Gulf Oil Spill: We Said the Night Was Full of Zombies

As an anti-plastics blogger, I should be able to write about the gulf oil spill in my sleep. The connections seem obvious. Plastic comes from oil. Our demand for plastic drives up the demand for oil, as do our demands for all the other products made from oil. I should be able to write about this topic as I would write about anything else related to plastic, things like Bisphenol-A, bottled water, PVC, phthalates, ocean plastic pollution, and yet until now, I couldn’t.
Like the vastness of the ocean itself and the incredible magnitude of the spill, the topic was just too big to wrap my heart around. It hurt too much. Somehow the thought of oil gushing relentlessly up from the earth into the ocean felt even more nightmarish to me than that of plastic pollution washed by the tons into the same oceans. What’s more, with all the commentary about whose fault it is, what methods should be used for clean up, and how the guilty parties should be … Read the rest