We’re Making Our Own Synthetic Nightmare : Energy: As the memory of the Exxon Valdez fades, we still do the most stupid things to feed our oil addiction.

Three years have passed since the Exxon Valdez tore its hull wide open on Bligh Reef, oiling 1,200 miles of some of the wildest, loveliest coastline in the world, killing millions of living beings, from barnacles to whales and throwing coastal communities into a socioeconomic tailspin.

With the spill, the urban-industrial world came briefly face-to-face with the consequences of its own voracious consumption, as it had before with Chernobyl, Bhopal, Santa Barbara, Love Canal, the Islip garbage barge.

While we as usual learned a few obvious lessons and corrected a few problems, we seem to once again have missed the transcendent implications of such disasters.

Humanity still seems willing, for instance, to initiate world wars to secure oil supplies; to convert wilderness and disrupt local human and ecological communities in order to explore for and pump oil from the ground; to transport it through thousands of miles of poorly welded, corroding, disposable pipelines across the land and seabed; run it through inadequately designed, chronically polluting marine terminals owned by dispassionate, multinational corporations caring, it seems, only for the bottom line; to load it onto huge, poorly built, aging single-hulled vessels that are inadequately maintained and insured and ill-equipped electronically; piloted by an insufficient crew that is often tired, bored and sometimes drunk, drugged, distracted or overwhelmed and confused by navigational information; guided by shoreside vessel traffic systems that are generally outdated, in disrepair, and staffed by undertrained, inattentive watch standers. All of this causes vessels to collide or ground, spilling millions of barrels of their toxic chemical cargo into the world’s oceans each year, to which we respond by mobilizing tons of big-boy toys that rarely collect 10% of what was spilled; we regulate all this with poorly funded agencies whose personnel are chronically overworked, undertrained, disinterested, overwhelmed with paperwork and whose priorities are corrupted by political pressure, and that treat public complaint as a mere nuisance.

All of this, just to fuel a terribly inefficient transportation/energy network that burns 10 million tons of the stuff every day in order to power a pathologically unsustainable, manic economy of waste and greed that survives by increasing consumer “demand” for more and more stuff of less and less real value, and that exploits women and minorities while making a few people very rich; causing a deepening global environmental crisis characterized by ozone depletion, climatic warming, massive deforestation, species extinction, acid rain, toxic runoff, urban sprawl and the rapid conversion of the planetary surface to human purposes; all attempting to satisfy an exploding human population that is instead becoming increasingly disillusioned, worried, afraid of one another, frenzied, insecure, desperate, oppressed and alienated from the natural world by “living” a synthetic nightmare in the gray, lifeless, spiritual wasteland of the steel-and-concrete megalopolis of office buildings, shopping centers, city streets, and factory floors; all the while denying that anything whatsoever is wrong.

But, everything is OK for now. The Exxon Valdez has slipped comfortably into obscurity. The Dow is up. We can all go back to sleep in front of our televisions, vote if we want, pay our taxes if we must. And rest assured, government and industry will take good care of us and this lovely little wet, blue planet. Good night.