Yesterday the Milwaukee area received 5-8 inches of rain in one afternoon and evening.  I don’t even know how to talk about rain like that!  If you watch CNN, you have seen some of the mess, but the reports of damage continue to mount tonight.

Menomonee River in Wauwatosa - really shouldn't be anywhere near the road: photo by Margaret Swedish

It’s hot.  It’s humid.  It’s oppressive.  It is a summer that will be talked about for years to come – 12 days so far above 90 degrees in NYC this month.

These downpours are becoming all too common in parts of the country (like south central Wisconsin), while in other parts, like the desert southwest, drought conditions deepen. Permanent climate change? Many scientists think so.

Well, friends, this insane month has also involved some conferences, gatherings, events that limit my ability to post.  For the next 11 days, I may or may not be able to.  I hope you don’t forget about us during that time.  We know how short the U.S. American attention span can be!

Kidding aside, I will be at a gathering in northern Wisconsin for the next week called together by the Midwest Regional Collaborative for Sustainability Education (MRCSE).  My attention and energy will be very engaged in the conversation, dialogue, story-sharing that we will be doing together.

I am so encouraged by the fact that so many people are starting to talk about this essential thing – how we are actually going to live through the ecological crisis.  I will write about some of these insights in the weeks to come.

So hang in there.  Love the planet.  Love one another.  Be strong.  Be open to profound change. Be open to the possibilities of what can be birthed through us right in the midst of crisis if we can hear what it is telling us about the true meaning of the human.

NOAA has reported that, globally, the first 6 months of this year were the hottest Jan.-June period ever recorded. Arizonans are dealing with a deadly combination of high temps and high humidity (triple digit temps, dew points around 60), the mid-Atlantic is sweltering, many areas are dry as a bone, while in other places, like Kentucky over this past weekend, torrential downpours and huge storms are wreaking havoc. In the Milwaukee suburb in which I grew up, one night last week saw 4 1/2 inches of rain fall in barely an hour. My brother said he had never seen water like that fall from the sky.

Temp anomalies June 2010 - NOAA

It’s a global phenomenon. Moscow is melting and Northern Europe is getting Mediterranean-type summer weather. Earlier this summer, hundreds of people perished in India during a record heat wave that sent temps as high as 122F.

In many parts of the world, crops are withering, and rain patterns have shifted.

In this country the heat wave is big news, but you would have a hard time finding any info about the larger context for this year’s tumultuous weather.

What does the record warmth have to do with a nearly 3 sq.mile piece of Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier breaking off into the sea this past month?

Projected 100 degree days in US this century - US Global Change Research Program

Oh, right, global warming. Oh that again! that supposedly controversial thing that is talked about as some dire planetary future, something we can think about another day when it is more convenient and by then we’ll have the technology to save us – except here it is now, unfolding all around us as we attempt to go on about our business-as-usual, yet knowing inside, if we listen to our anxieties, that, like any biological being, we sense, we know, that our habitat is changing – fast.

And we do not have what we need to save ourselves, especially the will and commitment to adapt quickly to this changing environment in which we are embedded – natural beings as dependent on certain patterns of biosphere and atmosphere as any other creatures. We have been brilliant in using our brains to adapt to things like heat and cold, to develop tools to be more productive, etc.  We have been less-than-brilliant, even woefully unwise and ignorant, in realizing the limits of technological adaptation when it confronts those far larger forces at work in our world – like how too much heat trapped in the atmosphere will cause the planet to cook beyond anything we can control.

So here’s what’s coming for the U.S. this week and into the next – get ready, southeast and mid-Atlantic, things are about to get worse. From Accuweather.

And this, from Earthweek, A Diary of the Planet:

The sweltering heat waves that have baked several parts of the Northern Hemisphere over the past two weeks will become commonplace within the lifetimes of most of the world’s current inhabitants, according to a new report.

Not the future I had hoped for my old age.

See, some folks tell me I’m too dark, but I’m just reporting the news. I welcome anyone who can tell me how we can stop these now well-developed drivers in time to keep things from getting worse. Tell me how you shift this culture to a downscale, unselfish, generous body politic prepared to take power out of the hands of corporations and to change the politics of the nation to focus on the well-being of the planetary systems in which we live and move and have our being.

Noah Diffenbaugh says he and his team also found that the longest heat waves on record that occurred between 1951 and 1999 will likely become five times as frequent between 2020 and 2029.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers caution that the 2030s are likely to become even hotter.

Okay? That’s not the future to be prevented, that’s the future to which we must adapt. And we must act urgently to do the other half of the equation, mitigation.  We must act now and urgently to keep this trend from continuing beyond the 2030s.

To do this with a modicum of human dignity and compassion, traits that ought to mark the uniqueness of the evolution of the human, means shifting our national political and cultural priorities. We cannot have everything we want according to the desires created for us by Corporate America.  We have to change what we want, what we cherish.

