources primarily in service of themselves. We go along with it because we get our oil.
A prayer for forgiveness, a vow to buy locally, bike more and live with greater eco-awareness goes only halfway into the problem. As long as BP chooses not to pray for forgiveness as well, little will change. The planet’s plunder will continue in the name of progress.
© 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.)
Last night I was talking to a woman who is active with the Green Party where I live. I was sharing that I felt disappointed that President Obama did not ask for a National day of prayer and meditation. We have a national disaster on our hands and people of all faiths should be encouraged to pray that the volcano of oil will be stopped.
Some might say that the state has no right to call a day of prayer and meditation because of seperation between church and state. Yet, for something as bad as this disaster I think people of all faiths would welcome the chance to pray or do spiritual healing of the oceans, wetlands, and animal life etc. I know Pagan friends who love the earth and they might want to do a ritual to help this sitution. I know I as a Catholic prayed a novena to St. Jude and continue to pray. Jewish people too would want to pray for oil to stop. People of all faiths I believe want this volcano of oil to stop, so I really don’t think anyone would get angry if such a day were declared.
I think if the President put this idea forth as to include all religious faiths that Americans would not have a problem with having a day of prayer and sending thoughts that will stop the oil so that we can then focus solely on the clean up and making sure that justice is done for all those who have been hurt by this disaster.
I am watching the hearing now. Tony Hayward doesn’t want to take responsibilty for what has happen. I just wish that he would be honest and admit that they are over their head and they need help to stop the volcano of oil. In someways Tony Hayward and others remind me of a child who is trying to do a task that they really want to achieve like riding a bike. They try and keep on falling, but sometimes they don’t ask for their dad to put on training wheels for the bike. They think it would make them stupid to say I need help. I think he is afraid to admit just how bad this disaster is and admit he doesn’t know how to stop that volcano of oil that is killing all that gets in its path.
I hope at least one thing good comes out of this and that MMS will be overhauled and no more can companies get a free pass to drill for oil even when they do not have a plan incase of a disaster happens.
Both parties are responsible for the corruption of our government. The Green Party has the strongest platfrom on the environment and has not been corrupted. I believe if we can get elected to Congress a Green candidate and win a seat at the political table of power that we could make sure that the corruption is dealt with and to make sure that it doesn’t happen in the future where companies can get permission to drill when they have no plan and that they can drill with out having an acustic switch and relief wells built at the same time.