Deep Water Rising: What's Love Got To Do With It?

Deep Water Ho Rising: Image from Business InsiderThe hole under the late Deep Water Horizon drilling rig may be spilling as much as 60,000 barrels per day (bpd) into the Gulf of Mexico, not the officially estimated 5,000 bpd.

It's pretty bleak stuff when you look at it that way, and even more so if you jump down to the three Louisiana shrimping zones and meet the people who walk around on boats in rubber boots for a living.  It's hard work, and the pay is low.  Now it's also surreal, racing to pull in shrimp or crabs before they get soaked in a black toxic mess, a villainous vinagrette.

But on the plus side, a friend of mine who works for the University of New Orleans' Center for Hazard Assesment and Technology (CHART) tells me off the record that there are some bright signs: the scope of the problem is enormous, but the response has been forceful and intelligent.  Government is working together at all levels, and there's a great deal of focus on the people most affected by this enormous mess.

"Love" in this case is unsentimental.  It's tempting to think of it as being coextensive with "efficiency."  But there is a host of people staged down in Venice and Port Fouchon that are battling for wildlife, for the marshland, for the shrimp, and for the people who make their living on the Gulf. 

You Did Not Die In Vain: We Have Cheaper Gas

More basically, I think they're battling for our dignity to walk on the face of the earth as a race that's not aggressively hostile towards creation.

I've (provisionally) defined love pretty broadly here: the energy for creating and sustaining life-giving relationships.  The costs are high, there's no doubt about that.  And it's interesting to see love's basic justice when our lifestyle is so out of balance: how much should British Petroleum pay, and how much should the government pay, and is it really fair to ask all those drivers up in Nebraska who need cheap oil to nevertheless pay for the disaster that comes from harvesting that cheap oil?  Love's energy filling in to save us from our craving for another kind of energy.  This won't be the last time.  Maybe it's necessary.  I believe it is, at this point. 

But we've made it so.Who, Us? Addicted?

And so maybe the most difficult question are the philosophical ones: how have we structured our lives so that this sort of thing was always inevitable?   What's the value of love when it steps in to fix a disease of our own making?    And how long will the earth bear up under the lash that's created when 300 million of us believe that it's too far to walk, that we'd rather drive, and are willing to pay the price for that small convenience?