Ok, Oil

I am no expert on oil wells or drilling or underwater engineering so I want to be clear here, this is my opinion and it is based on common sense, gut feeling and the lessons taught to me by First Nations Elders over the years.

There are certain things I accept as being true and some of my argument does rest on those things. Primarily, I am writing it out here and now to keep myself from putting it on my FB page, to kill off the urge to reply to a friend's comments on FB and also to keep it and the feelings it generates from seeping into my other work. I don't know if this happens to other writers but I often have to clear my head before I can sit down to something that pays - and clearing it in private, for some reason, does not work. How's that for a neurosis? I'm managing it by publishing here, where nobody reads it. Works for everybody, I think.

Anyhow - here are these certain things I accept as being true:

The earth functions as a unified whole. Geographic or climactic change in one part of the world will have an impact on all of the other parts even if that impact is not immediately apparent to us.

The things we do not know far outnumber the things we know.

Deposits of oil or minerals have changed the nature of the earth to an extent where their continued existence in situ contributes to how the rest of the planet functions. This means - oil deposits have a purpose and are useful to the planet and we are, in all likelihood, ignorant of that purpose and that use. (safe to say, it probably isn't to run cars.)

We are an organism on the planet and our actions contribute to the growth of the planet as a complex organism however, we are not more nor less important in our biochemical presence than any other organism - what gets us into trouble is that we think we are more important in the biological sense and we tend to use our brains to try to prove that and so we get into a lot of mischief.

I also believe (and this is the most contentious one, I think), that there is a Creator and that the way the world runs is designed to a certain extent to teach lessons through consequences. Hit your brother - he will take your cookie. Stuff like that. G-d to me is like the benevolent force that runs through all of us, through your consciousness and through the earth itself, not a Daddy but the sense of right and wrong. I believe in that and to me, that's non-negotiable. That force is the voice that and suggests to us that we do not hit our brother in the first place. Once the brother is hit, consequences are in play and there is no stopping that part. Gotta have free will - but you have to live with the outcome of it too.

With these issues in place as my personal foundation, I have to say, I do not think Top Kill or the Junk Shot are going to work to stop the leakage of oil from the rupture in the floor of the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico.

First of all - ask your gut. Does it seem reasonable to you that piling mud into a burst artery is going to stop that artery from bleeding out? Doesn't seem reasonable to me. How about throwing little pieces of garbage into that cut? Another crappy solution that only looks at the oil gushing out and doesn't seem capable of understanding that the oil is under pressure from a much larger system and that pressure will continue to overwhelm the bits and pieces of gunk we throw at it.

Secondly, it's time we learned new ways of coping with our messes. The old ways aren't working. This incident is giving us the chance to see that reacting in panic doesn't work. Once all the panic-stricken, childish responses have been exhausted, we will have to actually sit down and think about how this is happening and what kinds of things we actually can do that will help us to fix the mess and solve the problem on our end.

This means we need to find a way to get the oil out of there. It's not going to stay in, that much has been proven. So how do we get it out?

It will require a lot of calm, sensible, engineering skill to think this one through but it seems to me that there must be some way to bring the stream to the surface where it can be captured and piped out - probably to be used for its original dubious purpose, but anyway, away from the damage it is doing to all of the people, (fish, birds and wildlife included) that it is hurting right now.

So there are my thoughts on the subject. Junk shot - won't work. Top Kill - no way. Dome? you're kidding, right? We have to actually do the work and fix this one from the ground up. I wish us luck and a measure of common sense. And now I can go back to work - my deck is cleared.