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Page added on July 19, 2016
Why Do We Pretend to Clean Up Ocean Oil Spills?
When the Deepwater Horizon well operated by BP (formerly British Petroleum) exploded and contaminated the Gulf of Mexico with at least 650 million litres of crude oil in 2010, blue-smocked animal rescuers quickly appeared on television screens. Looking like scrub nurses, the responders treated oil-coated birds with charcoal solutions, antibiotics and dish soap. They also forced the birds to swallow Pepto-Bismol, which helps absorb hydrocarbons. The familiar, if not outlandish, images suggested that something was being cleaned up.
But during the chaotic disaster, Silvia Gaus poked a large hole in that myth. The German biologist had worked in the tidal flats of the Wadden Sea, a region of the North Sea and the world’s largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud, and critical bird habitat. A 1998 oil spill of more than 100,000 litres in the North Sea had killed 13,000 birds in Wattenmeer National Park, and the scientist had learned that cleaning oil-soaked birds could be as harmful to their immune systems as the oil accumulating in their livers and kidneys. Kill, don’t clean, she advised responders in the 2010 BP spill. Gaus then referred to scientific studies to support her unsettling declaration. One 1996 California study, for example, followed the fate of brown pelicans fouled by oil. Researchers marked the birds after they had been “cleaned” and released them into the wild. The majority died or failed to mate again. The researchers concluded that cleaning brown pelicans couldn’t restore them to good breeding health or “normal survivability.” Another study from 1997 observed that once birds affected by an oil spill had been cleaned, they fared poorly and suffered higher than expected mortality rates.
And, consider the 2002 sinking of the MV Prestige. The tanker split in half off the coast of Spain, spilling more than 70 million litres of highly toxic bunker fuel that coated more than 600 beaches with oil. The catastrophe killed some 300,000 seabirds. Although response teams diligently cleaned thousands of animals, most of the birds died within a week. Only a few hundred ever made it back to the wild. In fact, said Gaus, studies indicate that, in general, the post-treatment survival rate of oil-soaked birds is less than one per cent.
Not all bird cleaning is futile. Rescuers saved thousands of penguins following the MV Treasure spill off South Africa in 2000, for example. Success stories, however, are rare. In the Gulf of Mexico, the giant BP spill probably killed nearly a million birds. Gaus’s comments highlighted two uncomfortable realities: cleaning oily birds is a risky business, and the marine oil spill cleanup can often do more harm than good.
In many respects, society’s theatrical response to catastrophic oil spills resembles the way medical professionals respond to aggressive cancer in an elderly patient. Because surgery is available, it is often used. Surgery also creates the impression that the health-care system is doing something even though it can’t change or reverse the patient’s ultimate condition. In an oil-based society, the cleanup delusion is also irresistible. Just as it is difficult for us to acknowledge the limits of medical intervention, society struggles to acknowledge the limits of technologies or the consequences of energy habits. And that’s where the state of marine oil spill response sits today: it creates little more than an illusion of a cleanup. Scientists — outside the oil industry — call it “prime-time theatre” or “response theatre.”
Oil spill workers clean the beach of Naval Air Station Pensacola as oil washes ashore from the BP spill on June 10, 2010 in Pensacola, Florida. Photo via shutterstock. Reproduced on Resilience.org with permission.
The hard scientific reality is this: a big spill is almost impossible to contain because it is physically impossible to mobilize the labour needed and current cleanup technologies in a timely fashion. When the City of Vancouver released a study in 2015 on the effectiveness of responses to large tanker or pipeline spills along the southern coast of British Columbia, the conclusion was blunt: “collecting and removing oil from the sea surface is a challenging, time-sensitive and often ineffective process,” even in calm water.
Scientists have recognized this reality for a long time. During the 1970s when the oil industry was poised to invade the Beaufort Sea, the Canadian government employed more than 100 researchers to gauge the impacts of an oil spill on Arctic ice. The researchers doused sea ducks and ring seals with oil and set pools of oil on fire under a variety of ice conditions. They also created sizable oil spills (one was almost 60,000 litres, a medium-sized spill) in the Beaufort Sea and tried to contain them with booms and skimmers. They prodded polar bears into a man-made oil slick only to discover that bears, like birds, will lick oil off their matted fur and later die of kidney failure. In the end, the Beaufort Sea Project concluded that “oil spill countermeasures, techniques and equipment” would have “limited effectiveness” on ice-covered waters. The reports, however, failed to stop Arctic drilling.
