How a head and heart response to Deepwater Horizon can help fight Gulf Fatigue. By Pat Thomas

It was with some trepidation that I tweeted an unconventional prayer for the Gulf of Mexico this morning. Bang goes my badass eco persona. And possibly my intellectual credibility.

It’s extraordinary that those of us who identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR – there’s even a facebook page)  are so often afraid to admit to our esoteric sides for fear of being dismissed as incapable of rational thought or scientific understanding – or worse lumped in with the extreme end of the spectrum goofy narcissistic new-agers.

Nuts to that – I won’t be pigeon-holed.

My longheld belief is that we need to look at and understand the world, and each other, and current events from a lot of different perspectives in order to keep our thinking sharp and our souls courageous.

Besides, it wasn’t just that the poem that moved me. It was also my growing unease with the media scramble to be first with the biggest exclusives, the freshest perspectives and the hardest facts on the Gulf disaster. In newsrooms across the globe you can smell the testosterone, even amongst the women, as everyone elbows everyone else out of the way in the battle for a prominent byline and a place in the history of the event.

For politicians, likewise, the BP disaster is an opportunity to tough talk the spill in terms of national pride, economics, political gain and stock market prices. It’s a hot potato in the apparently ‘special’ relationship between the US and the UK. Same again with social network sites like Twitter which, at their best, can be rich sources of different perspectives and original thought, but which have become awash with received opinions and endless retweets of the same old (BP) stories.

The melee has plunged us into information overload. We are drowning in a sludgy sea of everything from number crunching the gallons of oil lost, to the bookies’ odds on which endangered species will drift into extinction first. It’s an overwhelming tidal wave of ever longer strings of adjectives describing the horror of unfolding events.

I think I must be suffering from Gulf Fatigue, and I can’t help but wonder: if we continually respond from our heads, or worse from our competitive, cavemen (and cavewomen) selves aren’t we in danger of reinforcing the same kind of cultural shallowness and even arrogance, that led to the explosion in the first place? Doesn’t the overload follow the same dreary business-as-usual way of being and threaten to endanger certain things in us as human beings? Perspective for one. A thoughtful felt response for another. And I suppose a sense of spiritual wounding as well.

When I talk about a spiritual response to the Gulf, I am speaking less about lighting candles and burning incense and chanting and more about a well-rounded response that includes the raw facts, the number crunching, certainly, but also one that acknowledges the fear, the shock, the symbolic nature of the event and the grief. I am speaking of both head and heart.

Thus, in my state of spiritual and emotional Gulf exhaustion, those stories in the last week or so that have really grabbed me have been the ‘softer’ ones which are rich in the symbolism of the event and help connect, in a human way, with a disaster that would otherwise be abstract and incomprehensible.

For instance at Planet Waves, where civil action and political commentary meets thoughtful astrology (and a touch of liberated sexuality), the inimitable Eric Francis  riffed on the totem meanings for Pelicans (help us float above the surface of the water when life’s trials and tribulations get intense), Turtles (guardians of time, and representative the Great Mother) and Dolphins (guardians of breath, which take us to another dimension of reality) and looked at the watery overtones of the current planetary setup and the watery emotional dimension of the spill:

“Now we have an uncontrolled toxic release from below the bottom of the sea, contaminating the realm of feelings, dreams and visions. More significantly, the sensitive, fertile meeting places where land meets water are taking the worst beating, and will take the longest to return to a position where they can sustain life. This region where land meets water is where we go for inspiration, rejuvenation and those rare moments of relaxation. And now that space, on the Earth and in our psyches, is being fouled.”

Allied to this are the increasingly watery dreams of some of my friends – massive tidal waves; carrying their children on their shoulders to safety in rough tides; boats or, in my case roofs and windows with uncontrollable leaks in them. These dreams are facts too and they speak to the deep grip this incident has on our psyches.

At Common Dreams Jill S. Schneiderman, Professor of Earth Science at Vassar College described the spill as “as a bellwether of slow violence” – a term coined by Rob Nixon to describe acts whose “lethal repercussions sprawl across space and time.”

She writes:

“Devastated communities and environmental refugees, dead or injured living beings, and absolutely altered land, water, and air…brutality in the guise of slow-moving and spatially extensive environmental transformations that are out of sync with the nano-second attention spans of the 21st century. But what will enable us unflaggingly to confront slow violence?

“In her memoir, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, Sharon Salzberg writes, ‘When we stand before a chasm of futility, it is first of all faith in this [the] larger perspective that enables us to go on.’ Some might scoff at the idea that faith has any place as a healing quality, a refuge, during this calamity and in the future it foreshadows. But human beings must begin to live and act in accordance with the reality of connectedness famously articulated by John Muir: ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.’”

