A Quiet Watercourse

In common with many people of late, I’ve been watching unfolding events in the Gulf of Mexico with a sense of growing foreboding.  The plight of the families and communities caught up in this cataclysm is heartbreaking and  images of seabirds covered in oil are distressing.

I’ve been pondering this tragedy and am wondering at the scale of it, a dark stygian cloud seeping beneath the water.  Some say it will spread up the Atlantic coastline, indeed, some rumors say it has already begun to.  This has been likened to an American Chernobyl, I think that’s an entirely justified comparison.

The cost in terms of both the environment and economy is well covered elsewhere, the political row echoes across the Atlantic, and reading newspaper website comments I wonder if many people in the UK can empathise with Obama.  I find myself feeling a deep sympathy for the man, and hoping that he can use this to break the stranglehold of Big Oil and move the US towards an alternative energy policy that includes walkable cities and clean efficient rail.

I was also pondering the effects on the mental level.  We’ve been caught out in our greed, as Peter so accurately puts it over at The Buddha Diaries:

“We have known for at least forty years that this dependency was a threat to our well-being and to the natural environment, but have done nothing to address it. Indeed, the reverse, our demand has only increased, our addiction deepened.”

I agree wholeheartedly.  This has been brought on by our greed, grasping for the things we feel entitled to, without realising that our sense of entitlement will be our undoing.  We have grasped and hoarded with no thought and our “solutions” to the World’s financial mess have seen us grasping at the resources of the future, impoverishing future generations to sate our own appetites.

So, are we Preta, hungry ghosts (speaking psychologically) with an insatiable appetite for a substance or object?  Our greed is forcing us recklessly onwards, as evidenced by internal emails from BP.  I’ve observed that the drive for profits, and damn the consequences, has stored up some pretty alarming trouble for us.  But I plan to cover that another time.

Or can we rise above that?  I believe that answer is “yes, we can”.  We will need to rediscover our humility in the face of nature, we have pushed too far thinking we could beat the odds; we couldn’t, you don’t beat Mother Nature.

I can only see only one solution.  That we must grow into a stewardship of this planet, and learn to use it sustainably; after all, it’s not like we have another.  Some vested interests are going to be severely inconvenienced, and will have to learn to restrain their greed but either we do this voluntarily and get a say in how it goes, or we sleep walk into another catastrophe.

Whats our Karma?