What kind of life do we want for our children? - photo by Mom

I look at my one-year-old Godchild and what I want for her is not the right to own a handgun or to have an iPad or at least 4 or 5 hi-tech gadgets for constant online connection, if these things will bring about the destruction of her world, or at the very least, a world of more hurt and suffering. What I want for her is health and a life in which she can express her creativity in heart and thought and spirit. I want for her joy and happiness in being alive. I want for her love and connection with other beings and real community and friendship.  I want for her an ‘outside’ that is not a threat to be feared, but rich in beauty and abundance, clean air to breathe, non-toxic food to eat, uncontaminated water to drink – none of these things controlled by corporations with a profit to make.

And that is what is in jeopardy with the world we have made.

We have written before that the natural El Nino effect makes for warm summers. We have also shared the science that these events, like rainstorms, blizzards (ask D.C. about that – 3 last winter and now record heat), drought, and hurricanes, will become more severe as the driver of a warmer atmosphere makes our weather crazier.

We have to dream a future right now. We have to look our kids in the eye and see the world we want for them. And then we have to go out and create that world, and we have to begin – right now.

Back to posting for a while, and here we are with the big news still focused on the Gulf of Mexico. If you view the live BP stream on the Home page, you see this startling thing – no oil gushing, that steady eruption that has become iconic over the past 89 days. It is some sort of enormous psycho-spiritual relief not to see that oil pouring into the precious waters off our southern coast.

Yet it comes with the caution that this is all so very precarious, that the increased pressure back inside the well with the capping and closing of vents could create leaks elsewhere below the sea floor, that something catastrophic could still occur, that the pressure could cause more eruptions and even the collapse of the sea floor.

If that happens, nothing will stop the oil…

So the news comes with all these words of caution, and with word that BP doesn’t intend to stop the flow even if the cap holds against the pressure of the stopped gusher, that it intends to get the flow going again with tankers that can siphon it all to the surface.   I assume that would be better in terms of the potential pressure issue. I assume also that BP wants as much oil from this reserve as it can get, that being the point – for BP.  I assume someone knows which approach is better for the Gulf waters, the sea life, the coastal communities, the planet.  I don’t assume that future decisions will be made accordingly.

NASA image July 12

But if we learned one thing in this whole mess it’s that we best be careful what news we trust here.

Because what I also know is that the oil industry and the countries who burn it are in no mood to move quickly to end the oil economy just because it is causing irreparable ecological wreckage to the Gulf, to Nigeria, to the Niger Delta, to the boreal forests of Alberta, to ruined and contaminated areas of Ecuador, to the pristine beauty of Alaska, to parts of Mexico…

What I also know is that this disaster is only one of multiple signs that the human attempt to wrest the harder-to-get crude from the Earth, because the easy-to-get oil is pretty much gone, is a pact already made with the Devil of Capitalism – to wrest all you can from whatever – the Earth, human labor, tax subsidies, war, etc. – while there is still a profit to be made, and to purchase the government agencies, decision-makers, communications media and more so that people are never able to see or know what is being done and to make decisions about whether or not they agree with this suicidal agenda.  And the future be damned if worrying about it affects stockholders.

We are being told that we cannot live without oil, that we want oil, that we love what it has brought us.  Yes.  And if 30-40 years ago the studies had been as consistently on the front pages and TV news as this disaster has been, if there had been a steady and earnest attempt to share the information of scientists, geologists, engineers, ecologists, demographers and others that we were headed towards a world where this sort of thing could happen – not once, but over and over again – and that this would be happening because we were reaching oil’s peak – do you really think we would have continued on this course?

People love what oil brings them once they have what oil brings them. You can’t become addicted to something you don’t know or that was never invented.

Would that have collapsed the economy, as some say, or brought about a new one? Unfortunately we lost the opportunity to make that decision. Now a new economy will be made by disaster, like it or not. If we agreed to a new radical agenda of change in the energy base of our lives, in how we live and consume, and did that now, we could ease the disruption and destruction. But that is not yet on the national or international political agenda except in the most limited, half-hearted ways. There is as yet no effort to come up with something nearly approaching the scale of either our economy’s energy demands or the assumptions of standards of living to which we are now quite addicted, much less the scale of the ecological threat.

It will take great persistence and creativity on the part of groups and movements to ratchet up the noise so that the conversation cannot go on without us anymore. It’s happening; it’s growing up all around us.  But we have to find the discourse that connects with and impacts the lives of suffering, struggling people whiplashed by deep recession, unemployment, foreclosures, mountaintop removal coal-mining, and on and on, because without them we cannot make this change.  There is so much fear in this country right now, and we must learn how to address that fear – not yell at it or judge it, but understand its roots and even identify with it.  There is much to fear; the question is, how do we get beyond it?