Amen. This is writing for the soul – as necessary as writing for the mind and too often absent from the ‘news’  in times of crisis.

What is more, this isn’t the SBNR new-ageism of yesterday with its ‘me, me, me’ overtones. With its spiritual materialism and chanting for abundance, for that lottery win and for that shiny new Hummer in the garage. This is intelligent spiritualism focused more on ‘us, us, us’. On our interconnectedness, on our interdependence, on the solid understanding that our actions have consequences and on the bigger picture.

Oil spills are an ongoing and international problem. Last month when the 13 grandmothers – an international council of indigenous elders – called for a day of prayer to heal the waters of the earth, they meant all the waters of the earth, not just the American ones.

They were praying not just for the seas, but for all our waters that have been abused and polluted. They were praying not just for the wounded Gulf but for those affected by the spills in Port Arthur Texas in January of this year, in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in April, in the Singapore Straight in May. they were praying for those in Nigeria where, also in May this year, a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline flooded 1 million gallons of oil the once fertile Niger Delta destroying the habitat there and threatening the livelihoods of people who have fewer resources and much less resilience in the face of such overwhelming crisis than those living along the Gulf Coast. Indeed 40 years of oil company abuse in Nigeria has left the country in ruins.

Why should it matter to US citizens? Because the 606 oilfields in the Niger Delta supply 40% of all the crude the United States imports. Oil is a dirty business wherever it’s found and, as John Vidal of the Guardian reports, due to the oil pollution in the Niger Delta life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. I’d be dead by now if I lived in Nigeria. So would many of my dearest friends and family. Maybe you would be too. Think about that the next time you jump in your car for a 2 minute trip to the mini mart.

Some observers have suggested that one way to turn things around is for business to begin to  incorporate spiritualism as a fourth bottom line. Maybe it’s the fatigue talking, but I have some doubts. Most companies can’t keep up with the triple bottom line which aims to add environmental quality and social justice to the traditional single bottom-line of profit and loss to create ‘win-win-win’ business.

Although initially intended as a philosophical way for businesses to think about sustainability, TBL has largely failed to deliver any noticeable changes and has become just another form of accounting, a different way of cooking the books. And the people doing the accounting are largely ignorant of what ecology and justice entail. What on earth would they make of the intangibles of spirit?

Likely they would end up focusing on what can be most easily measured (the very tip of the spiritual iceberg) such as ethics and miss the 90% of what can’t be expressed through words, let alone measured in terms of annual economic performance. Witness how quickly ethics and CSR reports become just a gaudy sideshow, an efficiency drive aimed at increasing profits and a competition amongst some very dirty companies – BP included – to appear ‘clean’.

There are some groups and individuals who are focusing on a nexus of economics and spirituality and who believe that the economic life of a nation is reflective of its spiritual attitudes. This is what the European Spirituality in Economics and Society forum (as just one example) is grappling with, albeit in a rather high, intellectual way. Best of luck to them.

Bhutan’s Gross Happiness Index mixes the intangibles of spirit with the tangibles of daily economic life in a progressive way that reflects quality of life measures.

Sound far fetched? In 2003 the UK government took it seriously enough to publish a paper known as the Life Satisfaction Report recommending policies that might increase the nation’s wellbeing as well as “finding an alternative to gross domestic product as a measure of how well the country is doing – one that reflects happiness as well as welfare, education and human rights.”  

Sadly it sought to quantify happiness in salary rise equivalents (i.e. marriage boosts your happiness by as much as a £72,000 pay rise; losing your job decimates your  happiness as much as a £276,000 salary cut). And lest the government be lumped in with all those goofy new-agers, losing its reputation for rationality and people-friendly policies that really work, the paper has emblazoned across the cover “This is not a statement of government policy”. We’ve got a long way to go, baby.

Although not directly connected with BP green economist Molly Scott Cato’s recent treatise on the Rational Economic Man (REM)  –  the antithesis of the Earth Mother, who lives obsessively in his head and not in his body and nurtures a self-image of invulnerability and intellectual superiority, seemed a better place to start with the job of humanising economics. For me at least, the image of REM made the issue of economics personal again and reinforced my belief that we can’t get through all the tough times ahead by thought alone.

When we tackle the BP crisis with our heads only we are aping Rational Economic Man, or in the case of my profession Rational Journalist Man, winning at all costs but failing to get to the heart of things, failing to see where change needs to happen, and failing to feel our own sense of connectedness and responsibility. Without that spiritual and emotional IQ we’re only half as smart as we think we are.

It’s spiritual maturity or bust for our planet and its people. You choose. Which is it going to be?

© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without author’s permission.

BP’s heart isn’t in the clean-up because, says Pat Thomas, to them Deepwater Horizon really is just a drop in the ocean.

So let’s review where we are.

