Blue sea, black sea, green sea

As Len reminded us in this morning’s Daily Astrology post, this week marks the one-year anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The disaster — declared by some to be the worst maritime spill in history — killed 11 workers, released nearly 200 million gallons of oil, tens of millions of gallons of natural gas and 1.8 million gallons of chemicals. Of course, these numbers — like those given for the immediate impact of the combination earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster in Japan — are just the tip of the iceberg. A year after the Gulf spill, we still have no idea what its full impact may be.

A quick look at cnn.com yielded no mention of BP or Deepwater Horizon, although msnbc.com gives it a sidebar near the top of the page; likewise at alternet.org and truthout.org. Meanwhile, Democracy Now! today featured an interview with Antonia Juhasz, author of the new book, Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill. Juhasz attended the BP shareholders meeting in London last week and spoke on behalf of Gulf Coast residents who were denied entry. She owns shares, and so was able to get in, although the others held proxies which should have also allowed them entrance. Among those denied was Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman from the Texas Gulf Coast, who describes her experience in a DN! blog sidebar.

Juhasz spent eight months embedded in the communities hardest hit by the spill, and notes that this spill did not merely shut down industry in these communities. These are mostly subsistence fishermen and women — they catch fish both to sell and to eat themselves, simply as a matter of survival. And although BP set up a claims process right away — the result of a bit of legislation spurred on by the Exxon Valdez spill — Juhasz reports that, “at this date, one year later, less than 40 percent of the claims that have been filed have even been processed, much less paid out.”

It’s a multi-layer disaster, to be sure. There is the ‘simple’ fact of oil and dispersant resting on the ocean floor, being ingested by marine life and causing slow or immediate death; there is the impact on the human beings simply trying to eke out a living by catching these fish who can no longer do so; there is the added struggle imposed on these communities by corporations more interested in giving themselves bonuses than making any kind of reparations; and in a sense, there is the next disaster waiting to happen. As with the nuclear industry’s mind-blowing levels of denial, the oil industry and their pocket-politicians are still full-steam ahead, with no new technology to prevent (or stop, once started) another massive spill:

ANTONIA JUHASZ: There’s—let’s see. Deepwater drilling, most offshore drilling historically has occurred at about 400 feet below the ocean surface. Deep offshore drilling in this well is 5,000 feet below the ocean surface to the ocean floor. Then this well, another 13,500 feet below that. One of the deeper wells—not the deepest—right now in the Gulf is as far down as Mount Everest is up. This is technological wonders that is so wondrous we actually don’t know how to do it. But the reason why they’re pushing out this far deep is that there’s a lot of oil out there, and they want to get to it.

What we know, however, is that they have not—they don’t have the technology to do it. So, when the Deepwater Horizon—when the blowout happened on the Macondo well, the oil industries tried to apply the technology for that 400-feet shallow water operations to operations that were 5,000 feet below the ocean surface. It turns out they didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t know how to cap it. They didn’t know how to clean it. They applied, as you said, two million gallons of chemical toxic dispersant to try and separate out the oil. They burned it on the ocean surface. They allowed this chemical-oil cocktail to spill. And the federal regulators had no idea what to do while the disaster was happening. And they still do not remotely have the capacity to address continued operations.

Gee. We sure are giving our oceans a bit of a beating. One way to look at all of this, as discussed here on Planet Waves, is that it’s a sort of global Chirotic wound, demanding our attention so we can act to heal it, learn from it, prevent another and find some holistic health for our planet. It can get pretty discouraging when someone like Juhasz says, “We still have oil coating the bottom of the ocean. We still have dispersant coating the bottom of the ocean. We still have waves that roll in, and oil rolls in with it. We stick a stick in the sand, and there’s still oil there. What we don’t have at the bottom of the ocean is the light that is supposed to be there.”

It would seem that in this case, as Len suggested this morning with regard to our interactions with each other, the light is what we ourselves need to bring to this situation — repeatedly, tirelessly, until we can feel it in ourselves, everyone can see it and our practices and policies reflect it. Sometimes that is easier said than done; sometimes we feel like we’re preaching to the choir; sometimes it’s just hard to focus the beam on any one thing long enough to see what we can do before another darkness distracts us.

Yes, I could stand to call my congressmen and women more often; I keep reminding myself of that. I could write more here on the blog. I could stake out my state capitol building wearing a strange costume and a sandwich board about one issue or another, laptop in hand to document the whole thing. Maybe I’ll get to all of those things. But for right now, I’m going to keep it simple and share a tidbit of light that came my way after a very stressful midday.

I thought I had given up for the afternoon, giving in to the temptation to wallow on my bed, when the doorbell rang: UPS with my belated shipment of fresh-dried Maine coast seaweed. I marveled at the different shapes and colors of dried digitata kelp, kelp, alaria, dulse and nori. I opened the bags one by one, breaking off small pieces to chew and suck on — no soaking or cooking — and was met by this amazing taste: straight ocean. That is, the moment the light salt struck my tongue, it was familiar. Something in me said, “Home.” Individually, each had different flavors, aftertastes, overtones and undertones; alaria and kelp releasing a touch of sweetness; nori a bit bitter or perhaps just surprising in the strength of its umami; dulse unexpectedly delicate and stretchy in texture in comparison to the others. But the most striking sensation was that split-second of transport to the sea.

I sat down to the computer to check in on the news, reading over the disheartening words about the oil spill with these primordial plants in my mouth, the sea herself finding home within me and bringing me back to her. And I determined that although I cannot personally send every reader some of this seaweed any more than I can personally save the Gulf of Mexico on my own, I would share this recipe provided by Larch Hanson with the seaweed he just sent to me. As I was trying to shake off the first part of my day a couple hours ago, it proved to be the bit of light I needed to see and feel. Larch writes, “Here is a basic recipe for calming seaweed soup. I call it Green and Alert.”

Green and Alert

~ Larch Hanson