Mother Is Bleeding - David Loftus

As I have had occasion to note here before, I am an atheist. I have been ever since I declared myself one at the age of 5. I can acknowledge there are many things we cannot explain, and perhaps never will, but I don’t go in for woo-woo spirituality or New Age fuzziness. Nevertheless, my training in English and American Literature has fostered a certain open-mindedness, I imagine, especially a fondness for metaphor.

And thus it is that the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico brings to mind the Gaia Hypothesis. In brief, as proposed by chemist and environmental scientist James Lovelock in the 1970s, the theory posits a view of Earth as a complex of interlocking and interacting physical and biological systems -- all of which affect and maintain one another almost as if the planet were one great organism. Lovelock and colleagues of like mind reject the notion of the planet as being actually alive or possessed of intention; his interest is in building mathematical models that describe how complex systems keep atmospheric gases (particularly the ones that keep plant and animal life alive on the surface) in relative balance. But as Stephen Jay Gould suggested, the theory could be regarded more as a metaphor for a “live planet” (Gaia was the name of the Greek goddess of the primordial earth) … and New Age and environmental enthusiasts are only too happy to view it that way.

However, as Tim Dickinson put it in his excellent report on the crisis in Rolling Stone, the spill is “the most devastating attack on American soil since 9/11.” An estimated 28 to 42 million gallons of crude oil have blossomed from the ocean floor -- discoloring the water, killing marine animals and plants, and clogging the beaches of the southern U.S. It is only too easy to think of Gaia as bleeding. Human greed and recklessness have wounded our Mother Earth by punching a hole in her side. But in its effects, the “blood” is more like a pus: thick, poisonous, and deadly to the skin of the planet and the tinier organisms that inhabit it.

Sadly, the catastrophe in the Gulf isn’t the only example of this. It’s not even the biggest. It just happens to be getting all the attention right now. ExxonMobil and Shell have leaked a Gulf’s worth of oil into the Niger River delta possibly every year from the deteriorating, 40-year-old pipe system in the 606 oilfields maintained there, as the British newspaper The Guardian reported last month. Perhaps even worse, Texaco extracted oil from the jungles of the northern Amazon, in Ecuador and Colombia from the 1960s until 1992, and has left “widespread toxic contamination that devastated the livelihoods and traditions of the local people, and took a severe toll on their physical well-being,” according to an opinion column by Bob Herbert in the New York Times.

A lawsuit brought on behalf of those locals asserts that Texaco “deliberately dumped many billions of gallons of waste byproduct from oil drilling directly into the rivers and streams of the rainforest covering an area the size of Rhode Island. It gouged more than 900 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor -- pits which to this day leach toxic waste into soils and groundwater. It burned hundreds of millions of cubic feet of gas and waste oil into the atmosphere, poisoning the air and creating ‘black rain’ which inundated the area during tropical thunderstorms.”

So it’s not just the one big wound we’re hearing about. Gaia is bleeding all over: we’ve stabbed her multiple times, and either she is dying or she is going to take her revenge on us, sooner or later, for wounding her so thoroughly. It won’t be pretty. The description of the process may be metaphorical, but the pain and suffering of the human race, along with all the other creatures who have made their homes on Gaia’s epidermis, won’t be.