A continuing theme of this blog, and of the Linkery, is our effort to create a place where we can enjoy food that comes from people, and not petroleum. This, even though we live in a society that has chosen to make petroleum-based food the only choice 99% of the time, and the cheapest choice to the consumer, by far, always.
In his latest piece at Front Porch Republic, Patrick Deneen shows how the disaster in the Gulf merely makes stark the damages that our food and consumerist choices create every day.
What’s remarkable about the images of the oil spewing from the severed pipe a mile deep in the Gulf is the widespread belief that this leakage represents an environmental catastrophe in contrast to the norm. Our understanding of the “norm,” of course, is the belief that we control our circumstances and fate. Our true norm, in fact, consists in a more widespread but no less disastrous release of poison into our world. The norm that we fantasize about returning to is when we imagine that we control our circumstances by pumping the substance through pipes to containers to refineries to gas stations to automobiles to exhaust pipes to a warming atmosphere (or, to fertilizer factories to farm machinery to topsoil to erosion to rivers and back to dead zones of the Gulf).
In other words, the cartoonish incompetents at BP have not failed America by destroying our own environment — they are failing America by not doing their job of hiding the fact that we are destroying our own environment and our own health.
Rather than dispersed throughout the world – including the very molecular composition of our bodies – the spew allows us to see with unusual clarity the nature of our civilization. Yet we treat it as an exception, a momentary and controllable lapse, the fault of nefarious oil profiteers, rather than the rule, our “way of life.”
There’s more to the article, of course, and it’s all spot on.
I can’t imagine anything will stop the apparatchiks at BP, Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, the military, or their sub-functionaries in the executive and legislative branches of the US government, from extracting every last drop of fossil fuel from beneath the earth’s surface, and nothing will stop them from poisoning every bit of the planet in the process. But that doesn’t mean we have to be a part of it.
Individually, we can always opt out of their industrialist Jonestown. Let the “winners” live with the blood on their hands, we don’t have to play at all. Not that it will save the world, but it may make our lives a little better.
Ride a bike. Enjoy a pastured beef burger. Join a CSA. Let’s make something, all our things, ourselves. With our friends, and families, and neighbors.
Opt out.
Indeed Jay, thanks for this.
The oil manufacturers know how much oil is left to
sell, so rather than transition over to “greener” transportation modes, IE solar/electric, etc, they continue to promote fossil fuel combustion (despite the detriment to the planet). It is the plan of the oil companies and the auto manufacturers alike to sell all the remaining oil while the selling is good, no matter the cost to our health and planet, and then be rich and powerful all the way up to the final moments when the oil truly runs out – and then, only then, transition to cleaner technology, which they will be in a position to do so, since their huge revenues will generate the research needed for the transition technology. They plan on perpetuating their financial dominance over the common folk. Makes me not wanna drive a car. In our home, we try to bike as much as possible and shop/eat local so we’re not just burning fuel everywhere we go.