As the old drill-baby-drill cry loses its appeal, the coastal communities in the Gulf of Mexico are beginning to understand that they will feel the devastating consequences of the BP oil spill.
The U.S. is a bicoastal country – 50% of the entire population of the United States lives within 50 miles of a coast. And pays extra in housing prices to live there. Ignore for a moment all the businesses that will be impacted – and think about buying a $4 million dollar house on the water – and have the water turn into an oil slick.
I watched Avatar last night and noticed how the movie depicted the planet, Pandora, as an interconnection of elements that you could SEE how they supported and depended on each other.
That illustrates our relationship with our own Earth and how if one thing changes, it effects everything along the food chain (literally, in this case). So the oil gets the birds and the blue crab larvae and the shrimp and now they are saying it may wipe out a generation of sea life.
As a species, we generally do not recognize that our connection with the earth is every bit as interconnected and tangible as the network on Pandora. We need the earth to give us water, provide us with food (whether you are a vegetarian or not), provide water and shelter, medicine – everything – even manufacturing of plastic comes from the earth through our use of petroleum.
That is also why ideas about animals are often so ‘un-evolved’, meaning they are thought of a things, not spiritual beings. Time magazine ran an article on animal intelligence several years ago and said, at the conclusion of the article, “if we recognized and were aware of how sensitive and intelligent animals actually were, we would have to change everything we do as humans.”
News flash — we ARE going to have to change everything we do – we have to find our connection to the earth and the animals and plants who share it, or we will continue to have these devastating environmental disasters and wake up one day to a wasteland that can no longer support us.
If you’ve watched “What The Bleep”, which is a movie that explains new developments in quantum physics – and I highly recommend that you watch it… you will reach the same conclusion – that the electric Field exists on our planet and connects you and me to every dog, every blue crab, every tree, every blade of grass. There is no artificial separation. We are them and they are us and we are the same thing – just a different sector of the same energy field. We are Pandora.
Oil spills and other disasters make this living network more apparent by watching, hour by hour on CNN, how one event affects everything, first in the Gulf, then in the entire coastal area touching the Gulf, then probably the Caribbean – who knows how wide the damage will be from this one oil platform.
Do you feel the connection? A few years ago, I got a great book about ‘curing the incurable’ and it was a collection of Russian folk remedies – from a former doctor to the Russian Olympics. One of the remedies was how to use trees for healing – complete with details about which trees were most responsive – how to tap into the energy of the trees and use them by standing eighteen inches from the tree and putting your hands on the trunk…
This oil spill may dissolve political differences and even national differences and show us, one more time, how interconnected we are with the earth – and I’m hoping that we will find a positive way to use that information.