Tonight I actually felt sick about filling my gas tank.  What can I do to end this addiction to fuel?  I am overwhelmed by my oneness in a nation of millions all slogging down a cultural highway designed by our great grand parents, heralded by our grand parents, perfected by our parents and now laid at the feet of the grand children.  How can a nation built around the American weekend, a concept created by Henry Ford to encourage his plant workers to buy cars in which to travel, make the sort of drastic changes necessary to reduce the use of fossil fuel?  Most of our major cities were designed around the concept of nuclear families commuting from suburbia to the city.

I traveled around Europe.  Those cities grew up long before the advent of the combustion engine.  They actually struggled to accommodate vehicle traffic.  Rearranging there transportation network will be much simpler for them.  The American city looks and functions literally like a human artery, and like that artery feeds the vast network known as the American Dream.  Will Detroit, the once King of the Auto empire, show us the way as the Mayor flattens out suburbia to save the heart of the city?  Could his courage lay the foundation of change for a nation raised on the milk and mythology of the open road?

All the joy of life I profess to cherish interconnects with the creatures struggling through oil laden marshes in Louisiana, Alabama and Florida.  I smell the tarry ooze because I spent three months up to my armpits in the stuff cleaning it off the beaches in Skan Bay, Alaska.  I know how depressing it is to scrape, shovel and heave bag after bag of the stuff into super sacks while you wonder to what destination will the filth be sent, and will that place suffer just as badly?

Can not we humans appreciate the struggle of a mother to raise her children, a father to feed his young?  Can we not grasp in the most basic of creature terms, the essence of the struggle of the animals trying to live in spite of the odds against their doing so?  If we could but grasp this in our bellies, deep in our collective wombs as a fellow species seeking survival, perhaps we might be able to take the baby steps to put us on the path that might save our planet.  Decrying that this is an act of fate is ludicrous.  We humans caused this catastrophe.  We must take responsibility for what we do.  Tonight I will.  I don't know how to change it, but at least I can face my part in the blame squarely, and be willing to at least be willing to change.

There can be no fouler stench than that produced by rancid, congealed oi wrapped around decayed vegetation, and it cuts me in two to imagine some animal struggling through it on its way to feed, to tend its nest, to live.  This is my page and I'll cry if I want to, and right now, I want to.   It is just a bit more than I can bare, and I don't buy for one minute that this is some media hype by Greenpeace or a plot by the Obama administration.  I know what 485,000 gallons of bunker c looks like, and if it can mess up as much of Skan Bay as it did, I have no problem what so ever visualizing the enormity of six million gallons.  This is real, and you'd have worked in it to fully appreciate the power of the devastation to the wildlife and eventually to the humans living in Gulf of Mexico.

It must be possible to cherish and save what we have on earth today.  God created man in His image, therefore it stands to reason we must be capable of carrying out our stewardship of this planet with His grace and dignity, magnanimity and love.   How can we stand idly by to see the fall of animals God tasked man to name each one?  "Thy kingdom come.  They  will be done.  On EARTH as it is in heaven..."

What About a Junk Shot In Our Own Tanks: Learning to Appreciate What We Often Take for Granted.

I saw this cartoon on the Alaska Dispatch and just had to share it.  I can still remember my Grandma Carpenter getting up very early in the morning to fetch coal to start a fire in the pot belly stove at the little house by the railroad tracks in West Virginia.  We grandkids just huddled under the thick blankets listening to the clank of the stove and the shovel as she stoked the old coals back to life and added fresh ones to the fire.

Slowly, through the mound of blankets, you could feel the warmth flow through the house.  It was an old switchman's house, and was very simple, with most of its rooms open to the center where the pot bellied stove stood.  The rhythm of our world centered around that stove.  During the cold months, the energy of that house ebbed and flowed with the heat that my Grandma worked so diligently to provide her family.

I have never forgotten that example.  Whenever I walk to the thermostat in my house, and perform the oh so casual flick of the finger that sends its signal to the burner on my boiler.  As the igniter lights off of a puff of natural gas, and effortlessly delivers heat to the rooms, I think of my Grandma Carpenter walking through the cold, morning air with her bucket of coal.

I cannot but continue to believe that the question for Americans lies not in where we can find more oil, but in how we can conserve the precious quantity that we have so that future generations can experience life of the scope enjoyed by my generation.  We do take what we have for granted.  For myself, I am going to spend some time just calculating what portion of my day would be spent simply providing warmth necessary for existence if I didn't have the benefit of cheap, easily utilized fossil fuel.  For an Alaskan that should not be too difficult.

I owned a cabin in Soldotna at one point in time.  It had no running water, and the heat came from a single stove.   I was younger then, but even still, it took a lot of work to keep that cabin heated when the temps dropped to the teens or below.

Maybe, what we need in America, is a National Day of Doing Without Fossil Fuels.  For one day, we flick the master circuit breaker panel, set aside the car keys, turn off the central heat (or air condition) and make do only with whatever we can utilize by human power or public transport.  Perhaps then we might better appreciate the gift that has been bestowed upon our society.

British Petroleum Oil Spill Containment Plan 2009... FAIL!!!

 "In an exploration plan and environmental impact analysis filed with the federal government in February 2009, BP said it had the capability to handle a "worst-case scenario" at the site, which the document described as a leak of 162,000 barrels per day from an uncontrolled blowout — 6.8 million gallons each day."  Sunday, May 2, 2010 1:41 PM EDTThe Associated PressBy ALLEN G. BREED and SETH BORENSTEIN

British Petroleum (BP) Oil Spill Containment Emergency Plan...     FAIL!!!!!!!!!!!

