The self-inflicted wound: Gulf oil well eruption

A dear friend wrote to me recently about the anguish she felt over the oil that continues to inundate the heart of the sea. She is a brilliant poet, and one who looks squarely at the horrors of the body and soul, but she also is a person of action and feels helpless and heartsick in the face of this enormity. This is what I wrote in reply:

Sometimes it takes a self-inflicted wound to halt the bleeding.  I think of those ‘relief wells’ inching their way through the seabed, and it almost feels like using a lancet to release bad humors, as in the days when western medicine and modern science knew little of each other.  Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood: the body out of balance.

We are shockingly primitive in our modern response to what our greedy delving has released.  It reminds me of J.R.R. Tolkien’s demon in his trilogy, “The Lord of the Rings,â€� the Balrog of Moria, that awoke when the dwarves went too deep after their precious silver steel. It took the wizard Gandalf’s death and rebirth to quench its flame. It will require something like that of us as well.

Tolkien, the lover of trees, also understood the sadness of the immortal elves who outlived all else that they loved, who knew the ancient oaks from acorns and saw whole forests sacrificed to the insatiable and consumptive ‘now’.  The chapter entitled ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ is, for me, the most significant part of  “The Lord of the Rings.â€�

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The more we look unflinchingly at the horror of this house of grimy cards, and the more we insist never again, the better chance we have that some positive lessons can be learned.  As for the wounded sea, the irreplaceable losses and the long-term scars, sometimes the best we can do is bear witness, to tell the stories of what has been lost, to feel and to weep and to give tongue to grief.  The real healing happens over spans of time beyond human years, although it is amazing what resilience is possible from decade to decade.

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Consider the dramatic change in status of so many birds, including brown pelicans, once threatened with extinction by DDT and now recovering in its absence.  Harp seals now haul out on the beach at our family’s beloved ‘Windrock’, when before the Marine Mammal Protection Act they were heedlessly slaughtered.  The quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink today is in sharp contrast to how it was just a few decades ago when both were fouled and disregarded.

We cannot sit by and say that in a thousand years the Earth will cleanse itself of the outrages we inflict upon the land and sea.  There is a small comfort in knowing that geologic time is measured in millions while we encompass less than a century, but human beings only learn through telling and bearing witness, and a poet with heart and depth of love for the ocean is the right person to give expression and meaning to this self-inflicted wound.

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. He also writes The Lakeville Journal’s Nature’s Notebook column biweekly.