When people learn that I grew up in Santa Barbara they usually ooh and ahh. Yes, Santa Barbara is very beautiful, but I also remember spending much of my childhood scraping globs of tar off my feet after time spent at the beach. Some say the tar was from the 1969 80,000-barrel Santa Barbara oil spill; others, that it was just the result of natural seepage. Either way (or both), anytime there’s a spill, I’m reminded of hours spent rubbing solvents into my skin.
I also remember Roderick Nash, (one of my favorite professors), and the environmental movement that rose from this “shocker.”
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Shockers, as I recall, are the only effective means to offset the negative environmental impact of our short-term thinking, consumerist culture and popular religious dogma that awards humans “dominion” over the natural world. However, I’m not sure how shockers hold up at times when people like Sarah (“Drill, Baby, Drill”) Palin and Michele (Christian Nation) Bachmann are exalted as heroines. Is the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico shocking enough to cause Real Americans™ to reject the popular new meme about lying environmentalists who are interested only in reaping personal and professional rewards – and dishonoring Christian Capitalism?
Ask the birds of the air, and they will teach you. (Job 12:7)
I think you’re right: Shockers are certainly not enough. One major reason for this is that simply saying something is bad/wrong/terrible/detrimental doesn’t help. We need to find solutions, things that work, alternatives. So, my question is this: What’s the solution/alternative to oil usage? I’m all for electric cars (I really enjoyed “Who Killed the Electric Car”)… but how do we–as consumers–help move that forward? How do we help change the current issues of corporate construction that, due to horrible design, burn far more fossil fuels than automobiles? In other words: What are Real AmericanTM doing, other than just rejecting stuff? Because, if there’s good stuff to be done, I’m all for doing it!
~Luke
Luke: “What’s the solution/alternative?… What are Real AmericanTM doing, other than just rejecting stuff?…”
Good points. We reject a lot of stuff for the sake of convenience, I think. And, there aren’t always alternatives — and some alternatives that do exist (solar panels come to mind) are still very expensive. I do use a sun oven to cook, but I would love to power the whole house on solar. It’s such a shame; as you know, it’s perfectly sunny here today and we rarely have need for umbrellas. :)
At least we’re seeing more hybrids – finally. I don’t know why it took so long, do you? People have been ready to buy for years, it seems. My husband even paid top dollar for his when they first came out. He was so excited. No doubt the salesman thought he had died and gone to heaven that day. Oy. :)
“Is the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico shocking enough to cause Real Americans™ to reject the popular new meme about lying environmentalists who are interested only in reaping personal and professional rewards – and dishonoring Christian Capitalism?”
Nope. Haven’t you heard that it was a liberal environmentalist who sabotaged BP and caused the leak? I cannot link to a source, but heard this from my husband’s mouth so assume it can be found somewhere in the wacky world of internet conservative bullshit.
So, the meme (gasp!) lives! <:O
Meanie: “somewhere in the wacky world of internet conservative bullshit.”
Could it have been the wacky world of talk-radio conservative bullshit? :) I glanced around a bit and found that, back in late April, Rush Limbaugh implied that “environmentalist wackos” may have been to blame:
And, it looks as if there were insinuations made on FOX TV “news” programs, too. Obviously, there’s not a scrap of proof to back their… notings, but since when does that matter?
Uh-oh, Lynn. I think you pegged it. Probably is Talk Radio. I assumed it was the internet based on the browser history in his laptop and the spam I see in his e-mail inbox. Oh how I wish he was just viewing porn online like normal husbands. :/
(just to make myself feel better I have to clarify that I don’t check up on him. My laptop is in the shop and I’ve been forced to use his.)
The only person who has given me any confidence that this might be fixed, on some level, is General Honore. He showed up on the morning news today. DH and I were wondering when they were going to get him to start kicking butts. Don’t know that it will make even a tiny bit of difference but it made me feel a little better. (I know everyone does not love Honore but my memory of him is that he actually got food and water to people who needed it after Katrina.)
Lynn, if you haven’t watched Who Killed the Electric Car?, I think you’d enjoy it. I did. It certainly does not have all the answers, but it does offer some fascinating insights.
Solar? I’d love to get it for my house. But, yeah: It’s wicked expensive and wouldn’t provide enough juice to power my computers anyway. I can’t wait for the technology to get better.
It’s been pretty windy here lately, and if I could get a turbine that worked on my garage, that’d be sweet.
Trouble is, not only are all these alternatives expensive, there’s questions about how much more ecologically friendly these technologies really are. [sigh]
~Luke
Luke, we have a turbine. It is actually part of a large local wind farm, so the cost was less than you would expect. It is also much, much larger than you would expect and turns most of its energy back to the provincial energy company. As is it now, we make money from the turbine. I would recommend anyone to look into setting up a co-op wind farm in conjunction with your energy company.
Lynn, I don’t have many solutions for the oil dilemma either. I have a brother in a peripheral oil-industry business who laughs when I talk about alternatives to oil. His latest email said (and I’ll quote him here) You might as well ask ‘”what alternatives does a drug addict have to crack?” There’s always heroin, or meth, right? If he’s not hooked on the crack, there’s another dealer who’ll get him hooked on something else. In the end, he’s still a drug addict. That’s what America is with oil. A bunch of addicts. With the oil dealers raking it all in. Let me tell you, sis. The money’s real good for us working alongside them, too. We’re a whole nation of pushers and addicts. God bless America.
And, just to clarify, the rest of what he had to say was pro-oil (to be expected), but very much anti-BP, who, according to my bro, has had a terrible reputation in the industry for a long time. No one in the industry was surprised that a BP rig was the next big disaster.