At Country Wickhouse Candles, we’re always blogging about the environment, all-natural products, conservation, and recycling. However, this isn’t an advertisement or a ploy to increase revenue while so many others suffer. This is an appeal. It’s true that many people have written about the Gulf oil disaster and that this catastrophe has headlined newscasts for the past month. But we need to continue to blog about it, talk about it, report about it until we finally have the collective power to take back our environment and to make a genuine effort to preserve, once and for all, our earth. We need to do this with the energy and commitment of our own will, now, and not wait for the fulfillment of promises via some government program or legislation that will take years to initiate and maintain. Chris Matthews, on his MSNBC news show Hardball, noted that the Gulf oil crisis is a prime example of mankind’s power to destroy his own environment. What a sad reality this certainly is.
Where I live, in northern New York, people have for years waged war against the installation of windmills in our countrysides. In light of tar balls on the pristine beaches of southern Florida and gobs of toxic oil in Louisiana’s sacred wetlands, this anti-windmill mentality seems insane. How is it that off-shore drilling is a healthy, logical alternative to solar and wind power? Why is it supposed to make sense that oil-covered animals, poisoned wetlands, and eleven men dying on a faulty oil rig are all merely “collateral damage” in an endeavor to feed a nation with an addiction that is killing us?
As Louisiana fisherman struggle to feed their children and small businesses all along the Gulf Coast shut down and inevitably fold, as British Petroleum (BP) scientists and engineers attempt to stop the oil gushing out of the seabed only to fail again and again, as politicians make promises and speeches and presidents wag threatening fingers in the faces of those responsible, another pelican fights to free itself from a thick puddle of oil, unmindful of the fact that the eggs it laid only a day before have already died.
So, yes, we preach about the environment as do thousands, perhaps millions of people everyday. The question is, in the face of the worst “natural” disaster in the history of the United States: What are we going to do about it? Not just to stop and clean up the oil, but to make sure that it will never happen again? Think about it. This is OUR problem, not BP’s or President Obama’s. This is our country, these are our loved ones, our wetlands, our beaches and birds and crawfish and shrimp. This is America and it is ours. Or is it? We’d fight for our own livelihoods and families. But will we fight for every family and every life in this nation? We have to.
Whether you’re reading this on day 57, 58, 59, 60, or whenever of the Gulf oil crisis, remember this: More than 19,000 gallons of oil are spewing out of the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico every single day, and BP seems no closer to containing it today than they were on day 1. The oil will stop, however…someday, either through the means of some humanly-engineered contraption, or because the well runs dry. But the damage is already here, and it will still be here long after the oil stops and BP has packed up its operation and headed for Nigeria or some other country to drill somewhere else, leaving behind their corporate lawyers to fight the residents of the Gulf Coast who have been left with nothing. Goliath fell, and so, too, can those responsible for destroying our environment. But the fight starts with us. Are you ready?
Maybe we haven’t said or written enough here, in this blog, so leave your comments and let the world know what you think.
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