Tagged with 'bp'

Exorcism - the act of driving out a dark spirit that has possessed a person or a place, by commanding it to leave in the name of a more powerful power, in our case the life of the Earth - this is one of the oldest of our human rituals.  However, exorcisms are also embedded in the arts of our culture like little noticed but powerful micro-climates.

At the Tate Modern in London, British Petroleum seeks to capture our imagination by hitching its BP sunflower logo to the Miro exhibit. The artistic experience is then reduced to a dangerously passive consumerism. Only the Earth itself, a kind of freak storm inside, can free us from such a damaging lie.
We tried to let all the victimized life of BP come through us on Monday.

Today, we live in an unprecedented sort of world—a reality completely inverted from any known in the historic past. Our world has been gutted of sense and consistency. Propriety, responsibility, even meaning itself have become jokes to exchange in the cynical dialogues that have replaced profound conversation.

Today is, apparently, World Conservation day….a quick google however reveals that no events have been planned around this day. The silence is deafening. The 13 Moon Almanac asks: Can Human Beings Cooperate with the Earth? Can we find our natural place in the order of things?

Yesterday I read a Wired blog on the Bee which bears this headline

three months of denial is long enough. this is a song/story about the gulf oil disaster and western civilization's roll in it. thanks for watching.

Can we as a collective re-frame our perspective of the Oil Spill into that of a miracle? I realized tonight that we as a humanity all co-created this event for us to come into clarity as one humanity.

Dearest child,

There is a Native American belief which states that every action should be considered with an awareness of its impact on the next seven generations. This ideal has been lost in our current culture, however, I am choosing to contemplate your future life so that I can gain a compass reading on my own life. I hope to do well by you.

In these troubling times, sometimes its hard to know how to function in the world and stay open and present. With the oil and methane continuing to gush into the Gulf, where it is mixed with toxic dispersants, and cover-up efforts being as extensive as clean-up efforts, it’s becoming clear how much power corporations really have in our country.

I was given the great opportunity recently to interview Summer Burkes and (Evolver's own) Natalie Pierce, two activists working in New Orleans right now, on my radio show. We talked about:

* The mood in New Orleans
* BP’s restrictions against press, scientists, and people wanting to help
* Effects of Corexit, the highly toxic dispersant being used

What is occurring in the Gulf of Mexico is not an isolated incident. It is only one component part to an entire ecology of unconsciousness. This is the same unconsciousness that allows the removal of mountaintops that have evolved over millions of years, the damming of rivers that have formed throughout great shifts of world ages, and the systematic deforestation of the entire planet.

As images trickle in of oil-soaked birds and oil-glazed waters, I hurt because I know that we are not seeing the worst of it. BP's extensive cover-up efforts are restricting media and scientist access to the worst scenes of the spill, and BP's scant clean-up efforts are mostly for show not for real effect.