Oil: When We Finally Have Enough, Will We Have Anywhere to Live or Anything to Eat?

Glance quickly at the photo below. Take a guess where it is. I bet you were fooled.

Another American oil spill has been somewhat newsworthy since this past week. That's the Enbridge Energy spill in Michigan. The pipeline ruptured and there was sort of a delay in finding the source of the leak. Enough of a delay so that Governor Jennifer Granholm had to get rather vocal about the State of Michigan's dissatisfaction with Enbridge. The spill, meanwhile, dumped about a million gallons of oil into a little creek called Talmadge, which flows into a little river called the Kalamazoo, which flows into this little body of water called Lake Michigan. Of course, a million gallons is like a dewdrop compared to what's in the Gulf of Mexico, but still, that's a lot of oil. The NY Times reported on Saturday that Enbridge admits that it may take months to "clean it all up".  Robert Mackey's blog at the NY Times had a plethora of videos showing us just how lovely it is on the Kalamazoo these days.

Somehow, the verdant areas of Marshall, MI just don't look quite the same with 35 miles of oil scumming the Kalamazoo.

Today I received an email from the National Resources Defense Council with a video of Robert Redford entreating people to write President Obama to ask him to block oil drilling by Shell in the Arctic Sea, close to the area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I'm sure at least of few of my readers remember what a bang up job Shell has done in Nigeria in Ogoniland. I'm definitely feeling like I could trust them with our Arctic Refuge, aren't you? I'm already envisioning lovely brown sheen on pristine blue-white ice...

You can write to President Obama here.

And every time you stop to justify drilling for all this oil because we need it, ask yourself what the world is going to look like, for you, for your children and grandchildren, with a few more of these spills. And what you're going to be eating and drinking when our water supply (all hail Josh Fox) and our food supply are completely contaminated.

What is the point of obtaining all this energy if we kill our planet in the process?

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010