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Slow Violence in the Gulf of Mexico: A Buddhist Response
The U.S. government and reporters have gone from calling the BP/Transocean calamity an accident to referring to it as an environmental crime. In my opinion, that’s an improvement in verbal accuracy but it misses an even larger and vastly important point. We are now witnessing in the Gulf of Mexico slow violence. Writer Rob Nixon coined the phrase, which he acknowledges as seemingly oxymoronic, to describe acts whose “lethal repercussions sprawl across space and time.”
Would anyone argue that the exploits of oil professionals in the Gulf haven’t caused deadly outcomes that continue to sprawl spatially and temporally? If the implications of the words Nixon uses to help us understand his concept were not utterly devastating, I’d relish their richness: “attritional calamities” with “deferred consequences and casualties;” “dispersed repercussions” that “pose formidable imaginative difficulties.” The explosion, fire, and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon was a small spectacle and only the initial phase of a protracted series of events with severe ramifications. I believe that Nixon would call the BP Earth Day Oil Catastrophe a “convoluted cataclysm”; it’s vivified by the tortuous patterns of unspectacular brick-colored sludge and oblique oily sheen not anywhere but everywhere. The crude oil coats birds, porpoises, redfish, marsh grasses, and people. It’s dispersed in the water column and currents, and sends fumes into the air.
It’s difficult not to be heartbroken. Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, reported from coastal Louisiana the sentiments of people whose lives and livelihoods are wrecked. When asked to talk about the damage, fifty-one year old Dean Blanchard, owner of the largest shrimp business in the area of Grand Isle responded, “It’s not the damage. It’s a way of life. They destroyed a way of life.” In the parking lot of his tattoo parlor Bobby Pitre displayed a sculpture of an adult and child, both wearing gas masks, holding a dead fish by the tail and a sign, “God help us all!” When talking to Goodman he said, “I don’t think there’s anything that man can do at this point to really prevent the spill from reaching us, reaching our marshes….we need a miracle, is what we really need, you know? That’s how I see it. It’s going to kill everything in our marshes, our whole way of life. It’s just going to kill us, you know?”
Devastated communities and environmental refugees, dead or injured living beings, and absolutely altered land, water, and air. We should recognize the BP Earth Day Oil Catastrophe as a bellwether of slow violence—brutality in the guise of slow-moving and spatially extensive environmental transformations that are out of sync with the nano-second attention spans of the 21st century. But what will enable us unflaggingly to confront slow violence?
In her memoir, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, Sharon Salzberg writes, “When we stand before a chasm of futility, it is first of all faith in this [the] larger perspective that enables us to go on.” Some might scoff at the idea that faith has any place as a healing quality, a refuge, during this calamity and in the future it foreshadows. But human beings must begin to live and act in accordance with the reality of connectedness famously articulated by John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe. ”
Salzberg advocates for an enduring faith in, among other things, the recurrent workings of nature. She reports after the U.S. bombed Hiroshima, panic erupted as rumors spread that grass, trees, and flowers would never again grow in the city. She writes:
“Had the disaster been of such proportions that the laws of nature had exploded with the bomb? As we know, even in the face of massive human intervention, the grass and trees and flowers did grow again in Hiroshima. Several people, describing their experience of that time, say that it was only once they learned that natural law was still intact that they had the faith to go on.”
Natural law still operates amidst the ineptitude and corruption in the Gulf of Mexico. Distributary channels on the Mississippi delta continue to carry sediment to the Gulf despite human efforts to channelize the flow of the river; tides and currents dole out the sediment to the sea; fine-grained particles settle to the seafloor. It’s the modern day continuation of processes that first formed the oil. The petroleum—“rock oil”—now gushing forth from the earth’s crust is a natural substance, albeit unleashed in an unnatural time frame. It formed from the remains of marine organisms interred in mud beneath the sea. Over millions of years, the mud compressed and heated to form the sedimentary rock, shale. In that process the contained organic matter broke down to form oil. In the record of rocks, like those that spew oil, I read rhythms of deep time and the renewal they imply.