I want to share a few articles that I have found, well, to the point:

from NPR: Hope and Disbelief as Oil Gusher Holds Steady

from George Lakoff on Huffington Post, something a bit more biting: Conservatism’s Death Gusher

from the NY Times in June, something that should really raise eyebrows, especially if anyone thinks BP is a company into whose hands we want to put the fate of this planet: to avoid the prohibition on off-shore oil in Alaska, BP has built islands for drilling, then called it on-shore drilling.  Hey, why not? Then, to make matters worse, the drilling itself may be riskier than what they were doing in the Gulf.  Read about it here.

then, because I revere her writing, think she articulates our crisis so eloquently, both spiritually and ecologically, this beautiful essay from Terry Tempest Williams.  “Bearing witness…” Yes. And what she calls for, what she commits to,  is a bearing witness of a fierce kind, full of passion and grief and loss and love – riding always on a sea of compassion, what we insist over and over again here must become the bread we eat, the air we breathe, the bottomless well from which we drink and draw our sustenance.

Not a passive bearing witness, but rather one that goes straight to the heart of the matter, disturbs the truth out of the dust from which it has been buried, bothers us with the inescapable urgency of our predicament.

Because the oil disaster is not only in the Gulf; it is everywhere oil exists and where more and more invasive and destructive technology is being developed to wrest it from the planet for our use. That is the real oil disaster, and that’s the one that we must bring to an end.

Well, friends, I’m going to be offline for about 9 days, time for reconnecting and replenishing. But I wanted to share some thoughts here and challenge us to do some radical new thinking about our predicament.

Tomorrow ESPN will have a one hour special built around LeBron James’ decision about which NBA team will pay him more than the GDP of many poor countries to play professional basketball.

I think this is very disturbed.  I think this indicates a culture with a problem.

Meanwhile, some recent news reports indicate that BP is preparing for the very real possibility that the relief wells will not stop the flow of oil. And of course the oil has now reached the Texas shore and has moved into Lake Ponchartrain on its way to New Orleans.

Syncrude Mildred Lake oil tar sands plant - Wikimedia Commons

How chastened are we by this incident? The U.S. government is about to decide whether or not to allow a pipeline to be built from Alberta’s Athabasca oil tar sands fields – described as one of the greatest environmental disasters, and most toxic sites in all the world – to a port in Wisconsin. We already import 1.9 million barrels a day from Canada and the pipeline would allow for an additional 1.1 million.  As this article indicates, Canada is becoming our primary source of oil – hey, why waste our coastlines when Canada is perfectly willing to destroy their ancient boreal forests, forests that help cool the earth’s atmosphere?

As you will see from this article, there is growing opposition in Congress to this deal, so you might want to consider making a stink about it with your own Representatives.

Oh, and speaking of heat – just thought you’d want to know what meteorologists and news people don’t want to tell us – that some of our climate scientists are saying that the weather pattern creating the record-breaking heat wave could be a climate impact from global warming.  Scientists are usually more cautious than this, and when scientists get alarmed, I do, too.

Meanwhile, this little tidbit no one is talking about much really got my attention – ocean acidification due to global warming is reaching tipping point levels that could change everything – and I mean, everything.  Read this, and then try to sleep well tonight.

Okay, I can get pretty depressing here. The point I’m trying to make is that while James and ESPN and the NBA and all their corporate sponsors see fortunes to be made in marketing this guy, and while lots of energy gets absorbed in this empty exercise of athletes as investments, our world is literally unraveling. The suffering is getting real (ask the folks along the Gulf coast about that, or elderly folks in Philadelphia without a.c., or folks living near the oil mess in Nigeria, or Appalachian Mountain coal-mining communities), we’re in trouble, and these corporate folks keep screaming, “Hey, but look over there!”

Don't want her to have a sad future - photo by Mom

What they don’t want us to know (to SEE) is what we need to know in order to save ourselves from a pretty sad future. When I look at the attitudes revealed in the polls, when I see what absorbs so much of our energy in the popular culture, and in politics (a particular disaster), what isn’t there is the capacity to make momentous decisions, in cooperation with others, to address these gathering crises which are going to shake us right down to the foundations of our lives.

In the last chapter of my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World:’ A Spirituality of Hope, I ask the question, “What kind of human beings will we be as we go through the crisis?”  Right here, in this U.S. culture, what kind of people, with what values and priorities?

If the ESPN/NBA/James business is any indication, we have a problem, a serious, serious problem.

I’ll be back end of next week.

What does the 4th of July mean now? It’s an old story – revolution against the British monarchy, landholding white men asserting their rights to independence from the Crown, the Declaration of Independence, Washington crossing the Delaware, violating a Christmas truce to take advantage of unsuspecting drunken British soldiers, the Constitutional Convention – all that.  Great story.

