elbales

Gulf Oil Spill: We Said the Night Was Full of Zombies

As an anti-plastics blogger, I should be able to write about the gulf oil spill in my sleep. The connections seem obvious. Plastic comes from oil. Our demand for plastic drives up the demand for oil, as do our demands for all the other products made from oil. I should be able to write about this topic as I would write about anything else related to plastic, things like Bisphenol-A, bottled water, PVC, phthalates, ocean plastic pollution, and yet until now, I couldn’t.

Like the vastness of the ocean itself and the incredible magnitude of the spill, the topic was just too big to wrap my heart around. It hurt too much.

She goes on to do a fantastic roundup of links from all over about ways to deal with the problem. I joined a boycott of BP in the early days of the disaster, but there's a growing body of evidence that a boycott hurts small business owners more than it hurts BP. Even Greenpeace isn't supporting it. So what can we do? We can drive less and use fewer products that depend on petroleum, for starters.

Beth's title comes from a post on Boing Boing:

We wanted that oil. We wanted that oil cheap. In giving us what we wanted, BP and the government made some horrible decisions that we wish they wouldn't have made.

They picked up a gun, loaded it and shot into the dark. But we're the ones who told them that the night was full of zombies. Can we really say we're not responsible when they accidentally kill a healthy toddler?

QOTD, yeah. But seriously, it's true. We wanted cheap oil, and they gave it to us with subsidies and preferential treatment for corporations that were already filthy rich. We've abdicated responsibility for our own democracy and our own environment in exchange for gas-guzzling mega-SUVs that we can fill up for a fraction of what it would cost a European or a Japanese.

We're all responsible, but it's not worth wasting our energy on guilt. Just act. Drive less, and buy less crap. That's it.