James Hutton, the 18th century Scottish medical doctor and gentleman farmer, is considered the founder of geology and remembered as having likened the earth to a perpetually self-renewing machine. But as essayist Loren Eiseley reminds us in The Firmament of Time, for his doctoral dissertation Hutton studied blood circulation. At the same time, the medieval idea persisted that Man reproduces in miniature the outside world. What has been called Hutton’s secret—the fact that as a physician he applied his biomedical perspective to the earth—allowed him to use an organismic analogy for the earth. He conceived of the planet not simply as a machine but as a living organism with circulation and metabolism. In this way of seeing, it is possible to recognize dynamic qualities of the earth’s crust that facilitate decay and renewal.
As Sharon Salzberg advises, “with faith we can draw near to the truth of the present moment.” So, for the time being, as I follow the ongoing reports coming from coastal Louisiana, I’m clinging to my faith as a geoscientist that we and the Earth together can begin again.
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37 Comments so far
Show Allwhat?
we need to change our daily behavior...
all of us, together...
we need to cap and dismantle the other wells...
we're going to be needing the newly-thawed northern portions of the northern hemisphere's major land masses soon, also, as the planet's middle desertifies, so this tar sands mess will not be a pretty thing to find, either, when migrating peoples arrive...assuming the warming arctic's methane releases don't make this whole discussion moot...
we are painting ourselves into a serious corner...
faith is hard to disparage, but I sure prefer action...
Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...
In florida, during stone crab and lobster season, if you are caught catching too many pounds of lobster, you will be arrested on the spot by the marine patrol and you will need to be bailed out that day. Here, this grotesque corporation, bp, is in the process destroying an entire sea! The perpetrators are on tv! They are holding news conferences, they're actually still discussing company revenues!
That's the difference between us and Them.
Don't you know? They're "special".
Their contempt of regular working folks (as Mr. Hayward so beautifully exemplifies) is only surpassed by their contempt for the natural world.
BP just spent 50 million dollars for media buys and the production of print ads & a commercial – a disguised attempt to control what information gets out. (Money talks, facts walk.)
"Steal a little and they throw you in jail,
Steal a lot and they make you king."
Dylan
When I stare at this disaster, despair is the only emotional response, and it is extremely disempowering. But when I widen my view and see it as a wound to the earth, it somehow becomes more solvable and that is empowering. Thank you for reminding me of this: "Natural law still operates amidst the ineptitude and corruption in the Gulf of Mexico."
Faith doesn't mean lighting candles and hoping. It means we act, but from a mindset of hope. We drive for accountability rather than revenge, not letting anyone off the hook. And yes, first we stop the damage - we act to keep this from happening again. We also act to help the earth heal however long it takes. And we make those who did this stand accountable for the greed that drove it and the damage that was done. These things are not mutually exclusive.
And I hope the "we" with the power and tools to do all this have the courage and will to get it done.
Beautifully put, Jonma. Only one word: "hope" would I change, because hope is the Siamese twin of fear, and cannot liberate us from this or any other catastrophic circumstance. The mindset from which we must proceed, if we are to exert a positive affect on this profoundly negative condition, is a mind which apprehends that this web of life is an eternally and completely interconnected system, inclusive of every manifest thing. Everything we do (think, say) has consequences and effects. We can no longer indulge in our ignorance of this "natural law" or we will have deconstructed the conditions necessary to support life on earth. This is a nightmare of our own collective creation, and first we must wake up.
Here's a non Buddhist response. Has Buddhism done anything to alleviate the conditions in China or India all these years or just served the various empires by quieting the people?