What followed was more than 200 years of trying to figure out what it all meant. Took another war with the Brits in 1812. Took a Civil War to resolve the slavery part. Took another century to resolve the part about civil rights for African-Americans, took 150 years or so to recognize that women were equal citizens, and then more laws against discrimination to widen the recognition of rights further.

We have yet to address one of the most aggrieved communities, most violated, most discriminated against – the original inhabitants of this land whom we massacred, allowed to die, pushed off their lands to make way for the European conquerors.

Freedom, one of those loose terms open to all sorts of interpretation – killing native tribes and Mexicans for our freedom, going to war against Hitler for our freedom, sending federal troops to defend the freedom of civil rights activists, using executive authority to spy on U.S. citizens to protect our freedom from terrorists, declaring individual gun ownership as essential to freedom, defending women’s choice as a matter of freedom. Yes, indeed, one of those words that can be used for all sorts of nefarious and inspiring purposes. I have learned one must use great care with that word.

We are still trying to figure out who and what we are.  For some, it’s about the right to own guns, even though it is pretty clear that the 2nd amendment really is about what it says – militias organized by the states, you know, like the National Guard. For others it’s about trying to force women to carry pregnancies to term, no matter their circumstances.  For still others, it’s about “leave me alone to do whatever I want, this is freedom, and my individual freedom trumps all other responsibilities or consequences to others” (for instance, ATVs in national parks, resistance to property taxes to pay for schools, allowing oil companies freedom to exploit deeply buried oil reserves).  For some it is still about going off to war, as if any of the wars we are in right now are really about defending that revolution of 1776.

For many it is still mostly about how much money I can make, no matter the impacts on the lives of others, or freedom of commerce and investment above and beyond freedom to preserve natural places and healthy eco-communities.

For many others, it’s about a society built on the pillars of justice, equality under the law (no exceptions for corporations, for example, or extremely wealthy people), respect for people of diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, races, and cultures, sharing of personal and community responsibilities, commitment to the well-being of all, commitment to preserving the nation’s beauty and wildlife, healthy habitats in which we live in balance with nature (Muir, Leopold, Carson, W. Berry, T. Berry).

Maybe it’s just me, but in recent years, this annual patriotic celebration has been feeling a bit empty of meaning, a bit wanting when it comes to a sense of national purpose or national sacrifice, more like another excuse for a big party, lots of noise.

Mind you, I’m not against a good party or picnic, and I love fireworks, but something has gone empty here, and I don’t think it’s because we have simply lost something we once had. Rather, I think it’s because that narrative is not relevant anymore, it doesn’t describe our world the way it once did.  The world has changed significantly in the past few decades, and our cultural symbols and unifying narratives have not kept up.

We need something new, not a ‘spirit of America’ that defines us over against the world and superior to it, but rather one that sees within the best of this culture what we have to contribute to a world community of peoples and nations that is collectively facing a series of unprecedented crises and challenges.  In other words, seeing our national purpose in becoming part of a planet whose living systems are in grave crisis and offering what we can – in our best creative energies, in our national energy and fervor, in our can-do spirits, in whatever is left of our sense of community both locally and nationally, to the cause of keeping this planet a friendly, vibrant, rich, deeply meaningful experience for our species and the other species that are part of the living communities in which we dwell – the waters and soils and deserts and forests and mountains and plains heralded in some of  our most-sung patriotic songs (would we have a different sense of ourselves if ‘God Bless America’ had been our national anthem rather than the war song that it currently is?).

I don’t know, patriotism is not one of my favorite values as it is so pregnant with dangerous tendencies – for example, airs of superiority, seeing oneself over against others, creating chasms rather than bridges. But I do believe that there is something unique and significant deeply buried in certain aspects of the American spirit and experience – what gave rise to abolitionists and civil rights workers, the Sanctuary Movement and immigration rights efforts, women’s rights movements and those in support of the rights of our LGBT sisters and brothers, ecologists, artists and poets, from Whitman to Dickinson to Ostriker, workers rights movements, and more.

From that tradition have come numerous movements and groups trying to meet the planetary challenges that will shape our future, like it or not. We are learning in the Gulf the cost of not addressing our dependence on oil. We are learning in the Appalachian Mountains the cost of churning out electricity to power our way of life. We are learning from the launching of the Sixth Great Extinction what it has meant to allow growth to go unchecked. We are in a time of diminishment, which will mean entering a period of growing scarcity.

What symbols, narratives, images, can help inspire us to rise to these challenges?

I would like to see a new national spirit that would put aside fear, manufactured rage that churns up real rage (Glenn Beck, for example), hate-mongering, division, distrust, fiercely defended self-interest, and national superiority, and puts in its stead a spirit of unselfish devotion to a future of resilience, beauty, healthy children on a healthy planet, compassion, justice, even love.  I would love to see hope emerge from the ground of this nasty, cynical spirit that has hovered for too long over our nation.