Part of the illusion has been created by ineffective technologies adopted and billed by industry as “world class.” Ever since the 1970s, the oil and gas industry has trotted out four basic ways to deal with ocean spills: booms to contain the oil; skimmers to remove the oil; fire to burn the oil; sand chemical dispersants, such as Corexit, to break the oil into smaller pieces. For small spills these technologies can sometimes make a difference, but only in sheltered waters. None has ever been effective in containing large spills.
White sands of the Gulf Coast with BP oil cleanup sign. Sign photo via shutterstock Reproduced on Resilience.org with permission.
Conventional containment booms, for example, don’t work in icy water, or where waves run amok. Burning oil merely transforms one grave problem — water pollution — into sooty greenhouse gases and creates air pollution. Dispersants only hide the oil by scattering small droplets into the water column, yet they often don’t even do that since conditions have to be just right for dispersants to work. Darryl McMahon, a director of RESTCo, a firm pursuing more effective cleanup technologies, has written extensively about the problem, and his remains: “Sadly, even after over 40 years experience, the outcomes are not acceptable. In many cases, the strategy is still to ignore spills on open water, only addressing them when the slicks reach shore.”
The issue partly boils down to scale, explains Jeffrey Short, a retired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research chemist who studied the aftermath of the 2010 BP disaster as well as the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, which grew at the alarming rate of half a football field per second over two days. “Go try and control something like that,” says Short. Yet almost 30 years after the Exxon Valdez contaminated much of Prince William Sound, the cleanup technology has changed little.
“What I find the most disturbing is the tendency for responsible authorities and industry to adopt technologies mainly because of their optics and with scant regard for their efficacy,” says Short. In addition, chaos rules in the aftermath of a spill. The enormous political pressure to do something routinely sacrifices any duty to properly evaluate what kind of response might actually work over time, says Short. “Industry says ‘we just want to clean it up,’ yet their demonstrative ability to clean it up sucks.”
Consider, for a moment, the industry’s dismal record on oil recovery. Average citizens may think that a successful marine oil spill cleanup actually involves recovering what has been spilled. They may also expect the amount of oil recovered would increase over time as industry learns and adopts better technologies. But there has been little improvement since the 1960s.
During the BP disaster, the majority of the oil evaporated, dropped to the ocean bottom, smothered beaches, dissolved, or remained on or just below the water’s surface as sheen or tar balls. Some oil-chewing bacteria offered assistance by biodegrading the oil after it had been dispersed. Rough estimates indicate that, out of the total amount of oil it spilled, BP recovered three per cent through skimming, 17 per cent from siphoning at the wellhead, and five per cent from burning. Even so, that’s not much better than the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 when industry recovered an estimated 14 per cent of the oil. Transport Canada admits that it expects only 10 to 15 per cent of a marine oil spill to ever be recovered from open water. “Even informed people are taken aback by these numbers,” says Short.
Nor are the numbers any better for small marine spills (smaller than 7,950 litres). This year, York University researchers discovered that offshore oil and gas platforms reported a total of 381 small spills between 1997 and 2010. Only 11 spills mentioned the presence of seabirds, yet it only takes a dime-sized blotch of oil in cold water to kill a bird.
A bird covered in oil from the Black Sea oil spill. Photo by Pauk. Creative Commons licensed.
The danger of wishful thinking
Self-reporting combined with an appalling spill-recovery record underscores how poorly industry’s preferred technologies perform in the field. Deploying dispersants, for example, is about as effective as cleaning oil-soaked birds and remains another example of response theatre designed to hide the real damage. During BP’s catastrophic spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the company sprayed over 6.8 million litres of Corexit. It was the largest volume of dispersant ever used for an oil spill and one giant chemical experiment.
Researchers have known for decades that mixing oil with Corexit rarely works. Short compares it to adding detergent when you’re washing dishes: it produces a cloudy suspension that scatters through the water but hovers close to the top. Sweden has banned its use, and the U.K. followed suit, based on the potential danger to workers. That didn’t stop the aerial bombing of Gulf of Mexico waters with Corexit — which actually killed oil-eating bacteria — because it looked as if the authorities were doing something. Their work made little difference. Bottlenose dolphins, already vulnerable, died in record numbers from adrenal and lung diseases linked to oil exposure.
