now mayday! mayday!

I hope you can read the type face on this sign from Dauphin Island, Alabama, a place I fell in love with and is now threatened by the oil spill. Like the shot below showing the devastated trees from one of the hurricanes of the last 10 years, Dauphin's housing stock was pretty damaged but nothing to compare with what is coming.

I think of the birds, from the peeps scooting along of their stubby legs to the pelicans and it's like a crude sludge in my chest. They eat it, they preen it and they freeze in it-- just like Prince William Sound, just like Santa Barbara 40 years ago. Nothing has come along to save them or their chicks in the nests.

The crabs, the mollusks... I never made my peace with crabs but the mollusks are different. Second only to insects in numbers of living species they include critters like clams, scallops, conch, octopi and squid. Their fleshy bodies have no bones so they often have shells and it's the sea shells, not their flesh that I have a great love for. After the oil kills them by the impossible numbers their seashells will also be tarred, along with the beaches, the swamps, the grasses...

I wish the crab people could pincher these BP guys, the politicians and the other corporate criminals like Exxon... that the humans who caused this may dream of it then if the crabs can't pull it off because they are dying. When is restorative justice going to serve the victims and when will the meek inherit the earth? The planet is lurching along without even a coherent human consensus on climate change. Why do we allow this suffering and destruction?

These photos are from Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana... all now at the mercy of what belonged under the ground, under the Great Gulf. This MUST be a caution not only about off shore drilling but also on nuclear energy which is being touted as being safe. Over a million people have died as a result of the accident at Chernobyl and the land continues uninhabitable. Let's wake up and take responsibility for the future. Nothing May about it. We Must.