A Sin Beyond the Telling

I cannot get the story out of my mind. And I sincerely wish I could. The thought that every minute of today, every minute of tomorrow, every minute of the past month, the ruptured oil line a mile down in the Gulf of Mexico is spewing gallons upon gallons of crude oil into the water. From all I can read, the world is still a month or more away from the complete shut down of this awful thing. Every minute gallons more poison pumps into the water. Every day God knows how many barrels, how many hundreds of thousands of gallons are spewing into the natural environment that God gave us. This is a crime, a sin beyond the telling. It makes me sick to think about what we're doing to the planet. At what point, you wonder, will this spill be declared the worst ecological disaster ever visited upon the Earth by man? How is that going to be measured? At what point are we going to realize as a species that we cannot continue to constantly just beat the living hell out of the earth. We've been beating the hell out of her since the dawn of industrialization. Now in the so-called post-modern world, we're dealing her death blows.

My brother-in-law who has worked for the state of Louisiana on wetlands and coastal issues for his whole career says he's retiring. He can't take any more of this. I haven't talked to him yet--I did right after this first happened--to find out what he thinks, but I know he's sick. Couple of items today on this continuing catastrophe: first, BP now says it's managing to siphon off a lot less oil than it told us a few days from the "fix" they installed a few days ago. The most they're managing to siphon off is about 3,000 bbl per day. That's the most. It's more likely around 1,500 bbl per day . . . which compared to the well over 5,000 bbl per day gushing into the Gulf* is peanuts. 


This is to be expected, really. I mean the fact that BP is lying about how successful its recovery effort is. The company has done nothing but lie from the start of this disaster. What makes you think they are suddenly start telling the truth?


The second story today is much, much worse. Get this: scientists and government people are now saying that cleaning up the oil-soaked wetlands may be impossible. This is no surprise either, really. Have you ever seen a marshland? So awful is the prospect of what this oil is going to do to the wetlands that truly drastic solutions are being considered. Like setting the swampland on fire or flooding areas in hopes of washing the hideous oil offshore. But, surprise. Others warn that measures like these might do more harm than good. 


Listen: no good is going to come of this. The best we can hope for, the best, is that something miraculous intervenes to stop the spill quicker than the best case estimates. But if that's the best hope, you can only imagine what even a moderate hope would be. May God have mercy on us all . . . though we deserve none.


*A quite conservative estimate. Many experts put the amount of daily spill much higher.