I would love to see hope emerge – as the flame burning in the hearts of my people, hope for something more beautiful than what is reflected back to us right now in the Gulf of Mexico, hope for something less toxic, hope for something that ensures that wonder and awe will be on the agenda for future generations.

[Just a note: during these summer months, I will not be able to keep up a twice weekly post schedule. But do stay tuned. When we are not posting something new, remember there is lots to visit on the site. We will keep up as we can between conferences and various other events.]

My godchild plays peek-a-boo: I want a beautiful healthy world for her - Photo by Mom

So,  what kind of society do we want to be? I ask this because there are so many indications lately that we are headed in some tragic directions. I want to mention some of those I see or read about, and see how it all adds up –

– for example, the Supreme Court overturning Chicago’s most reasonable, even necessary ban on personal ownership of handguns, this in a city suffering a plague of youth gun killing. Our highest court has decided that we the people do not have the power or the rights in our communities to ban certain kinds of especially lethal weapons.

This is brought to you by the National Rifle Association and a violent individual gun culture that still runs through large segments of our society. The other day, in the streets of my neighborhood, I found myself driving behind a pickup truck with a homemade version of this poster in its back window: a handgun, with the message, “I don’t call 911.”  Incredible.

Another example: growing numbers of middle age US Americans are suffering from Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and various physical disabilities. I read about this in an article entitled, “Older than their years…“  We are speaking here of people in their 50s and 60s having trouble walking, early onset of arthritis, or chronic neck and back pain.  How can this be happening in our supposedly health conscious culture?

The study, published in the April edition of the journal Health Affairs, also found that some middle-age respondents – less than 2%, but growing – need help with personal care activities. Those include getting out of bed, using the toilet and shopping for groceries.

The national study didn’t pinpoint a root cause of the increase in disabilities among middle-age people, but local health care providers list these as the biggest reasons: obesity, sedentary lifestyles and lack of preventive medical care.

One of our more recent accomplishments is that the number of obese people in our society is now greater than the number of merely overweight, and fully TWO THIRDS of us are overweight or obese! (see The Obesity Society).

Think of the looming health care costs.

Source: MSN Health and Fitness

I have to just say this, though I am not a professional. Sometimes such symptoms are signs of severe depression, or hidden emotional pain, and even despair.

A week or so ago, Bob Herbert in his NY Times column wrote that he sees this society’s greatness ‘slipping away.’  As evidence, he notes how after each of the major catastrophes to strike the nation in recent years – 9/11, Katrina, the Great Recession, the oil disaster – we have failed to respond with anything nearly commensurate with the scale of the event.  We appear cautious and timid, afraid of the big changes implied in these events.  Our local communities are collapsing, and the collapses will get worse as the prevailing political ideology of the day – get government out of the way of the private sector – means that government is abandoning the social safety net, depressed cities and states are seeing dire budget cuts, and many services needed by our growing population of poor and un- or underemployed people are disappearing.

But BP is being allowed to further develop its Alaska deep-sea drilling projects, the war in Afghanistan is needing another tax-payer funded appropriation, the Gulf of Mexico continues to fill up with oil, public school systems are laying off teachers, and we are getting sicker and fatter.

Herbert:

The collapse of the economy in the Great Recession gave us the starkest, most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans.

Our entire federal government has been loaned out, it seems, to the private market. Obama negotiated with big PhRMa and the health insurance industry on health care reform before negotiating with our representatives, the result being a massive transference of tax-payer money into those companies over the next decades, because our ‘culture’ prefers this to publicly-funded not-for-profit health care. It is clear that human beings do not have the knowledge or technical skills to drill for oil deep into the earth’s crust, but Obama and Congress will allow the oil industry to do it anyway. Unemployment checks are being used to buy food, pay rent and school books, but millionaires in Congress are more concerned with the prevailing ideology – cut deficits first, but not by raising taxes on the well off.

Again, Herbert:

We have become a nation that is good at destroying things — with wars overseas and mind-bogglingly self-destructive policies here at home — but that has lost sight of how to build and maintain a flourishing society.

Which leads me to this question – what kind of society do we want to be? Because right now the signs are not very encouraging.

Weigh in.

It’s hard to write about anything else these days, though there is so much to be writing about, thinking about, to lose sleep over.  But that camera on the gusher (see live feed on our home page), the thought of all the suffering creatures dying horrible agonizing deaths, the grief of the gulf coast residents who are watching a generations-long way of life come to an end – it is hard to write about anything else.

I embedded this video from the English version of Aljazeera because somebody put the link on a Facebook update and I had to agree with them – it is one of the best reports on the disaster that I’ve seen. It explores the whole culture of oil and chemical industrialization that created it, and includes searing interviews with residents, local human rights and environmental groups, and coastal restoration workers.  It’s about 25 mins long.  Do take the time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4itfAVq19U

NY Times had a great article in today’s Science Times section (Cold, Dark and Teeming With Life) about the life in the deep sea of the Gulf.  It is an amazing story, scientists discovering life where no one imagined it existed – not a little life, but a lot of life, teeming biodiversity at the floor of the sea living off stuff like, well, oil seeping from cracks in the floor. These magical critters actually eat, metabolize, some of the oil and chemicals that seep out of the earth’s crust, hence the term, ‘seep communities.’