Sick sick sick of the macho man and his endless rape of nature and women. This is the underlying thread that keeps Joe sixpack supporting all the wars not in his interest and the stupid oil industry which has suppressed public transportation and renewable energy for decades. Carter told us the truth and was villified as a wuss Joe sixpack wants his muscle car, the oil industry and the banking industry want their big profits for coke and prostitiutes among other things. Rape is epidemic in Africa. The biggest industries in the late, capitalist patriarchal world are arms, drugs and sex traficking/pornography. The wars are fought for oil on oil. Tanks get .6miles to the gallon. If we stopped warring we wouldn't need so much oil. We don't need oil but renewables need to be decentrlaized and nobody can make obscene profits from that so it isn't done. Our entire political class are a bunch of whores far less moral than actual prostitiutes. Valerie Solanas was right.
This oil spill is likely the end of human life on earth. The oceans were already in trouble. This never ending spewing will be the death of so many species one of them being plankton which we need for oxygen. So great work guys, so technically brilliant at doing such stupid life wasting things. It truly is a man's world now. All you Ahabs have conquered nature and isn't it grand.
As a Buddhist I have come to understand that there is a basic contradiction between conscience and social action that Buddhists share with those early Marxists who thought that after the education of the working class there would be a raising of awareness which would make a kind of phase shift in society that would make governments in the sense of being the projections of individual egos obsolete.
Early on in communist history the notion of the vanguard of the proletariat was brought in because this hope for a "natural" maturation of the working class into some kind of group avatar of humanity in history just really never seem to be very likely.
And if you look at the history of the hard-working and poor Asian nations - Buddhism is used by the state as a way to encourage passive acceptance of oppression, especially by females.
And if you look at both the case of Marxism and Buddhism you see a weird fact emerge. In both cases you are counting on the accumulation of a lot of individual transformations of character based on conscience reach a tipping point that changes the consensus spiritual character of the societies they live in. In the case of Marxism you have them just give up on that particular notion entirely, and in Buddhism you just have the religious hierarchy look away and say to themselves “change doesn't seem to be coming but I'm sure this is better than what would've been otherwise”.
The World fights becoming Enlightened.
Re: "... after the education of the working class there would be a raising of awareness which would make a kind of phase shift in society that would make governments in the sense of being the projections of individual egos obsolete. Early on in communist history the notion of the vanguard of the proletariat was brought in because this hope for a "natural" maturation of the working class into some kind of group avatar... just really never seem[ed] to be very likely."
That's because it can never happen. Societies are as subject to evolutionary pressures as are species. The driver, as always, is survival of the fittest. In the most desperate cases, this means being able to match the power of an adversary. Thus successful societies evolve in ways that tend to increase their collective power. In times of danger, this generally implies centralization as a means of uniting a society in a common cause. And once that centralization has tken place, it only dissipates with the society's demise or its subjugation.
A worker's utopia is not a viable entity. The best that can be hoped for is a government that protects its people without at the same time oppressing them. This has proven to be a very tall order.
Indeed, as the saying goes, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Your post presumes an inevitable dominator society.
Sometimes the dominant baboons die off first and the remaining males work cooperatively with the females. A new basis for societal structure is born.
Re: "Your post presumes an inevitable dominator society."
No, actually it only presumes that similar evolutionary processes are at work in societies as are at work on a biological level. In "The Parable of the Tribes", Andrew Bard Schmookler (http://nonesoblind.org) describes a pretty convincing thought experiment showing that this is so.
Given that, the implication is that there will be a long term tendency in a society toward ever-increasing power. A society in which this does not happen risks annihilation, absorption, or subjugation by a rival society in which it does. One can meditate on the fate of the native Americans in the US or the Tibetans in what once was Tibet as illustrations of this process. In times danger, that power tends to become centralized. Once centralized, it tends to remain so due to those same evolutionary pressures operating at a group level within a society.
My post doesn't assume a dominator society. On the contrary, it demonstrates why the tendency toward a dominator society exists, why the communist idea of the "withering away of the state" is unrealistic, and perhaps suggests some points to consider when meditating on the proper form and operation of government.
