By Juliet Davenport

I first met Gretel Ehrlich in 2005 when we shared a room at a conference in Oxford which brought together artists and writers with an interest in climate change with individuals and scientists working in the field. The conference followed a Cape Farewell trip which took artists and writers to the Arctic to experience climate change first-hand.

Gretel is a writer and poet with a particular passion for ice, and she wrote The Future of Ice about the impact of climate change on ice after her Arctic trip.

She is a storyteller whose descriptions bring their subject to life with a beautiful lilting ease – reading her work you never feel that you are being lectured or shouted at. This short piece about the BP oil spill is a lovely example of how she brings potency and passion to the issue, and I wanted to share it with you.

NO ESCAPE: A Statement About the Gulf Oil Spill

Gretel Ehrlich

A heart has been pierced, four miles of seabed violated, and the aorta is gushing unabated. There are no tourniquets, finger pressures, or shamanic spells to staunch the wound because none were intended. “Top Kill,” “Top Hat,” “Junk Shot,” and the “Lower Marine Riser Package” have all failed, and the Macondo Prospect, the whimsically named reservoir of oil that is flowing freely into the Gulf of Mexico, its meager 100 million barrels that would have provided only five days of oil by American standards, is now adrift with no fixed destination, yet causing ecosystem failure wherever it goes.

The nature of the wound is vast. While surface oil is being mopped up, an underwater storm of emulsified oil is on the move: forty miles a day, and when the Gulf Stream picks it up, it will shoot north averaging 3000 miles per month. Vast areas of the Gulf and the Atlantic will mean the end of vital food-chains.

Oil is water. Ocean is time. Under the plume is a shadow that moves wildly, unseen. We have no practice of making natural resource decisions that put the biological health of the planet first. We have no ecological justice systems in place; there are no legal advocates for the natural world. Humans are corruptible; communities of plants, animals, and undersea beings are not. A year ago I proposed a tribunal court for crimes against the planet when injury done to whole ecosystems is irreparable.

We’ve forgotten that when we step down on the earth we are walking on a living membrane. Now we are wounded people recklessly pimping a wounded planet. We’ve turned away from a sacred view of the world, a deep openness in which we accept that all living things have equal value. We’ve drilled recklessly under the ocean floor for economic gain, and in the process, exchanged a sense of well-being, beauty, hope, and wonder for the myopia of profit.

Two thousand and ten was declared the year of bio-diversity. One would never know it. Instead, our rolling waves of destruction continue on in feigned innocence with species extinctions, including our own, becoming rampant. We have failed to develop a panoramic awareness, the spawning-ground for compassion. We refuse to cut through the ambition of ego. The corpus, the so-called “body” of a corporation, feels little pain. Blame is laid as ecological boundaries are erased. The much sought-after oil in its emulsified form, no longer quantifiable, loses its dollar-worth and becomes instead, an unwieldy agent of harm, an unscrolling undersea shadow-hand whose touch means death.

We’ve never been owners of the world, but our delusional behavior would make it seem so. Now brown polluted skies lie down on brown oceans. Auditory memories of earlier, and vastly smaller oil disasters arise: the still, haunting silence of a beach lined with oil-drenched seabirds, of slime fingering marsh grass and kelp, of heavy-lidded incoming waves.

To call it a “spill” doesn’t begin to address damage that will soon extend to the entire ocean ecosystem. A plume of oil caught up by the Gulf Stream will convey it up the Atlantic coast to Arctic waters, across to Europe, then flush it back down the coast of Africa, only to return again. By refusing to see that we are participants in the interliving systems of the earth, that every action has a consequence, we allow ourselves to live in denial, to be delusional, to act fraudulently, to be criminally negligent.

We don’t know now the extent of the leaks in the Gulf. It’s said that the seabed itself has been disturbed and that the result will be a kind of internal bleeding that no surgeon or engineer can mend.

How convenient it is for the government and BP to confine their response to purely economic terms. It gets them off the hook because their pockets are full and reparations can be made easily. But money cannot reconstruct open ocean ecosystems or put into place robotically, the primary sources of life on the planet. Therefore, kind of “risk assessments” can be made for ecosystem collapse?

We’re spilling “crude” alright, both oil, and crude ways of comprehending the kind of destruction we are wreaking. I’m not just talking about oil on our beaches, dead pelicans, and out of work fishermen. That’s bad enough. I’m talking about the decimation of a fundamental building block of life on our planet as we know it. Such human behavior is the moral equivalent of suicide.

Oceans are life-giving. Marine plankton plays a key role in global geochemical cycles relevant to climate. It mediates Co2 fluxes and engenders photosynthesis. The ocean-atmosphere exchange creates weather. Oceanic dead-zones spread death and absorb heat.

Two years ago I coined the word, “terricide.” Now I’m trying to imagine a judicial body similar to the Hague that will deal with environmental justice not pinned exclusively to the boom and bust plights of human beings. Who will speak for oceans, for ice, for marine algae, not to mention pelicans, kelp, fish, mollusks, willets, cormorants, gulls, diatoms, krill, eels, and sea grass. Who will have the courage to think and act for the whole, to assume blame, to speak for the voiceless?

What instruments of environmental justice do we have in place to deal with the criminal destruction of the whole ocean? How do we enlarge the conversation from a purely economic frame - the badly needed compensation for fishermen and residents of these coasts – to one that is also biological and societal. Not just the human community, but the ones inhabited by flowers, trees, grasses, and animals, big and small. Who has the guts to enforce a penalty for recklessly disregarding life on the planet, for decimating something as large and complex as the entire marine ecosystem?

Our eyesight has become so dim, we cannot see all that is around us and our place within it. To see is to stop. Have we forgotten how? Too many of us have lost the scent of wildness and have applied linear thinking to a circular universe. We cannot conceive of a “we” that is not the center of attention and the repository of world power, that would willing exchange economic know-how for ecological knowledge. We need to develop a more generous attitude toward all that is wild around us. Our collective wound of being “too early weaned from the breast of the earth,” is enacting its revenge: we willingly despoil the Earth whose unruly embrace we so crave.