But they were not created for oil like this, or the millions of gallons of chemical dispersants meant to break up the oil deep below the surface where we can’t see it. With these communities barely discovered, and many more yet to be found, with so much work that scientists had hoped to do to study them, to understand their habitats, to learn the role they play in the life of the planet – now everything has changed.

Feeding off oil seeping in small amounts from cracks in the floor – that’s one thing. 160,000,000 gallons of crude (that figure based on the new estimates that 60,000 barrels per day have been gushing out for 2 months now), this is of a different order all together and could snuff out all that life.

Something hardly talked about in the media these days is that about 40 percent of the content of Gulf crude oil is methane gas. Not only crude is filling up the Gulf, but also methane.  From an AP article a few days ago:

That means huge quantities of methane have entered the Gulf, scientists say, potentially suffocating marine life and creating “dead zones” where oxygen is so depleted that nothing lives.

“This is the most vigorous methane eruption in modern human history,” Kessler said.

Congratulations, humans, we have once again topped ourselves on the scale of our achievements!

Things might still get a whole lot worse. I hate scaring us, but, heck, I’ve gotta share my fears somewhere out there. So if the relief wells don’t work, given the enormity of the reserve that BP discovered and claimed, some experts are saying that the oil could gush out for the next – gulp – 2 years!

From the U.K.’s Guardian:

Hayward told a Congressional committee on Thursday the reservoir still held 50m barrels, providing fresh urgency to efforts to contain the oil, or seal off the gusher completely with a relief well.

Using the government’s present flow estimates of up to 60,000 barrels a day, BP’s well could go on gushing for two to four years, unless it is stopped.

Yes, one could lose sleep over this possibility. And still, if you read this article, even 50 million barrels may be a low estimate.

Meanwhile, the appearance that the Obama administration has somehow halted deep sea drilling permits to allow time to investigate safety issues is just that – appearance.  The Minerals Management Service, those folks in bed (at times, literally) with the oil and gas industry, continues to approve offshore drilling projects, granting similar exemptions to safety standards and procedures as BP so famously received.

Then, just to keep things interesting, today a federal judge in New Orleans blocked Obama’s 6-month moratorium on drilling citing it as ‘generic, and even punitive,’ because of the impact it will have on rig suppliers, employment, etc. I love this paragraph from the NY Times news update:

…the order was challenged by a coalition of businesses that provide services and equipment to offshore drilling platforms. The companies sued, asking the judge to declare the moratorium to be invalid and arguing that there was no evidence that existing operations were unsafe.

Do you laugh or cry at such a statement – “no evidence that existing operations were unsafe.” Well, of course, the existing evidence went down in flames and explosions into the gulf. And recent testimony in Congress provides something less than reassurance that other rigs in the gulf are, indeed, safe.

And for all the bluster aimed at BP publicly, and for all the impassioned statements that we must wean ourselves from oil (which last week Jon Stewart revealed for the bogus political message that has been through 40 years and 8 presidents), and all the business about halting offshore drilling until we know it is safe, the political will is simply not there to cause a major (or even minor) disruption in the oil economy, which underpins the rest of the economy. And every day, we see who runs that show – and it is apparently not the federal government.

Photo: NASA Earth Observatory June 19

The corporate takeover of our government at various levels is becoming more and more obvious. BP and other oil executives say they are only doing what the American people want. But no one ever asked me or anyone else I know if we wanted them to fill up the Gulf of Mexico with oil and gas, kill off millions of living creatures living in those waters and wetlands, and destroy the lives of fisherpeople, shrimpers, tour boat operators, and more living in our gulf coastal communities so that I could have liquid beverages in plastic bottles or buy a SUV.

No one ever asked me that. Because they don’t tell us before the fact what they really intend to do to the earth to get the energy that fuels our way of life.

Now our choices are really stark. But to have the power to make those choices, we have to have, you know, the power to make them – which means taking power away from the corporate world as it is and creating a new one, one in which business is made subservient to the life and well-being of the planet, including us (in our needs, not our wanton desires). To do this, we have to take our government back from big corporations. Otherwise, I don’t see how we end this destructive course we are on, now made so manifest in the dying and death of one of our nation’s most precious ecosystems.

One of the things I like to do here is put together fragments of our world into a whole picture. We have to SEE our reality not one separate piece at a time, not one seemingly unrelated crisis after another, but put those pieces together to see what kind of world we have made – and continue to make.

