Humans have made a living hell for the most beautiful creatures on this planet.
For nearly forty years I have been more than enchanted with Cetacea, especially dolphins. I believe John Lilly was correct about the intellectual capacity of Cetacea in general and the bottlenose dolphin in particular.
The video over the fold was posted two days ago. It comes from a familiar source:
John Walten
http://bpoilslick.blogspot.com/...
Walten states:
This is the most disturbing video I have ever produced.
He goes on to say:
I saw at least 100 Dolphins dying or struggling to get out of the oil. It was many miles from any water that was not contaminated. In all likelihood, the Dolphins and Sperm Whale seen in this video are dead by now.
The Dolphins were disoriented. Some already dead and others struggling to keep their heads up high enough to see the fires. The Sperm Whale was covered in oil.
These dolphins are most probably all dead by now, but it is pretty clear that they were struggling to understand what into what form of hell they had descended.
It is impossible for me to express my anger. For a long time, my anger at the overwhelming injustices of humanity has buried itself into a hardened resolve to stare into the mouth of the monster and to do so relentlessly.
What used to be an angry consciousness long ago passed into a sense of the tragic necessity of simply standing up to the evil, naming it and resisting the evil if only through its exposure. (I resist using the term "evil;" however, there is simply no other English word that suffices.)
But until the last two months, I still believed it was possible to turn Americans and humanity in such a way so as to ameliorate our situation short of catastrophe.
Because of Deepwater Horizon, I have forever changed my mind. It is not just that the effects of this single catastrophe are likely to be more than we can imagine, it is more than that. James Lovelock's last book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, came out in paperback the week after Horizon exploded. In it he states unequivocally that we cannot now avert global climate catastrophe and a mass extinction event. While I do not agree with Lovelock concerning nuclear energy or, even his assessment of alternative energy (although he may be right about the second), I do agree that it is probable, if not certain, that the overwhelming majority of humans will die.
We have simply exceeded Earth's carrying capacity.
In the process, we will murder incredible numbers of the most beautiful creatures on the Earth; we will stain the collective human karma for eons.
I no longer believe electoral politics in this nation can have a positive effect.
The dolphins were struggling to understand how their ocean had turned into a burning hell. The mass deaths of these nearly perfect creatures and all the other suffering life forms in the Gulf are literally reaching into my soul and coming into me in a torrent of grief.
I am struggling too accept that more than forty years of effort on my part has lead not to effective amelioration, but rather to the increasing power of extreme capitalism in the form of global corporate murder.
I do not believe that phone calls, letters, donations, organizing can possibly stop this onslaught.
What is needed is something entirely different and far, far more radical.
I am not interested in the paltry and weak efforts of any political party now extant. I am only interested in activism aimed directly at the mouth of the monster.
This resistance and activism must take an entirely different shape from what we have so far invented on this planet. After centuries of violent revolution, it is clear that this route does not yield lasting positive results. After the example of non-violent resistance from Gandhi's India to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s USA, it is clear that non-violent resistance does not yield lasting positive results.
For months now, this site has been divided in a struggle between those of us who lost our trust in the Obama Administration and others who attacked us relentlessly for any criticism, no matter how reasoned. This push back has effectively stymied any positive movement towards a discussion of what we might actually DO. In my opinion, this struggle was a major contributing factor in my conclusion that it is now too late to avoid catastrophe.
I don't have much hope we can start that discussion now. There are a devoted cadre of posters here who devote themselves to repressing any hope we have for that conversation.
But this movement will come, with or without us here. It will come because the devastation will be so overwhelming and so disruptive of our way of life that we will not be able to gather anywhere at any time without addressing the emergency.
But it will not come until death stalks us on every corner of the planet.
Note: Others have posted this. I think I was too stunned to even search, but I had to write/post this.
Links to other diaries:
trouble editing will try to fix