In a series of lack-lustre attempts to stem the flow of oil in the gulf British Petroleum, third largest energy company and the fourth largest company in the world has employed:

• Oil booms to contain the spill. Result: They haven’t really managed to contain much
• Controlled burning. Result: Ooops, burning oil causes serious air pollution
• Chemical dispersants. Result: BP chose to use the cheapest and least effective dispersant – one that had been stockpiled in local warehouses – and astonishingly it hasn’t really worked. The ingredients are toxic to marine life and mixed with all the chemicals in the Gulf, probably especially nitrogen fertilisers, it may form even more toxic chemical compounds
• Trying to put a lid on it. Result: No good; the big dome placed over the leak became blocked by ice crystals
• A mile-long tube to suck up the oil on the surface. Result: Erm, it didn’t actually suck up much oil
• “Operation Top-kill” – a  typically GI Joe nomenclature for a plan in which in which heavy mud was going to be pumped into the gaping hole in the pipe. Result: They threw a lot of mud at it but none of it stuck
• Robots to cut into the pipes. Result: No news yet but given the company’s track record…

In a handful of life-imitating-Homer-Simpson moments the company has also proposed throwing pantyhose, dog and human hair and golf balls at the problem. As if there wasn’t already enough garbage in the Gulf.

D’oh!

Along the Gulf Coast residents are increasingly asking the not unreasonable question: “Where’s the plan?”

The truth is there isn’t one.

A careful review of BP’s 583-page oil spill response plan by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a national alliance of local state and federal resource professionals, shows a document that is “studded with patently inaccurate and inapplicable information”.

The BP Regional Oil Spill Response Plan – Gulf of Mexico dated June 30, 2009 covers all of the company’s operations in the Gulf, not just the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon.  The plan (and I quote):

• Lists “Sea Lions, Seals, Sea Otters [and] Walruses” none of which actually inhabit the gulf of Mexico as “Sensitive Biological Resources” in the Gulf, suggesting that portions were cribbed from previous Arctic exploratory planning;
• Gives a web site for a Japanese home shopping site as the link to one of its “primary equipment providers for BP in the Gulf of Mexico Region [for] rapid deployment of spill response resources on a 24 hour, 7 days a week basis”; and
• Directs its media spokespeople to never make “promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal,” implying that BP will only commit candor by omission.

More seriously, the plan does not contain information about tracking sub-surface oil plumes from deepwater blowouts or preventing disease transmission (viruses, bacteria, etc)  to captured animals in rehab facilities, which was found to be a very serious risk following the Exxon Valdez spill. It also lacks any oceanographic or meteorological information, despite the clear relevance of this data to spill response.

No wonder PEER board member Rick Steiner, a noted marine professor and conservationist who tracked the Exxon Valdez spill, was moved to say the document wasn’t ”worth the paper it is written on” (perhaps unused copies of it could be used to soak up some oil?). But then again it was never meant to be. It is an exercise in superficiality like so much of BP’s CSR.

Why is BP essentially tinkering around the edges of what some believe is the worst oil spill in history? Because to them – the PR disaster aside – it really is a minor problem. BP chief executive Tony Hayward has gone on record referring to the spill as “relatively tiny”. He’s not being callous (well, yes, actually he is being callous, but that is a comment for another day). He’s being a businessman. Since when did businessmen ever give a flying albatross for anything except profit? And why do we continue to wish/believe/hope for them to change?

BP and all who sail in her are bottom-line thinkers, looking first and foremmost at barrels produced versus barrels lost.

Accurate figures for how much oil has actually been ‘lost’ are almost impossible to come by – and they all come from BP. Even the White House has said it can’t trust BP’s estimates which at first assured the Obama administration and the world that the spill would be no greater than 1,000 barrels per day. Estimates now range from 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

But what if the top estimates are true?

We in the media bat these words around alot – barrels, gallons, litres, tons, and tonnes – as if we really understand their import. Mostly we don’t. And neither do the general public (there are 42 gallons of oil per barrel and, on average – the figure varies by country – 7.33 barrels per metric ton (tonne)). Most of us just know that something important is terribly broken and is in urgent need of repair. We think it’s the pipeline or the ecosystem of the Gulf itself. But really it’s the economic system and a business model no longer fit for purpose, that is at the heart of these kinds of tragedies.

When Tony Hayward says the spill is “tiny” what is he thinking? According to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy June 2008, the world consumed 3952.8 million tonnes of oil in 2007 and produced 3905.9 million tonnes in the same time period.

According to the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation (so assume it’s an under estimate, but even so) 5.5 million tonnes of oil have been lost in spillage since 1970.

BP don’t care because over three decades that’s less than 2/10ths of a single percent of what we currently use every year.

