Thursday, April 29, 2010

Terrible Beauty & Sublime Ugliness

It almost looks like a beautiful abstract painting or photograph. The oil slick is making first contact with the Louisiana coastline (at the mouth of the Mississippi River) as I write this. I won't go into what I am thinking and feeling about this. I'll just leave you with the images, and your imagination, to ponder the impacts in the ensuing days, weeks, months, years, possibly even decades, on the ecosystems there, the fisheries, the rookeries, the people who depend on the delta. This in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Ike - from which those coastal communities and ecosystems are still recovering.

Devastation is upon this key region of our Mother Earth, those who inhabit it, all the creatures great and small, and all of us, by proxy.

We are all responsible for this.

Transocean Deepwater Horizon Drilling rig oil slick, Gulf of Mexico, USA

Image from the NASA Aqua Satellite on April 25:
NASA AquaSat Image of the Oil Slick

Link to the "See the spill from space" article [on msnbc's "cosmic log"] where I found these images:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/04/29/2289663.aspx




[Post title credit to La Nuit Blanche]

2 comments:

Deanna said...

Just so sad.

Mari said...

Devastating and heartbreaking hardly seem to cover it.