Sioux Rose
HELIX: Societies have been structured by men and reflect patriarchal programming, or the worship of FORCE to prove manhood. VERY few societies have been arranged differently over the course of most recorded history. To speculate about the full potentials of mankind when half of its population effectively was left out of the equation is not the kind of thought process I can respect. It IS what is generally taken for a solid basis for argument, but that's because patriarchal programming has controlled the dialog, determined who was accredited, and still owns the means to manage consent. Even religions are on board with its program; in fact it can be argued that they represent its theoretical/theological basis.
Those who argue FOR this paradigm lack imagination for all their scholarship. Once again, I don't buy it, nor do I believe in the big bang... unless it was in response to the Divine Feminine "black hole." There is no life without the dance; and THAT dance is an equal product of Yin and Yang forces. Most constructs here on earth have deprived HALF the force from acting as counter-balance in all those policy making circles that ultimately determine the collective fate (and direction) of nation states and similar entities. You do not speak for me, or many, who have been left out of the equation for too long. Therefore the authority behind your claims in my view is illegitimate.
l-rivers:
I've studied psychology, sociology, comparative religions and spent time in a Buddhist monastery in Nepal. What has won my dedicated interest for decades is a study of the Logos, which is to say, the mechanics of the magnificent "As above, so below" Divine equation. I preface my response to your post this way because there are very real archetypal energies that exist in both universal spheres as well as in ourselves. A few work towards universal enlightenment, while others obstruct it. I can simplify their defining characteristics in this way:
Mars = the principle of raw ego and its dominant focus on self-interest.
Venus = the interest in (and need to) love and be loved, cared for as part of a couple/group/society.
Jupiter = the belief in a benevolent, abundant universe, the power of faith (New Testament)to grant manifest outcomes.
Saturn = the realization that bad things happen, the need to experience loss (Old Testament) the influence of fear and the law of karma/accountability.
Uranus = the rule buster, the inventor, iconoclast, and visionary force that upsets the status-quo.
Neptune = The force that can delude, deceive, and beguile. It works through all forms of self-deception and escapist behavior, including the use of opiates/alcohol.
Pluto = The dance of life and death, the force that breaks things down so they can be rebuilt, just as the ashes must precede the rise of the Phoenix.
These and other archetypal energies factor into both individual and collective beliefs and behaviors. They extend to form societal norms. Saturn holds these together, and Uranus tries to burst the chains.
The circle is a perfect form. It exists without favoring any singular position, nor any "right" side... thus it provides a model that demonstates how these facets of ourselves are intended to act in manners whereby the parts evolve the whole.
Due to centuries of patriarchal conditioning, Saturn and Mars have been fed into humanity's stream of consciousness as the dominant archetypes, those associated with the Deity. The full wing-span of what flesh is heir/ess to has been limited.
Abraham founded 12 tribes, Jesus chose 12 disciples, and the ancient Zodiac speaks of 12 quintessential paths. I believe many answers can be found through the holy circle and its inherent sacred geometry. Inside its mysteries are the keys to reconcilation among all tribes and each perspective (or mandated life path).
I have been in the esoteric spiritual subculture since age 17. Everyone was hoping enough people would spiritually evolve to change the world peacefully. It didnt happen. Higher spirituality is opposed by the adolescent ego at every level of culture - by the elites, by science, by conventional religions and all the adolescent egos out there who dont want to face the fact that they are merely living at the larval, fetal stage of human development.
Until higher spirituality is granted its rightful place as THE purpose of human existence, nothing will really change, and we will slide into a Dark Age as we are doing now.
Buddhism opposes any political revolution that might involve violence or harsh criticism of elites. That is why you can see things like the Dalai Lama posing for pictures with Nancy Pelosi and George W. Bush. His seeking help from the US for his problems with China is like asking one Mafia don for help against another Mafia don. I wonder what people in Gaza would think of that picture....