“We’ve put the wrong people in charge of the job,” says McMahon, who has charted industry’s oil spill myths for years. Corexit, industry’s favorite dispersant, is widely believed to contain hydrocarbon, which gives it an ominous undertone. The product was first developed by Standard Oil, and its ingredient list remains a trade secret. Although the oil industry boasts a “safety culture,” everyone really knows that it operates with a greed culture, adds McMahon. Over the years, industry has become adept at selling an illusion by telling regulators and stakeholders whatever they want to hear about oil spills (in the past, executives claimed that their companies recovered 95 per cent of spilled oil).
In Canada, multinational oil companies also own the corporations licensed to respond to catastrophic spills. The Western Canadian Marine Response Corp., for example, is owned by Kinder Morgan, Imperial Oil, Shell, Chevron and Suncor while the Eastern Canada Response Corp. is owned by Ultramar, Shell, Imperial Oil and Suncor. In a recent analysis on this cozy relationship, Robyn Allan, an economist and former CEO of the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia, concluded that letting international oil companies determine the goals and objectives of marine spill preparedness and response was a flagrant conflict of interest.
Large spills, which can destroy fisheries and entire communities, can impose billion dollar cleanup bills and still not restore what has been lost. The cleanup costs for the Exxon Valdez disaster reached US$2 billion (paid by various parties), and Exxon fought the federal government’s claim for an extra $92 million for restoration, until the government dropped their claim in 2015. To date, BP has spent more than US$42 billion on response, compensation and fines in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, the evidence shows that nearshore and in-port spills are four to five times more expensive to clean up than offshore spills and that heavy oil, such as bitumen, costs nearly 10 times more than light oils because it persists longer in water. And yet, no more than C$1.3 billion has been set aside in Canada for a major oil spill — a sum experts find woefully inadequate. According to a University of British Columbia study, a release of 16,000 cubic metres of diluted bitumen in Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet would inflict at least $1.2 billion worth of damage on the local economy, which is heavily reliant on tourism and promoting its “natural” beauty. That figure doesn’t include the cost of a “cleanup.”
Based on the science, expecting to adequately remedy large spills with current technologies seems like wishful thinking. And there will be no change unless responsible authorities do three things: give communities most affected by a catastrophic spill the democratic right to say no to high-risk projects, such as tankers or pipelines; publicly recognize that responding to a large oil spill is as haphazard as responding to a large earthquake and that there is no real techno-fix; and recognize that industry won’t adopt more effective technologies that actually recover oil from the ocean until governments and communities properly price the risk of catastrophic spills and demand upfront multibillion-dollar bonds for compensation. “If they spill, they must lose a bloody fortune,” says Short.
Until those reforms take place, expect more dramatic prime-time theatre on oiled ocean waters. But we shouldn’t for a moment believe we’re watching a cleanup. The only things being wiped clean are guilty consciences.
26 Comments on "Why Do We Pretend to Clean Up Ocean Oil Spills?"
penury on Tue, 19th Jul 2016 11:27 am
Most of the people that I know (both greens and not) are convinced that humans are doing everything possible to preserve animal life on this planet (provided that it does not interfere with our comfort or desires) and these picture as well as baby seals “saved” by people at the beach are their greatest source and evidence of human “love”,
malahmadi on Tue, 19th Jul 2016 12:00 pm
Oh…poor bird
I call this environmental terrorism.
Apneaman on Tue, 19th Jul 2016 1:29 pm
The humans cancer has spread so successfully that they have run out of healthy tissue to infect. Nowhere left to go and are now shitting on themselves.
Los Angeles sewage spill shuts down ocean 20 miles away
“At least 1.5 million gallons of sewage spewed from a 90-year-old pipe that burst in an industrial area near downtown Los Angeles, leading ocean waters downriver in Long Beach to close, officials said Tuesday.”
“The cause of the rupture wasn’t yet known. The pipe dates to the 1920s, Johnson said.”
http://phys.org/news/2016-07-los-angeles-sewage-ocean-miles.html
“It falls apart
In little pieces on the floor
Too wild to keep together
So you want it more
It falls apart, falls apart, falls apart”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNtjksCUMIA
Anonymous on Tue, 19th Jul 2016 2:51 pm
You know, you could say the exact same thing about say, nuclear accidents and contamination, a far more serious problem. Or chemical spills, or the ‘war on cancer’, as the article alludes to. It gets worse when you stop to consider oil is hardly the only thing that we pollute our oceans with and is also, impossible to ‘clean’.
-plastics
-chemical, industrial wastes
-sewage
-common trash(all varieties)
-radioactive wastes.
-medicines we toss into waterways.
-heavy metals.
