Top Kill = Fail / Failure to Learn/Act

I must admit that I have surprised even myself with some recent posts and some recent offline conversations (wow: remember those?) about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico. Even before I was a vegetarian I never self-identified as an "environmentalist." Sure, I knew that humans had a responsibility to care for the planet, I probably will always be an animal lover and be passionate about zoology (especially paleobiology, primate evolution, and marine biology), but I guess I still had "Child of the 70s" presuppositions that environmentalists were all hippies worshipping Gaia (even though I considered myself a supporter of the "Save The Whales" movement).

Over the weekend I discovered another happy privilege of the iPad: watching movies and causing serious catch-up damage on my ever-increasing Netflix queue. So I watched several documentaries on that DVD/TV-like portable device. And I found myself several times this weekend thinking back to another documentary I have mentioned before: "The Corporation." Seriously: everyone must watch that one.

But the two most recent ones for me were "Crude" and "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price." "Crude" documents the ongoing class action lawsuit trying to get some reparations from Chevron/Texaco for the massive damage alleged by indigenous people in Ecuador for what some have called "The Amazon Chernobyl." A glimpse of the future that massive oil spills and environmental pollution disasters hold for all of us? Yes. Also a scathing indictment of corporate greed and a failure for individual leaders to accept any sort of shared responsibility not only for actions but also for human protection of a shared planet. The concept of greed is the focus of the second movie, "Wal-Mart" that is full of frightening facts and includes eyewitness testimony from former/current employees that document how greed becomes injustice in every sense of the word. Truly eye-opening and made me swear off ever shopping at Wal-Mart (or Sam's Club) ever (not that I ever did). Now I understand why communities have protested Wal-Mart coming into their communities, large and small. Reading facts like Wal-Mart employees contributing $5M one year to help their peer employees experiencing financial hardship when the executive family contributed only $6K of their vast fortunes for the same emergency fund just sickened me. (The Wal-Mart family routinely contributes something like 1% of their profits to charitable causes; Bill Gates gives away 56% of his. Bravo to him; Boo on Wal-Mart.)

So this brought me back to the current oil spill that is nowhere close to being solved. I decided it;s not enough to just throw up my hands and say, well, what can we do? Corporations are in for the money, I still drive a gasoline-powered car, engineers can't possibly solve every mechanical problem in the world especially one that is one mile below the surface of the ocean, etc. I decided instead that this is all about individual responsibility: the individual responsibility we each have to conserve the planet's resources, to honor the privileges of our lifestyles by giving back what we can when we can, to use political and social action to promote justice for all people (and all living things), to steward the health of our societies for future generations, and to never just sit back and accept the "fate" of "accidents." We're each capable of much more than that. At the very least we can all continue to examine multiple sides to each story and stay as educated as possible.

I hope you'll do that too, iPad/documentary movies or not.

For more (eye-opening and mind-expanding) information:
"Crude"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1326204/
"Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0473107/