June 18, 2010

The Lesson of BP: Too Much Greed? Too Little Guts?

Frances Moore Lappé writes: "We'll be living for decades, or longer, with the consequences of the BP disaster. That much seems clear. So the question now is, how -- how will we proceed after Deepwater Horizon? What lessons will we take in and use?"

Excerpt: "While greed, hubris and denial have contributed to the worst single environmental catastrophe in our history, to suggest they are "causes" gets us nowhere. A character diagnosis is the evasion, the real denial, we can't afford.

For one, it leads to despair -- since few of us can imagine the end of human greed, hubris, or our tendency to deny what's uncomfortable.

Worse, the diagnosis diverts us from the first essential step in avoiding continuing global ecocide: that we accept what we now know about our nature and work with that. We know, for example, that concentrated power and lack of transparency bring out the very worst in us. Yet we've fallen for an economic and political doctrine with rules certain to speed both.

Nowhere is that concentration more evident than in the fossil fuel industries, where, in 2004, just five companies controlled two thirds of gasoline sales. Their economic might dwarfs that of most countries. Such concentrated economic power infuses and distorts political decision making in its interests."...

Read full article at Common Dreams
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