If a global spiritual leader can overlook what Bush did, it's hard to see what one cant overlook. Would the Dalai Lama approve of the people having the power to forcibly drag elite criminals like Bush of BP executives into court? I dont know, but I doubt it. And if we, the people do not have that power, it is hard to see how any change is possible. I often wonder if the Dalai Lama sees that we are heading for a Dark Age. At any rate, he doesnt look like he is losing any sleep over it.
Sioux Rose
KITAJ: Most excellent post. I, too, have been on "the spiritual search" since I was 16, and using the oracles, I have been a guide to hundreds of persons, many of whom thank me for the light/insights shed on their paths. I wanted to bring higher teachings to "the masses" and wrote 6 movie scripts with that intention. Not a one got through. By the time my children were grown and I could dedicate myself to this "mission," the media was in the hands of those most invested in preventing any messages that might challenge the make-war/pro-corporate exploitation status quo.
I thought of Mother Theresa the other day. That for all her efforts, there are still so many millions of poor persons. It is more effective to shift the political systems that create such unfair bases for income distribution than to fill each hungry person's empty cup. However, in the lives of those whose cups were filled, such generosity makes a real difference.
None of us knows when we will be the wings of the flapping butterfly that turns over the beast. Keep flapping... and I'm glad you (and I) got to experience the miraculous beauty of the Florida Keys. My favorite snorkeling spot was actually off the coast of Puerto Rico on the Culebra (snake) Island.
I can't even look at the photos of the dying creatures from the Gulf. The one on CD today made me wonder if at some instinctual level the creature understands the full ramifications of its nest being tainted, and if it wonders/worries in its dying breaths about its offspring left behind to fend for themselves in so unnatural a once natural ecosystem. Sickening.
Buddhism is a technique to the higher spirituality.
A path of nonviolence taken by King and Ghandi that performs what most would say are miracles but are actually totally in congruence with Quantum Physics
One creates the conditions for the best outcome through right thought, speech and action ( this is also the Sufi way).
Violence begets Violence
Peace begets Peace
Most people in India are NOT Buddhists. I repeat NOT Buddhist. Between the Hindus and the Muslims, Buddhists in India were long ago wiped out.
And much of China in the last century is not Buddhist. And was never really all that Buddhist.
"This oil spill is likely the end of human life on earth. The oceans were already in trouble. This never ending spewing will be the death of so many species one of them being plankton which we need for oxygen. So great work guys, so technically brilliant at doing such stupid life wasting things. It truly is a man's world now. All you Ahabs have conquered nature and isn't it grand."
No it isn't. Not close. As usual, Americans overrate things that affect them.
This is a thoughtful article- thank you. I too find comfort in the bigger picture, and at times it even brings me peace to think that the human species will probably die out as it becomes apparent that it is a blight upon the earth, and that nature will once again heal and rebuild what we have destroyed. We do very little to enhance and strengthen natural systems, and it seems whereever more than a few of us gather we do much harm.
What is most challenging for me is the suffering- the suffering of birds and sea life who die a slow and miserable death covered with oil, as well as the suffering of people in the area who have built their lives around too many of them trying to catch too few fish and shrimp. Even before this disaster another slow motion disaster has been unfolding in the Gulf as overfishing has decimated many of the fishing stocks there. We are so clever in how we have medical care to prolong life and prevent childhood death and disease, to increase maternal health, but we forgot that we then must also be wise and responsible for limiting our own numbers, as we have learned to prevent nature from doing so in her own harsh way.
We learned how to get this precious and incredibly useful resource out of the ground and have now managed to go through nearly half of it- most of it used to make war and provide us with disposable plastic junk that now fills our landfills and litters our roadsides. Now that we are addicted to it, and will suffer greatly if we can't get it in sufficient quantities and cheaply- we find the rest of the oil is harder to get and carries more risk. Yet, how many of those in the Gulf would willingly agree to stop driving their cars, turn off their air conditioners, and stop shopping for new appliances and food from distant places?
