Some day the earth shall weep, she will beg for her life, she will cry with tears of blood. You will make a choice if you will help her or let her die, and if she dies, you too shall die.

John Hollow Horn, Lakota Shaman, 1932
(Quote from Carolyn Baker’s daily news digest today.)

See photos of the oil spill:
Oil reaches Louisiana shores: the big picture

We did this. This oil is on our hands, too. And by us, I mean anyone on the earth who is living an over-consumptive middle-or upper-middle class lifestyle, we who aspire to look rich but go in debt to do so. I know this lifestyle firsthand because we’re a recovering wannabe-glittering-rich baby-has-only-the-best duel income family who will finally be out of credit card debt in a few months, I hope. We had the fortunate good timing of learning about peak oil last year and stopped short of buying a honking big SUV and a McMansion in the exurbs (all on credit.) We’re making do with an old Honda Civic and Accord and now I shop at thrift stores, but more on that in another post.

We, the wannabe-glittering-rich, had to have that oil for what? So we could cart our butts to the nearest big-box retail store where we could buy stuff that doesn’t ultimately make us happy anyway. It took fossil fuel energy to produce this stuff, oil to truck it to the store, coal to keep the lights on, and bigger houses burning coal to keep it air-conditioned. And for what? To be tossed out or donated away? My garage is full of this garbage right now and I can’t tell you how unhappy it makes me. Even the process of planning to sell it is exhausting. But I’m learning to see, I’m climbing out of denial and complacency, and I’m doing a little more each day to slowly (very slowly!) get my family un-hooked from fossil fuel and consumerism. I wish I were moving much faster.

The oil keeps our food supply chain going, too. We truck in our organic food from thousands of miles away instead of bothering to get up off of the recliner and get our hands a little dirty or bike down to the farmer’s market. Shame on us. I’m guilty of all of it, too. What fuels the tractors, or do you buy food from an Amish farmer? How do you think that petroleum-based fertilizer is made? In a solar powered factory? Ha, no! Have solar panels on your roof? What do you think we burn to get the raw materials for solar panels out of the ground? Coal! And how do you think those solar panels are shipped to us? Oil!

Updated:
So don’t be angry at the oil companies or the government or the people who have no idea how to properly lay a boom. We have only our lifestyles to blame.

Do this instead:

I agree with Asher Miller – Yes, you should be angry that BP got away with this b.s., that their employees were goofing off in bars instead of learning how to properly lay a boom.

Once you’ve exhausted your outrage at the idiocy of it all and are ready to move on, here are five constructive outlets:

1. Be sad. Experience your grief. This is incredibly depressing and we all need a period of mourning. Need some help shedding a tear? Go look at picture #38. Mourn the poor souls who have been making a happy living near the gulf. Mourn the days that you will not be spending with that white sand between your toes and for the future generations who may not be able to do the same. And please, mourn for the poor creatures. Mourn the pelicans and the flounders and the ghost crabs. They didn’t need recliners or cars or toys or exotic fruit. They only needed the ocean, a marsh, an ecosystem, and we destroyed it.

   Requiem
   by Robert Louis Stevenson

   Under the wide and starry sky,
   Dig the grave and let me lie;
   Glad did I live and gladly die,
   And I laid me down with a will.

   This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
   Here he lies where he longed to be;
   Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
   And the hunter home from the hill.

   But no, this is the poem for the happy end to a life well-lived. Perhaps this one is more relevant:
   from Joanna Macy

   We hear you, fellow-creatures. We know we are wrecking the world and we are afraid. What we have unleashed has such momentum now; we don’t know how to turn it around. Don’t leave us alone; we need your help. You need us too for your own survival. Are there powers there you can share with us?

   (I was first introduce to this, and Joanna Macy, in chapter 19 of Sacred Demise.)

2. Wake up. Learn what’s going on around you. Read about the issues on Post Carbon Institute’s site. Check out my links in the sidebar. We’re on the down-slope of the oil age anyway – you may as well get off of it.
3. Now that you’ve scared the crap out of yourself, find support amongst friends, in a group or with an eco-psychologist. When I found out that my life wouldn’t play out in a period of continuous growth, that everything I thought I knew was going to be changing, I freaking panicked. I got depressed. My husband thought I had lost the last of my marbles. For those of us who have been in a daily routine of work-eat-sleep, this is tough material to digest. Start with Carolyn Baker’s book Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse.
4. Find a new way forward. Take steps every day to get fossil fuel out of your life because volatility is going to be the new norm for the price of fuel (and everything that depends upon it). Find or start a Transition Movement near you. Replace ‘oil-soaked’ food with local, organic, in-season choices. Learn how to grow something. Figure out how to get yourself around with less gas, and coal-powered electric cars are not the answer – have you seen the mountaintops in West Virginia? Take a look at Community Solution’s Smart Jitney idea. You can partially do this now with carpools. When thinking about where to live, find a small, walkable town to live in or live near public transportation if you can. If you need to have a face-to-face work meeting but don’t actually need to shake hands, try a Telepresence meeting instead of flying or driving a long distance.

   Take the future into your own hands and stop waiting for a hero to arrive.

   “I wondered why somebody didn’t do something. Then I realized, I am somebody.”

   — Source Unknown

5. Take some classes from people who understand what’s going on. Here are a few:
   - Carolyn’s class: Navigating the Coming Chaos of Unprecedented Transitions: be guided though the process of denial, soul-sickness and stages of grief that we’re all experiencing over the loss of our habitats, the faltering of our economy, the depletion of our natural resources and the shattering of every idea upon which we’ve built our McCastles in the air. I just finished this class and it was a transformational experience.
   - Other classes I plan to take from Post Peak Living include the Un-Crash Course and Sustainable Post-Peak Livelihoods.
   - I’m hopefully taking an Adapting in Place class from Sharon Astyk – fingers crossed that there are still openings. Getting off the grid right now really isn’t financially feasible for us – I need to know what I can do where I am, and I’m betting some of you do as well.
   - I signed up for an Urban Gardening summit. I really want to be involved in urban/suburban gardening initiatives and want to know more about what’s going on.
   - But first, I need to take lots of organic gardening and food preservation classes! Our community has some great ones – I took a class on building a cold frame last year. But I also have a full-time job and a family, so I’m learning as I go and am pestering my gardening friends for advice. I’ll post what I’ve learned (usually the hard way) on my site.

We don’t need to blame others or shame ourselves, we need to empower ourselves and our communities. Trying to get myself off of fossil fuel is something that I can get pretty far with on my own, and I could get even farther if I banded with a group of like-minded citizens. It won’t be easy. It’ll take time. But we have to get started now or we’ll destroy everything good that is left on this earth as we engage in ever-more risky behavior to extract the remaining fossil fuels. It’s time to redefine ‘the good life.’ My husband and I used to think it meant a designer house in the ‘burbs with a BMW or two in the driveway. But to pull off that kind of lifestyles, we would work and commute so much that we’d have little time to actually enjoy the house or the cars. We would be happier, I think, with a yurt, a garden, a bike, and time spent together as a family.

I’m leaving you with some moving videos and a poem. It’s time to remake the way in which we live upon this Earth. We can do it, but we have to open our eyes and our hearts first.

Carolyn Baker, The Thread:

What Uncertainty Brings Us:

Joanna Macy at Bioneers 2009 from Defend theCommons on Vimeo.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save.
So much has been destroyed.
I have to cast my lot with those who,
age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

from Adrienne Rich, through Joanna Macy’s Bowl of Tears practice