Exxon Valdez is a good example of optical illusions. I saw a report not long ago and the person being interviewed said on the surface, PWS, looks ‘clean’, then he dug into the beach a bit and easily dug up an oily mess of dirt and other material. 20+ years on.
PracticalMaina on Tue, 19th Jul 2016 3:00 pm
If you look at the contaminates in our waste you can see just how much we are fucking ourselves, not only our environment. There are so many chemicals in our water ways that effect hormones, fish in my area are switching genders, no bullshit.
Apneaman on Tue, 19th Jul 2016 5:39 pm
Hot and Getting Hotter
The top 25 hottest and fastest-warming cities – US
“earing heat is the signature of climate change, and the scorching summer temperatures blanketing much of the nation this week are exactly what we should expect in an ever warming world. With the mercury rising, a host of Midwestern cities are forecast to see their hottest weather of the year. This comes on the heels of the hottest June ever recorded in the U.S., in a year where every month has been the hottest on record globally. With the country broiling, Climate Central partnered with The Weather Channel to look at which cities are traditionally the hottest and which cities are warming the fastest.
Check out the interactive map below to compare the hottest places with those that are the fastest-warming.”
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/fastest-warming-cities-20535
Apneaman on Tue, 19th Jul 2016 5:45 pm
Wildfires Heat Up Across the West
VIDEO
Wildfires: A National Concern
“Homes evacuated. Buildings destroyed. Thousands of acres scorched. The peak of the fire season is yet to come, and it’s only being made worse by climate change.
The wildfires blazing in California, Alaska and across the Southwest are threatening communities and natural resources. In Alaska, the first wildfire this season started in late February, yet the season typically begins in April or May.
Already, more than 29,000 wildfires have burned over 2.6 million acres in 2016, increasing concerns that we could see yet another busy, dangerous and costly fire season. Last year was the most severe on record, with more than 10 million acres burned. That’s more than twice the size of the state of Massachusetts. It was also the costliest at $2.1 billion.”
https://www.doi.gov/blog/wildfires-heat-across-west
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipqqEFoJPL4
Apneaman on Tue, 19th Jul 2016 6:15 pm
Amitav Ghosh: We are living our lives as though we are mad
The author on climate change, Paris Agreement and more
“The changes don’t happen uniformly around the planet; they are concentrated on certain places. And one of the places is in what is called the Third Pole, which is the Himalayas. And if you think of what this means for us, and really all of Asia, I think people just haven’t taken on board the catastrophe that is looming. Glaciers are what make human lives possible. Rainfall comes and goes, but glaciers give you a steady source of water through the years, which is why you have the Ganges, the Yamuna, Brahmaputra, the Yangtze, the Mekong, Irrawaddy—all of them start in this one small area. Now the glaciers are melting so rapidly, who knows what we’ll be left with in a few decades? And once that happens, just think, these are the most densely populated areas in the world.”
http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/zo1459rOwDTjYN9Wr1ZJqJ/Amitav-Ghosh-We-are-living-our-lives-as-though-we-are-mad.html
Apneaman on Tue, 19th Jul 2016 7:30 pm
Global Heat Leaves 20th Century Temps ‘Far Behind’ — June Another Hottest Month on Record
“June marks the 9th consecutive hottest month on record in the NASA data. In other words, on a month-to-month comparison, each month since October of 2015 was the new hottest of those months ever recorded. In addition, the six-month 2016 climate year period of January to June showed an average global temperature of about 1.31 C above 1880s averages — perilously close to the 1.5 degree C global climate threshold.”
https://robertscribbler.com/2016/07/19/2016-global-heat-leaves-20th-century-temps-far-behind-june-another-hottest-month-on-record/
Go Speed Racer on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 3:57 am
Fortunately when this planet is completely wrecked, we can get onto Amazon.com, and use 1-click ordering to receive a brand new replacement planet.
dooma on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 4:39 am
Speed, I was always under the impression that Amazon.com was to order a new rainforest.
A whole planet…wow…let’s drill baby drill.
And how could we forget, it is only 6 months until the son of the owner of all the giant box stores was born. Soon it is time to consume like there is no tomorrow…hang on..
dooma on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 4:45 am
Oh, and the answer to the article title “Why Do We Pretend to Clean Up Ocean Oil Spills?”, is easy, because it is too f**king hard to do it thoroughly.
Anonymous on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 5:17 am
Sorry dooma, you don’t read too well do you? The answer is not that its too f**king hard to do it thoroughly. The answer is, it’s not possible. You seem to believe, for some reason, its possible to clean up ocean spills, but the only reason we don’t is because its were too lazy. The article is not premised on that at all, so its not clear how you came up with that ‘answer’.
