“all the news of home you read just gives you the blues”
June 10th, 2010
For anyone trying to navigate through the often confusing and contradictory media in search straightforward, scientific information about the oil spill, I recommend this blog by Dr. Samantha Joye:
Below is a NASA satellite image of the oil spill.
Yesterday, Erika mentioned how being on tour in Europe while this is going on at home reminds her of the lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s “California”. I couldn’t agree more…
Rems said,
June 10, 2010 @ 5:05 am
How ironic, there was an oil spill ten years ago (decembre 1999) in France. Name of the ship was Erika (and I laught about this non-funny post)…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Erika
I keep shouting to my friends who use their cars a lot. Since I live in the suburbs of Paris, I prefer using trains, tubes, tramways, buses and my feet ! They are in the same situation, but it’s so easy for them to use a car (of course, you sometimes take less time to travel), and I keep thinking and saying that they pollute but they cannot hear. I have got my driving license for four years and just drove twice in the first month, and then forgot my (parent’s) car, using overcrowded and never-bang-on-time trains so I can listen to music and read without thinking about anything else.
I am not in an ecologic idealism (as I said earlier, I use a lot of plastic stuff, a lot of WASTING plastic stuff by the way), but I am sure that invidual vehicles such as over-consuming cars is something both scary and stupid. I hope we’ll find one day an answer for those problems, convince everybody that the only good think they made by polluting the Earth is giving a brighter smile (and bigger wallet) to all these dark industries gods, and finish seeing all our oceans become more obscure and green places less green.
Paul M Lyren said,
June 10, 2010 @ 7:58 am
Reading through that blog was a bit of an education for me. Had to look up a lot of the experiments they are doing to decipher the intent, but as I got about halfway through - it dawned on me how truly catastrophic this is and how this will be impacting the Gulf for a generation or more. I think the most scary bit of info was after they identified the plume they were looking for and realized it was not the same one that had been mapped by the FSU team… How many plumes are out there? And how badly has BP and our government been lying about this.
The worst part aside from the death and destruction to the wildlife and the fouling of a shared natural resource for lifetimes to come, is the realization, as REMS says above, that we are all to blame for this. Every car trip, plastic fork, styrofoam box, greeting card, TV, water bottle, retail consumer anything - is petroleum based, and we all use uncountable numbers of these items every day in the 1st world. We can blame BP or Obama for not attacking it with enough whatever - but we all did this. Actually, since all of the implementation of the extraction of natural resources is market based (meaning done as cheaply as possible), and our regulatory apparatus is nearly wholly owned by the companies they are supposed to police - it is amazing this kind of thing does not happen more often. Actually, a quick Google search reveals it does; we just don’t hear about it until it is too big and too late.
Get your degree quick Heather. The world is waiting!
Nuno V said,
June 19, 2010 @ 8:01 pm
I don’t know if you have already seen this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lkkqztJPDM&feature=player_embedded#!
It is a cover of Anywhere you Looked by the I’m From Barcelona.
You probably know them, if you don’t, they are a Swedish band with 29 members, and I read that some of them are biologists and evironmentalists.
Usul said,
July 15, 2010 @ 3:14 am
Hi !
You posted this a year ago : http://vimeo.com/4532012
It sounds great, but it seems that it’s still unavailable. Do you know where this track can be found ?
Thanks !