Now we pay the price for our shortsightedness, and the innocent birds and turtles pay the price too. But, in the end, some will die, some will live, and nature will rebuild. Whether, after this disaster and the even more slow violence of climate change, as well as impending and continuing (and escalating) wars over this dwindling resource, any of humanity is left- only time will tell.
The Horizon Depths empirePie June 4th, 2010
follow the trail of the nested progress of blight
follow the goods to the neighborhoods
follow the vows,....... follow the DOWs
........to inheritance and feuds,
............. to squabbling families and assets both split
follow the flow, from the guilds to the Bilderbergs
follow the dynasties, follow the Kings and Queens of yore
follow the battles and gilded castles and courtly beaus and bows
follow the fawning courtiers,
and now......
follow the compliant marketers of serfdom
the Millennials of the iPad hand me down nests; B-52 blest,
horizonless
deep sixed in the deception of the black gold lifestyle
from the vista of deep despair.
follow the deep water geyser
follow the footprint
follow the tale
It is hard for me to find any sympathy for the people who live on the Gulf. For a couple of generations most of them welcomed the money and jobs brought by the oil industry.
Even now, Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi warns that the federal government should not be too harsh with the oil industry.
Money trumps all.
As far as I am concerned, Haley Barbour can go f*** himself. The extraction of oil - and indeed all energy - should be highly ecologically regulated and taxed for the benefit of all, and BP execs should be put on trial, stripped of their wealth and thrown in Gitmo.
While it's nice to know that in hundreds of millions of years that the earth will be OK, it's a shame to know also that it will not be OK in our lives or the lives of our children and grandchildren. Never mind in the lives of the other living things and their offspring. Life imprisonment is the least we can do for the top executives of the oil companies and their minion politicians who did this to the earth.
I have exactly two questions:
1) How many gallons of gasoline do you burn in your car each year?
2) Do you buy locally-grown food, or do you supermarket vegetables that were grown in california and beef that was raised in Argentina?
It's easy to point the finger at BP in this case, but the bottom line is that who's not Amish or lives by similar principles also played a part in this.
The kind of people who visit this website are well aware of the situation and have devoted their lives to changing things in one way or another. I have devoted my life since age 17 to investigating how human beings can actualize spiritual potential and transcend the spiritual degeneration that is destroying us all. During that time I have tried to help the people around me who were seriously damaged by social indoctrination in a sick culture.
It was obvious 30, 40 years ago that humanity was heading for disaster - that is what the 60's Counterculture was all about. Our whole way of life is sick. If you are just figuring that out, welcome to the club.
Please dont lecture us here in a tone of self-righteous oneupmanship. Save that for the people who support the corporate state, the war machine and the reactionary world view that is destroying this country and the world. I resent it that you have forced me to waste my time countering your post, as this whole subject has been gone over, over and over and over again. Enough!!!!!
When we the people can decide how our money is spent - instead of being pissed down the drain by the elites, then talk to me. Sheeeeesh!
Another one who is repeating apologia and spin from the oil industry, either out of ignorance, or by deflection.
You want to talk about bottom lines? Look at BP's profits last year. Look at BP's share price before the leak.
Yes, no matter the apologias from posters like you, from writers like Mark Morford, BP is to blame for trying to minimise costs as much as possible, to maximise profits as much as possible. BP is to blame for choosing to pay dividends to shareholders, even after the spill. As are those shareholders. BP, and the oil industry, is to blame for bribing politicians to minimise safety rules. The politicians are to blame for accepting those bribes.
BP is just doing what BP does: not surprise there.