In terms of the energy and resource base for industrial/technological life, the big picture is very disturbing and, of course, quite alarming. It’s not that humans have not always exploited the Earth’s gifts in order to obtain power and wealth, to create an ever more convenient lifestyle; it’s that now we do it on such a scale and at such a rapid pace that we are clearly no longer in control of the processes that are destroying the habitat in which we live and have thrived for thousands of years.

The first sperm whale has been found floating dead in the Gulf of Mexico.

The oil disaster: I know you are watching this as closely as I am, so I just want to place a few links to articles that help fill out the extent of the disaster we all face. While BP and government officials are slow with info, and reluctant to tell us how bad things are, we need to know.  We NEED to know.

Sea Creatures Flee Spill, Gather Near Shore — the dead and dying beings of the Gulf are trying desperately to escape the oil and other toxins, and finding themselves in big trouble. Every day, we are losing precious creatures that make up one of our nation’s richest biodiverse habitats.

Will bacterial plague follow crude oil spill along the Gulf? — deadly bacteria are beginning to feed on the oil in the Gulf and, through the hot summer months, will reproduce and multiply rapidly. These bacteria are not only deadly for sea life – fish, fowl, animals – but also for humans.

The Gulf oil spill is making a lot of people really sick — not in the future, but right now. And it will get worse in the future. Right now, illness is the immediate kind — respiratory, stomach ailments. Later will come the cancers, neurological problems, etc.

BP’s OTHER spill – this an article by Greg Palast about this other spill we hear virtually nothing about, the leak in the TransAlaska pipeline. BP has controlling stake in the pipeline and has been as reckless with safety with it as it was with the Deep Horizon drilling project. “Procedures weren’t properly implemented” – right.

Meanwhile, Tony Hayward – took responsibility for exactly nothing. Great analysis of yesterday’s non-testimony:  Looking for answers, finding one.

Okay, so why bring Afghanistan into this reflection? Because, as I ponder the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, its coastal life and culture, the living beings suffering so much right now, I cannot help but feel what is coming to Afghanistan because of the public disclosure of up to $3 trillion worth of mineral wealth buried there, waiting to be mined and exploited (now we know why we are fighting a war there!). More conflict, of course – and also, given the practices of mining companies all over the world, plenty of waste and contamination. Do we think there will be a strong regulatory system to control how the exploitation takes place?

It is a sad part of our industrial history that we destroying so much of our planet’s life and beauty. We are in a headlong struggle to wrest what we can from the Earth to support this completely unsustainable human presence, a species that will increase by another 2-3 billion over the next 4 decades.

This is serious, folks. We have to make some big decisions about how we are going to proceed. Preaching to the choir here. But the choir is urgently needed.

We welcome your thoughts and reflections.

Okay, I have just a moment today but wanted to share a few things with you that put forward the challenges we face if we are serious about getting off oil and other destructive fossil fuels.  While much of the oil focus is on the gasoline we put in our cars, most people have no idea how much oil permeates our lives. Yesterday, this AP article appeared in my local paper. It is a sobering narrative on how, even if we gave up our cars, we would hardly begin to address the amount of oil we consume in our daily lives – oil that not only permeates all the products we use, but also now permeates our own bodies.

Boycott Big Oil? Prepare to Give Up Your Lifestyle

So when we talk about getting off oil, we are not talking about finding another fuel source for our cars; we are talking about changing the very underpinnings of industrial and technological society. It is not only about the fuel we put into our vehicles and airplanes, it is also the very materials used to create them, the energy in the factories that make them, and on and on.

Then this article, which talks about the future of deep-sea drilling and how the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico reveals the consequences of what we have and have not done as we encountered the limits of available oil for extraction in these past 3 or more decades – mostly what we have not done, other than continue our addiction, leading us now to a crisis. We can only have more oil if we are willing to pay the price in the life of the Earth.

Then, on ABC World News last night, Sunday, an excellent report on the oxymoron called ‘clean’ natural gas. The gas industry has really been pushing this one for some time now, taking advantage of the oil crunch along with fears of climate change. Drilling companies dot the nation now and many people in rural areas are willing to offer drilling rights on their land to enhance their incomes.

Here’s the problem: natural gas may burn more cleanly, but producing it is highly destructive in toxic contamination of the Earth and waters, and damaging of ecosystems.

Do watch this video, and when you do, notice this excellent example of cheery denial on the part of the industry spokesperson. No, not denial; rather what Scott Peck once described as “people of the lie.” I cannot come up with a purer example.

After reading and viewing all this, think again about what it will mean to save the living systems of the planet by weaning ourselves from fossil fuels. We must do it; but this will in fact be one of the greatest challenges in human history.  Are we up for it?

How else to explain events such as this: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) orders BP to stop using a certain chemical dispersant in the Gulf of Mexico, and BP continues to use it anyway.

