Oil Spill--On Missed Opportunities of Consciousness (A Response to WAPO)

What follows is my response to the July 12, 2010 Washington Post article by David A. Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin entitled, "Historic oil spill fails to produce gains for U.S. environmentalists." You can read the article in its entirety here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/11/AR2010071103523_pf.html



Oh, you missed it!!! I was sure you were going to put your finger on the nasty, giant, pink elephant in the middle of the room of this event, but you tripped over it and kept going. Since day one of the oil spill crisis nary a peep has been mentioned about consumption and lifestyle (the function of demand in the equation that includes resources, oil and risk on the far end) by the press, the White House, the public, environmentalists or even opportunistic media-hog types (and I’ve been watching this with great concern from the very beginning--traditional media, enviro Web sites, Twitter, etc.).

Your article starts to turn in a useful direction when it points out that environmentalists are "trying to turn public outrage over oil-smeared pelicans into action against more abstract things, such as oil dependence and climate change" and then goes on just sentences later to cite Anthony Leiserowitz as saying “the spill hasn't been automatically connected to some sense that there's something more fundamental wrong with our relationship with the natural world,” but you never actually make the connection with what Leiserowitz really means (or should mean) and the real core of the issue.

As a consciousness teacher, the first observation I made about the larger-scale response right after the spill was almost identical to what you quote Leiserowitz as saying and something I knew already was a huge problem with human perception at micro and macro levels--people at the ground level are the central issue, but they aren’t connected with the world at a deep level. These people are the consumers of energy and oil-based products, the voters, the consumers of the media and advertising, the working force, everything. There would be no oil spill, no energy issues, no pollution, no government policies (good or bad), no products, no economy, no media, nothing… without them.

People won’t act on what they don’t know about. We have been isolated from the natural world, its rhythms and our impacts on those rhythms and therefore only make the choices we have been shown we can make, choices that flow with the economic imperative of consumption, choices that focus on abstract, manufactured and often manipulated cues about reality that have effectively become our reality and lead us to be parts of an engine that has nothing to do with the natural world as a priority or a deeply and intimately important part of our lives.

The fact that you missed this connection is sad, but not that puzzling; the fact that the environmentalists did is frightening and deeply troubling. Their subdued response seems to be buried in the notion that we can only point at others to solve our problems, that we can blame, pester or push changes in law or policy, but we can’t change ourselves. Worse yet, implicit in this notion is that a lifestyle of lower dependence on oil, oil-based products (and “things” in general) and energy would be lacking in substance or the opportunity for fulfillment. Nothing could be further from the truth, but that's a discussion for another day.

If you are going to make the point about the opportunities the environmentalists are missing, fill in the gaps and make it fully. But when you do, take the opportunity to ask why so many parties who know better avoid the consumption topic (even Obama didn’t mention it in his televised spill-response speech). What else is going on here that some people are conscious of and doing nothing about (or worse)? If you want a story--that’s a story worth telling.

Anton Elohan Byers
Intuisdom Institute
Portland, OR