Independence

Nature is the true independent. If I were to choose a personality adjective for the environment, I think that I'd choose "independent." Nature doesn't need us, but we sure need it. We need its water, its air... a whole bunch of stuff from it, but this weekend we need its energy.

This July 4th holiday weekend, a lot of us still are watching and reading the news about the gusher of oil spewing off the Louisiana coast and flowing toward the shores of some of America's best beaches. The beaches where we go to take a break, exercise our right to "kick-back" and relax and do just about whatever we want because, "Hey, we're on vacation!"

But while we stroll along the beach, head to the park... whatever it is that we do, we ought to keep in mind that as independent we think we are, actually we're very dependent. When it comes to the environment, our top of the food chain, 'do it my way' kind of thinking really is a mirage. It's a mirage because we're living in Safetyland, a term coined as far as I can tell by the writer Laurence Gonzales in his book, "Why Smart People Do Stupid Things."

In a nutshell, Safetyland is where we live when we think that we've conquered our environment, molded it to our liking and bent it to our will, Safetyland. But really we've done something kind of stupid. How else to explain the ignorant comfort we have with the idea of drilling for oil one mile beneath the surface of the ocean? What if something goes wrong all the way down there? The answer: we really haven't a clue.

The environment doesn't want to be tamed by us. It wants to remain independent. Nature may lull us into a sense of calm and help us create our Safetyland, but eventually it reminds us that no matter how much we think we have it under our control, nature reminds us that it is really in control, that it is independent.

Realizing this can really shatter a person's view of what's safe. But running scared isn't the point. The point is not to do anything stupid in the meantime, anything stupid that could make things worse when nature decides to exercise its right to do what it wants to do, when it wants to do it, how it wants to... in short, when nature decides to declare its independence.

So, back to the BP oil disaster (does anyone call it a spill anymore?). Because of our dependence on oil, we allowed a company to drill about one mile under the water. If something goes wrong there's really not much that can be done about it before the disaster spreads. Stupid, but we were living in Safetyland.

Becoming less dependent on foreign oil is often cited as the reason for drilling off our shores, and recently because of the BP accident there have been increased calls for oil independence. Foreign oil dependence and oil dependence are both pretty bad in the long run and we need to declare independence from them one day.