PracticalMaina on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 8:45 am
So we can sell cancer causing chemicals to break up the oil slicks. We need people leaving plastic on those beaches, not the more natural form of oil that the drooling fools at BP and Exxon Mobil like to spill in important fisheries.
If they cant clean up oil, just think what they can do about radiation….really pretend to do something.
JuanP on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 9:01 am
Ap, That climate central article you posted confirms my impression that Miami isn’t warming much, if it is warming at all. The summers here have actually felt milder these past decade, I am not certain whether this has been because of lower temperatures or lower humidity, though. Our problem here is SLR. The flooding in Miami Beach is slowly, but surely, getting worse every year.
Apneaman on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 12:18 pm
Jaun, unfavorable geology. Isn’t it hilarious that Florida and Miami a denier central? All the pumps and raising roadbeds are like putting little bandaids on shotgun wounds. Seems like a good number of mayors have clued in – hard not to with water in the streets so often, but the state Gov and development/real estate industrial complex are still lying their asses off. What will you do? Gonna sell soon and beat the panic or stay, take the hit and walk away when it’s no longer feasible to live there?
JuanP on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 1:26 pm
Ap, Isold my last Miami Beach condo about 18 months ago. We are tenants now. Most of our property and savings are in Uruguay by now. We will be shipping another 20′ container with farming and prepping supplies in a couple of months. We are ready to board a plane out of here with a one hour notice. We have only a month of bills in our US bank accounts and transfer our money from our income surplus to Uruguay every month. We have no debt, only one credit card which we use for convenience and we pay off every month. We consider all the property we still have here in the USA disposable and intend to gift or donate it when we leave. We’ll be taking our carry ons and will not dispatch any luggage when we leave. We have only enough cash here for emergencies.
We intend to stay here for as long as my wife wants to or until we are forced to leave by the deteriorating circumstances.
JuanP on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 1:39 pm
Ap, we have always been ready to leave this place with a few hours notice because we’ve always lived in a Priority 1 Mandatory Evacuation Area subject to Force 5 hurricanes and storm surges, and I’ve always been a prepper. I’ve had my life in a backpack since I was 16 and I left my parents home for the first time. My wife and I never grew roots in MB. We never cared enough for the place, but we’ve had a good life here. These past few years our preparations were increased, particularly since the 2008 crisis.
Apneaman on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 3:15 pm
Juan, right on. I was thinking of property values. Long before doomsday there will be a rush for the exits. When the pumps can’t keep up and the utilities won’t work anymore. It won’t matter if someone is high and dry on a hill, because if the sewage, water and electricity are no longer working no one except for swamp people will live there. It don’t need to be under 5 feet of water to ruin it all. Once it gets close to that point there will be a rush for the exits, but by then it’s too late. If I owned property there, I would beat the rush. Like planetary warming, SLR is also non linear. There could be a big glacier melt water pulse at any time. The geological record shows there have been many. It’s not highly predictable as it stands now. Best of luck whatever you guys decide.
JuanP on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 3:32 pm
Ap, I agree and I worry for all the people I know who own property here, but I have warned them repeatedly and there is nothing else I can do. My wife’s sister and my brother don’t own any real estate here, but I have many friends and acquaintances that do.
In the last couple of years there has been a new growing awareness of SLR and its implications for MB, but most people are still living in ignorance or denial. My best friends here are very close to selling their MB condo and buying land somewhere else to build a Permaculture farm. I have been pushing them to do it. Most people here will likely get fucked big time when the next big hurricane comes around. Andrew hit South of here in an area of farms and the Everglades.
A direct hit on downtown Miami in the future would likely bankrupt the city, county, state, insurance companies, and most people in the impacted areas. By then it will be too late. Many will lose their jobs, homes, and life savings in one blow. It is heartbreaking to think about it.
JuanP on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 3:46 pm
And, Ap, nobody here is aware that a big chunk of ice could break off in Greenland or Antarctica and make the city uninhabitable in an instant. A one foot SLR would force the city of Miami Beach to be abandoned permanently. The ground here is really low. Miami Beach is built on mangrove barrier islands that were filled with just enough sand to keep them above the high tide a century ago.
In the last hundred years the sand settling, SLR, and erosion have worn out our margin of error; most of the city doesn’t have a foot to spare. Most of the streets would be flooded daily and the beaches would disappear, too, taking with them all the tourists and foreign investors that keep the local economy afloat.
