Between a Rock and a Hard Place.

So many things are coming to a head now. The oil spill in the Gulf shows this in crystal clarity. We need oil in this country, badly, but this need, this desire, hunger, craving, insatiable appetite for oil has caused an environmental disaster. We use oil in so many, many ways. Not only to heat our homes, but to make plastics, paint, throwaway things. To make pesticides, herbicides, fungicides. To fuel big agribusiness (which is causing its own brands of environmental chaos). To run our cars, busses, trains. To light our cities, houses, towns, run our computers, gizmos and gadgets. Where does it stop? How do you stop it when there is a relentless mania for cheap? Cheap is not healthy or environmentally sane. However, there are fewer and fewer good choices these days, and even at Whole Foods you end up buying the same commercially raised, big-agribusiness foods, for more money. But back to the oil spill...

maybe, just maybe this oil spill will wake people up to the fact that we use way too much oil, that we need to be more environmental. The oil spill will kill the wetlands...and they will become fiction, like the cartoons of The Princess and the Frog, or The Rescuers. They will be gone. So will cheap shrimp (shrimp farmers are in danger too...they are their own version of environmental chaos, but still, once they go out, we will have to rely more on the wild, which causes its own enormous environmental load). I'm starting to wonder if we have now slapped Mother Earth with more than she can take. The oceans are becoming overfished as it is, with huge amounts of bycatch being discarded every day, and fewer and fewer fish.

I'm honestly scared. I honestly wonder if we are going to be losing our food sources. We need to rally now. We need to buy local as much as possible, support local farmers. We need to find sustainable options for our fish, our meats, our dairy. We need to find environmental alternatives to sucking up huge amounts of power....