Assume 19,000 barrels a day have been gushing into the Gulf for 44 days. That’s 2603 tonnes per day, or 114,530 tonnes since the pipe broke. One ten-thousandth of America’s annual usage of 943.1 million tonnes. They don’t care about the oil itself because in the narrow world of profit and loss it is a meaningless amount to them. Even the cost of the cleanup is meaningless: £1 billion is one tenth of what the company is investing in North Sea oil over the next decade. It’s an eighth of what the company is investing in renewable energy to 2015. A fraction of the £22 billion it spent trying to find new oil in 2008. These guys push big money around like it was monopoly money. They expect both losses and gains. They don’t care about the environment because their business is exploiting the environment, not taking care of it. And collateral damage is part of the deal.

I say this not to excuse what is being done, or rather what is not being done, in the Gulf. It is inexcusable. But it may help explain why all our attempts to find the words and concepts to frame this disaster and give it context have only served to make the picture bigger and more terrifying, creating a kind of public and media frenzy that makes a lot of noise but doesn’t (often) say anything meaningful.

The Deepwater Horizon blowout, for instance, has been framed as a political disaster. Pundits have asked how the Obama administration will cope. The administration for its part has kept its comments frustratingly brief and has been forced to admit publicly that the US government and military don’t possess the technology to plug the leaking well.  This means continued reliance on BP and its private industry partners to say “yes we can”. Only they can’t. As a display of government ties to and its puny weakness in relationship with big business it is a chilling spectacle.

A similar dilemma was faced by Nature Conservancy which on the one hand should be shouting loud and campaigning hard on behalf of the environment, but which is on the other has been supported financially by BP – to the tune of $10 million in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations over the years. Strong advocates for nature, it seems, have also been hogtied by their connections to industry.

The explosion has also been framed as a business disaster – BP has recently seen a 13% plunge in its share prices and had £12 billion wiped off its share prices. And this provided yet another sobering view of how all things are connected – and not always in a good way – since many UK pension funds are linked to BP profits. Indeed BP claim that it is responsible for £1 in every £7 of dividends that the pension funds receive. We will all pay for this disaster in the end, but the ones who might pay most are the ones who can least afford to.

A couple weeks ago 100 protesters, from CodePink (a ‘women for peace’ organisation) took to the sidewalk outside the US headquarters of BP in various states of undress, in order to “bare the truth” about the giant oil spill that is threatening environmental disaster for the Gulf of Mexico.

In tabloid stylee, they accused BP of ‘naked greed”.

They all appeared to be model thin, and I couldn’t stifle a growing concern that Deepwater Horizon has become yet another platform for a whole ragbag of conspiracy theorists, armchair environmentalists and Leo DiCaprio/Daryl Hannah wannabes to find their five minutes of fame as outraged ‘protesters’, ‘activists’ and ‘campaigners’ (I mean, seriously, it’s so easy to be outraged by this – where are they all when it’s time to be outraged at all the other deeply damaging stuff that doesn’t involve dolphins and is mostly hidden from view?).

But the thing that struck me the most, while considering these half naked Boudicas was how impotent this crisis has made most of us feel, how exposed WE are as citizens for our lack of understanding, for the daily blinkers we wear, for our complicity in events, and for our seeming inability to muster the resources – emotional, spiritual, intellectual and practical – to help mobilse change.

That we experience Deepwater Horizon as a personal tragedy – no matter where we live – is testimony to our deep connection to the sea. As John F Kennedy mused: “… we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it we are going back from whence we came.”

Only we can’t go back because the sea which lifts our little blue planet above all others, which spawned ALL life on earth is dying and polluted. And the lack of weight given to this serious tragedy of the commons by the business community is distressing. Peraps it’s time we stopped letting them be the arbiters of what is valuable?

From the position of this enormous grief that we as citizens feel, we expect grief also from BP. We keep expecting them to have some sort of epiphany; to realise the error of their ways; to be contrite to, worry about the impact both immediate and long-term of their carelessness. We expect them to be honest and live up to their CSR hype. We expect them to be a ‘them’ when really they are an ‘it’.

Companies may have citizen status under US law, but they are not citizens. They don’t think like citizens, they don’t act like citizens and, most appallingly of all, they are not punished like citizens.

Next week (June 8th) is World Oceans Day – a day to celebrate the sea, and maybe to really feel our own sadness over this ongoing tragedy and pray for healing as well as recommit to being an active part of the solution, instead of a passive part of the problem.

But after the celebrations and tears and prayers are finished we must find the will to be more realistic about how much we’ve let companies like BP get away with for decades through our own acquiescence to the soothing idea that megacorporations are just big ‘families’ working for our benefit.

As my dad used to say if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well then…

Maybe it’s time to go duck hunting.

Originally posted here.

Pat’s previous AlterNet post can be found here.

© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without author’s permission.