I take your point. But the problem with this line of reasoning is that if we're all responsible, then nobody is responsibile-or, more precisely, no one can be held accountable.I drive (my wife and I have one car, and it's a Prius),and we try to eat locally-but, this year, I have to make several trips to the East Coast-sucking down jet fuel as I do so.I can't avoid it.But I would dearly love to see some one take the rap for this particular disaster. So far, that would be BP, Transocean,MMS and the lax regulatory climate that made this disaster possible in the first place. At the moment, the market seems to be handing BP a ration of shit.I'll suspend my lack of faith in market mechanisms for the time being.
Blaming the public is akin to blaming sheep for being sheared.
USAans will drive anything that is availabe and affordable, even if it was fueled by bannanas.
There has been a pervasive and successful effort, with USA government support, for the last 100 years, to eliminate any alternative energy use other than those owned by vested interest monopolies.
Yes, nature will go on in some form ... but human beings will have no place in that future.
Oh well, four and a half billion years down the drain ... but who's counting?
I always considered the national debt to be 'slow violence'. Imagine requiring your grandchildren to pay for your public services. Who but Reagan could call themselves a 'fiscal conservative' while doing such a thing?
The articles writer overlooked one minor fact
ORGANISMS DIE!
"With faith we can draw near to the truth of the present moment." With faith we can draw near to the ILLUSION of the present moment. Faith is a mental interpretation of 'longing'. an indefinable feeling, sensation state, originating in Self/being. because the 'longing' has been usurped by mind it has now entered into the area of illusion, where truth cannot be "drawn near to" or found.
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it is bound fast, by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe" John Muir This is NOT a metaphor. It is EXACTLY like that, except that the invisible cords are NOT invisible.
This stunningly beautiful quote by John Muir, is exposing the most basic problem of humans and the planet that supports them. It is the belief that we are separate from the planet and it natural laws and that we are separate from Being. these "invisible cords" that he speaks of, are cords of light and i believe they are the most subtle form of this connectedness that is the omnipresent consciousness. It is a description of the 'unity' of consciousness.
"Slow violence" is a very apt concept for this catastrophe.
However, her article and philosophy have serious problems: It is not entirely clear what she actually means by "faith." Properly and essentially, there are two very different definitions: 1 - Common sense faith, as in confidence or trust; 2 - the religious term which means literally believing in something without evidence.
The first is rational, the second is the opposite.
Her article starts out sounding like the former, but, unfortunately ends up firmly in the no. 2 camp.
For this reason her thesis contradicts John Muir's eloquent quote.
Mystical faith, as one philosopher has said, short circuits the mind's rational processes.
Do you want an example? See (as several other of the responses highlight) the Buddhist dogma's effect of numbing people to reality and diverting their consciousness to "internal mental peace and relaxation," which effectively cancels out the likelihood of any rational action toward dealing with a given situation or problem. As noted above, this is rather convenient for the powers that be.
It is NOT faith that is needed, but a conscious realization that society must be changed -- starting with legal action action against those who perpetrated this crime.
"Truth and Consequences"
from stardust
BP's ugly theft.
Gaia bleeds out in black blood.
Ocean's trident poised?
I do not have to believe I am getting old, that I am going to die or that when I walk in the rain I get wet. Such realities are beyond belief. There are fundamental laws that operate in the universe and from a Buddhist point of view that are not created by or dependent on somebody’s power. The gist of Jill S. Schneiderman’s article and remark that-Natural law still operates amidst the ineptitude and corruption in the Gulf of Mexico attest to this reality. The catastrophe in the Gulf happened because of certain conditions which caused the results what happened and what we continue to observe.
Katfish your words-“Everything we do (think, say) has consequences and effects. We can no longer indulge in our ignorance of this "natural law" or we will have deconstructed the conditions necessary to support life on earth.”- are quite clear,to the point and so well taken.
A quality of Buddhist thought, expressed by many teachers, is to let go of endless thinking and intellectualizing that often produce the misguided perception of Buddhism and view of reality 'expressed in today's comments; observe and appreciate the abundance of nature around us;pay close attention to small daily happenings- gain insight from life.You will be able to deal with life a lot better.
People that don't understand natural law should not write about it.