Source: International Bird Rescue Resource Center

Or this: because the world is disturbed by images of an oil-fouled sea and the tortuous suffering of dying animals, birds, fish, and other sea and marsh creatures, BP is now doing everything it can to restrict media access to the areas of the oil slick and the skies over the Gulf.  Last I checked, BP did not own these waters, the coastland, or the air.  Scientists, with an air of urgency, have also complained about lack of access to the site and the source of the spill, which means they are not able to accurately gauge the amount of oil that has been and is gushing into the gulf, the extent of the toxic plumes under the surface, or the full impact on wildlife.

Or this: the federal authorities in the early days simply repeated the assurances of BP that only 1,000 barrels per day were spilling out, until they said actually 5,000, until a public outcry and lots of pressure on agencies forces NOAA and others to make a better assessment.  Then it was 12,000-15,000, then maybe 25,000, and now maybe 40,000 barrels per day, or nearly 1.7 million gallons, which means an Exxon Valdez size spill every 10 days or so. This number is the estimate before the riser cut last week, which everyone now acknowledges greatly increased the flow.

Or this: BP has withheld until recently clear digital images of the gusher, leaving us the grainier images, because otherwise experts would have been able to put a more accurate number to the amount of oil flowing from the pipe. Another expert says this morning that if they had 3-D images, you could do the physics and come up with a fairly accurate number pretty quickly.

And the federal government is not ordering this.

Or this: in 2008 our Supreme Court slashed the amount of the jury award in the Exxon Valdez case (20 years ago now – right, justice is so swift here in the US) from $5 billion to $500 million – pocket change for this giant corporation, which in 2008 was making the biggest corporate profits in U.S. history. This decision was brought to you by the corporate crony, Chief Justice John Roberts (this morning, NY Times columnist, Timothy Egan, called him “a compliant pet of the corporate world“), and the former Bush/Cheney administration, the latter being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the oil and gas industry.

Implications?  From the linked article:

The high court decision was hailed by the business community and could have broader implications for limiting how much courts can order businesses to pay in punitive damages, even in instances of egregious misconduct.

Think BP and the Gulf of Mexico. Is this prescient in terms of how this story is going to come out?

Or this, beyond our shores: the Brits are getting mad because they think we are bad-mouthing their venerable company.  It also turns out that British pension funds are heavily invested in BP.  So, it’s not that BP is the bad guy for the criminal negligence and cost-cutting that led to the biggest environmental disaster in the history of North America; US officials and the media are the bad guys for saying BP is responsible for the negligence that led to the biggest environmental disaster in the history of North America.  One result: BP’s stock value has plummeted by more than 40 percent, and pressures are on to not pay out, or at least delay, dividends. Hey, not fault of the disaster, fault of the bad press!

What I mean by today’s headline is manifested in this crisis. As corporations, in the span of my lifetime, have become multinational, no longer beholden to mere national governments, as they have come to control more and more of the resources and technology that support industrial and technological society, that controls things like our ability to move around, or to get the food we need (and to even control WHAT food we eat, even when unsafe), as we have been sold this bill of goods that we should all be invested in stock markets, and as pensions funds, public and private, have taken your savings and invested them in these corporations, we discover now who is really in control of our lives –

massive corporations whose deepest loyalty – and even legal obligation – is to investors, stockholders, and therefore to the bottom line of the quarterly profit report.

Into the logic of such a system we have placed our environment, our vital natural resources (water, air, soil, energy), our jobs and well-being, our health systems, our kids’ futures, our politicians, our Supreme Court justices (not all of them, but enough for the current pro-corporate majority), and agencies like the now-notorious Minerals Management Service (MMS).

Is this really what we wanted? We have seen recently what happens when too-big-to-fail financial institutions control our home mortgages and do what they want with them – risky investments? hey, we’re just trying to make some money here, sorry about the foreclosure – (sounds a lot like BP CEO Tony Hayward, doesn’t it?  Gosh, we are so sorry!).  Think Monsanto, which has a near monopoly on genetically modified crops like corn and soybeans, and is aggressively destroying real farmers and the real farm economy, while making our food dangerously vulnerable and potentially unsafe, meanwhile endangering biodiversity to boot.

Why this matters. Photo by Mom

Is this what we want?  When people say they want government out of our lives, that it has too much control, it is hard not to shake my head in sheer dismay. Are we aware of who has control, who really holds power, over basic realities in our lives? Are we aware that government is intended to respond to human beings, while corporations are not? Are we aware that when government is working, it is our best protection of our rights and security against forces that do not have these interests in mind, and will ride roughshod over them without effective government to limit them if there is profit to be made?

This Supreme Court is vigorously asserting an old deeply undemocratic strain in our legal system, the one that recognizes corporations as having the same rights under the Constitution as you and I. While we reflect on the tragedy in the gulf, let us also ponder the threat to our ecological lives that comes with the handing over of real power to giant profit-making corporations. This is what must be changed if we are to have a chance to turn around this inexorable course towards greater and greater disaster.