The conservative politicians got their wish.  Government stayed out of the way of Corporate oil, and let them decide how much effort to take in preparing for an oil spill on the Gulf.  Now BP cannot stop a leak less than 1/2 the size they proclaimed they could stop.  The Coast Guard and the EPA, having been whittled down monetarily over the past fifteen years by the conservative led Republican Congress, doesn't possess the resources to come to the rescue.  The starve the beast policies of conservative politics doesn't work.  Not one individual living on the coast has the power to stop this mess, yet conservatives argue that government should not intervene.

The trickle down effect espoused by President Reagan appears only to exist in the oil that will trickle down upon the coastlines of the residents of the Gulf of Mexico, and the pee that I imagine might be trickling down the legs of some major players at BP, the politicians who believe in Corporate self management and handed big oil the power to "best manage" our environment, and the constituents who placed their faith in those politicians.

A government of and by the people is only as effective as the people themselves.  There are just some aspects of business, industry and commerce that need to be regulated and policed.  Why do we who possess rights as individuals under the United States Constitution allow ourselves to be heavily regulated, yet allow corporations that do not possess those rights to dictate their own rules and regulations?

An Alaskan Perspective on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

I read this excerpt from yesterday's MSNBC update on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

"More than 200,000 gallons of oil a day are spewing from the blown-out well at the site of BP's Deepwater "Horizon rig, which exploded April 20 and sank two days later. Crews are using at least six remotely operated vehicles to try to shut off an underwater valve, but so far they've been unsuccessful. Meanwhile, high winds and waves are pushing oily water over the booms meant to contain it. Besides BP, a slew of federal and state agencies are scrambling to minimize the onslaught of damage."

I worked for three months as an oil spill technician cleaning up Bunker C fuel that had spilled from the wreck of the Selandang Ayu. The Selandang Ayu, a cargo vessel transporting soy beans and the fuel oil to ports in Indonesia, broke apart in heavy seas at the mouth of Skan Bay near Unalaska Island, Alaska.

The wheelhouse of the Selandang Ayu. The front broke off and lies half sunk to the starboard side of the main structure.

The Selandang Ayu belched approximately 450,000 gallons of Bunker C into the areas of Scan and Makushin Bays. For months and months the oil spill techs scraped, shoveled, scooped and bagged many thousands of twenty pound sacks of Bunker C mixed with soybeans off of the beaches around Scan Bay. Bunker C is the heaviest of fuels distilled from pure crude. This relatively inert fuel oil coagulated and formed balls and strings of oil. It was buried in the sand, packed between tiny rocks and huge boulders. We even found it high up on cliffs where the twenty five foot waves that pounded the vessel on the night of the storm had deposited it. When the sun came out and the temperature rose, we watched helplessly as it melted and bled down further into the rocks.

By contrast, the broken well in the Gulf of Mexico where the rig caught on fire is spewing pure crude oil out into the Gulf at a daily rate that is half of the total amount spilled from the Selandang Ayu. This crude contains every form of gas and oil that can be distilled. There are organic volatile compounds containing toxins and the denser oil that would be distilled into the heavier fuel oils. I cannot imagine the difficulties faced by clean up crews in the days, weeks and months ahead. A part of me wishes I could be there to help, but I don't think my body could withstand the strain. I was exhausted mentally and physically after I returned from Dutch Harbor at the end of my contract. I was thirty eight then. I am forty-three today. Still, I part of me...

The migratory season has begun along the coast of the Gulf. I wept to see the flocks of sea birds landing on the lines of booms set along the coast. For whatever reasons, birds and mammals cannot seem to differentiate between the oil and the water. They invariably end up landing and diving into it to find food with disastrous effect. Because the oil contains so many toxic components, the animals will die from contact with it if not treated immediately, and even with treatment they often suffer the long term effects of ingesting the oil when they preen their feathers or clean their fur.

The chain of spill techs as they pass hundreds of bags of oil to the awaiting skiffs and super sacks.

I wish everyone who uses products derived from crude oil could spend a day heaving a thousand bags of oil into super sacks. I wish they could spend a week caked in the stuff as they try and scoop gallons upon gallons of oil as it seeps down between rocks, coats every strand of saw grass and sticks to your tyvex. Would it make a difference if they could feel the sweat pour down the hollow between their shoulder blades as they crouch down in front of a hillock of saw grass cutting down a two foot swath by hand using only a butcher knife?

Cutting back on our thirst for crude would have been difficult enough in the seventies when most of what we consumed was in the form of fuel oil and gas to heat our homes, run our cars, trains and heavy equipment. We were so blessed then to have our homes heated with such a convenient fuel. Our parents didn't have to haul in wood, coal or oil each morning to warm their families. We could have reigned in our thirst then, but we needed more. Now our need for plastics competes with our need for fuel. Each barrel of oil must stretch much further than it did in the seventies. How much more difficult will it be now in an age when plastic makes up so much of our physical world and supports so much of the infrastructure of our culture?

I see the oil advancing on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico not as raw crude but as advancing formation of millions of laptops, cell phones, plastic toys sold with burger meals, gas tanks on lawnmowers, snowmobiles, and the countless millions of other items distilled and produced from crude. I threw my share of junk into the that cesspool that could potentially devastate yet another patch of nature on the planet. I am no saint even after I waded through the muck and fought to save a patch of planet.

I am writing this today to share my shame, and tell the story of my experience. I want to give a different perspective on this latest and potentially greatest oil spill. Maybe I can jog a thought or two. Maybe not, but I needed to get this off my chest. I don't have the final answer, but the problem is quite literally "blowing in the wind" and the wind is relentless, and it is heading for shore. If we could just make a dent in the debris of our lives, we would be astounded and amazed at the beauty to be and beheld by not only ourselves but our future generations.

Scan Bay, Alaska after a storm