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

Frances Moore Lappé with daughter Anna

Frances Moore Lappé

Published on June 16, 2010 by The Huffington Post

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?

Randy Kennedy, in the New York Times' Week in Review suggests one possibility. He likens BP's reckless pursuit of oil to the obsession that brought down Captain Ahab in his pursuit of Moby-Dick. The lesson we still haven't learned, Kennedy implies, is a moral one: the dangers lurking not only in oil hunters' greed and in the hubris of believing we can control nature, but in our own self-indulgence as well.

Kennedy closes with the admonition from Columbia University's Melville expert Andrew Delbanco -- that the BP horror is in part of our own making because, "we want our comforts but we don't want to know too much about...what makes them possible." In the same issue, Thomas Friedman seconds the point in his it's-our-fault column "This Time is Different."

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.

So we've ended up creating the systemic danger FDR warned us against: "the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than their [the people's] democratic state itself." That "in its essence, is fascism," he told Congress in 1938. Such concentrated power is at the root of what has greased not only massive public subsidies for Big Oil -- pushing aside safer, renewable energies -- but also BP's ability to stack up egregious safety violations with impunity.

Corporate lobbyists for companies like BP have become so powerful, that in 2009, for every single legislator elected to look out for our common interests, two dozen, mostly corporate, lobbyists spent $3.5 billion working Congress for their private interests. That sum has doubled in less than a decade.

We humans can't change our nature but we can change the rules that bring out the worst in our nature.

More: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/16-3

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If the earth does grow inhospitable toward human presence, it is primarily because we have lost our sense of courtesy toward the earth and its inhabitants. ~ Thomas Berry

The Roots of Violence:

Wealth without work,

Pleasure without conscience,

Knowledge without character,

Commerce without morality,

Science without humanity,

Worship without sacrifice,

Politics without principles.

~ Mohandas K. Gandhi