Top Kill

They are trying today, injecting heavy drilling muds - mineral compounds and clay - to stuff the genie of crude back into the bottle. Let us hope it works. There are men and women working at the limits of their capacity to understand how to stop the Gulf Spill, and I wish them, without irony, godspeed.

What we are watching will destroy beaches, marshlands, species, local ecologies, local economies - the ordinary life of the earth there will die for a long time. How big this will be is uncertain. There is next to nothing we can do can stop that now - save a few beaches, watch an illustration of dying ecosystem on video.

Yet the Santa Barbara spill of 1969 - a much smaller spill- sparked the beginning of the modern environmental movement, one the late Gov. Walter Hickel, then Secretary of the Interior for Nixon, quickly recognized and encouraged: it lead to the EPA, even Earth Day.

As crude hits the Gulf, we face the unendurable condition of helplessness. We will now watch once-avoidable destruction. Our technological might and national will becomes a mere whisper into the sea.

If this spill slaps our faces, and reminds us that without a healthy earth, we are like a sick body; if it reminds us that we have no right to eradicate the creatures and plants of the earth from existence; if it turns our horror at the unfolding of past indifference toward life itself into hard minded environmental policies and action, from energy to land use to international peace, we have an opportunity to take this disaster and with it buy back our future. There is a chance here: to turn our minds fully to the health of the earth, to know the costs of cheap oil, to resolve that before our generation passes, we will not leave this earth in a condition of sickness and dying.