The situation here is incredibly precarious, but highrises keep popping up like there is no problem at all. It is completely surreal!
Apneaman on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 4:38 pm
Jaun, I’m at the point where I have accepted what we our and what we have done and the inevitability of it all. Maybe it could have happened a little slower, but with the mismatch between our brains and technology, it could be no other way. I’m pained when I think of the young’uns in my family, so I push that shit away and get on with my lifes work of dooming. The humans will NEVER change because they can’t. Like all living things they are pre programmed reward seekers, only they have an abstract brain that knows no limits and must continually seek rewards.
See these retards
“On Monday, the first day of the Republican National Convention, the GOP platform committee chair was met with a chorus of laughter when he mocked the Democratic party for including climate justice — the part of environmental justice that deals with climate change and greenhouse gas emissions — in their party platform.”
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/07/20/3799311/cleveland-environmental-problems-rnc/
The main difference between them and the other team is the other team believes that growth (reward seeking) is still possible with alt energy and other greenwashing bullshit. either one can accept the premise that stopping would have the only solution. Now it’s easy to claim that it’s the right are major retards and the left are totally delusional, and if that was changed then the problems could be solved. Not true, because no ideology can trump the biological imperative. It’s fixed. The humans are not in control any more than worker bees are in their hive.
I’m part way through this awesome book by British philosopher, John Gray, “Straw Dogs”. Highly recommend it.
Here are a few memorable quotes so far.
“In all its practical uses, science works to entrench anthropocentrism. It encourages us to believe that, unlike any other animal, we can understand the natural world, and thereby bend it to our will”
“Science has been used to support the conceit that humans are unlike all other animals in their ability to understand the world. In fact, its supreme value may be in showing that the world humans are programmed to perceive is a chimera.”
“Humans are like any other plague animal. They cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them.”
“Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth – and so be free. But if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals.”
“Humans cannot live without illusion. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past, they could not go on. In that case, we may need a latter-day Pascal.”
-John Gray
“Man, like all other animals, is subject to the continuing process of adapting to the limitations of his environment. But the principal mechanism he has utilised for this purpose is unique among living creatures. To forestall the inevitable historical cycles of inadequate food supply, post-Neolithic man destroys surplus members of his own species by organised warfare.”
– Leonard C. Lewin:
JuanP on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 7:19 pm
Ap, I agree that we never had a chance as a species. And I agree about kids, too. As you know by now I never had any kids of my own, but I love every kid I know and it’s hard to describe how much I suffer for them.
A seven year old I know from gardening sent me this amazing video today of him freeing a Monarch butterfly that he raised from a caterpillar I gave him as a gift a couple of weeks ago. The video was filled with joy, but it made me cry. My mental health is very fragile right now; I am going through a rough time dealing with my depression.
I prepare Monarch kits and gift them to kids regularly. Every kid that meets me gets at least two caterpillars, more if they fail on their first attempt or they ask for them.
I basically refused to meet my nephews for most of my life, and have never met most of them and barely know the ones I’ve met because I don’t want them to love me because I will likely kill myself at some point and I don’t want them to suffer more than necessary. The damage I’ve done to my wife is more than enough for me.
Thanks for the book recommendation; I read in an obsessive compulsive way and have added it to my list. Public libraries are really incredible in the USA and I have enjoyed using them a lot. I have read some of John Gray’s books in the past and I like him. He is what I call an original thinker.
Apneaman on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 7:45 pm
Juan, I finally gave up on my purest stance of not reading e-books and am using a free open source e-book manager called, “Caliber”. “Straw Dogs” is my first, so in a way you could say, John Gray popped my cherry. He’s so dreamy (swoon). I’ve been a public library patron my entire life, but they ain’t gots all the super good Doomy shit I want, so e-books it is because I’m not dropping anymore coin than I have to. Hell no, if I start spending money I’ll have to go back to work (matrix) full time and give up my labour of love – All Day Dooming. e-books are cheap. I guess if one was an evil doer they could acquire them for free using Torrents along with music and movies, but I would never do such a thing. No no no, not me. I abide by all of the corporate state rules and especially those that, if broken, might have a “negative growth” effect on global GDP. If you’re depressed about the state of the world, just remember, it’s them – not you.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
JuanP on Wed, 20th Jul 2016 8:14 pm
Ap, thanks for the tip!
dooma on Thu, 21st Jul 2016 1:01 am
Anonymous,” because it is too f**king hard to do it thoroughly.”
Therefore it makes it impossible.
So yes, we are on the same page.