Our Complicity ... "We rather be ruined than changed."

[kpete]

Our Complicity

Thursday 29 July 2010

by: Dahr Jamail and Erika Blumenfeld | Dahr Jamail's Dispatches | Op-Ed

photo
(Photo: Erika Blumenfeld © 2010)

We rather be ruined than changed.
We rather die in our dread,
than climb the cross of the moment,
and let our illusions
die.

-W.H. Auden, excerpted from “The Age of Anxiety”

Not long ago we strolled along a beautiful white-sand beach in Orange Beach, Alabama, taking photos of freshly washed ashore black and brown tar balls. We watched little boys playing in the shallow surf, trying to catch minnows, as red oil boom bobbed in the waves just offshore behind them. This is the world we have all created.

......................

After telling of evaporation and oil-eating microbes saving the day, the story concludes with, “It is still far too early to know how much damage the spill has done — and may still be doing — to the environment. Tar balls continue to wash up on beaches. And the risk of a leak remains, until the well is permanently capped sometime in the next few weeks.” But, like the aforementioned piece by Reuters, the reader is left with a cheery assessment of how this disaster is not going to be so bad after all.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Far less available to the average news consumer are stories about the growing dead zone off the Alabama coast that is linked to BP’s disaster. Nor are most folks alerted to the fact that experts estimate that between 40-60 percent of Louisiana’s wetlands loss can already be attributed to the oil and gas industries activities over the decades, and said industry has added an average of more than 238,000 gallons of oil to the Gulf of Mexico each year for the last ten years.

much more:
http://www.truth-out.org/our-complicity61860

[NoNothing]

1. Does anyone know where you can buy a tar ball online?

I've heard so much about them I'd like to examine one firsthand.