the difference between a plastic bag and a jellyfish

For some reason I had confused the date, and it turns out that yesterday was World Oceans Day, rather than today. At any rate, I wanted to mention this round-up of "What you can do about the oil spill" thoughts from Cherie Priest (a fantasy author on the list of people I have heard of but not yet read.) I mentioned this to grauwulf the other night, and he asked how boycotting oil products could possibly help. I pointed out that it was more a matter of principle, since in the short term, regarding this particular disaster, the answer is "not at all."

In the long term, though, for as long as people are digging up and carting about large quantities of oil, there are going to be oil spills. It's inevitable; humans are fallible, and the longer you go between disasters the more people will think they can get away with ignoring safety regulations and thus save themselves time, effort and money. (As my father puts it: "there's no reward for safety." The disaster that doesn't happen is invisible and therefore ignored.) This being the case, the less oil that gets moved or used, the less of a problem you're setting yourself up for, and like planting native to save the songbirds, it's ultimately a crowdsourcing problem.

Maybe you can't stop driving if you need to get to work every morning and you don't have anyone to carpool with, but you can check the labels and try to buy clothes made out of plant and animal fibers rather than acrylic and polyester. You can support some of the ways to use less plastic, recycle as you can, and support uses for recycled plastic. (It's no help at all to put things in the recycle bin if there's no market for them afterwards.) You can check the labels on your cleaning products and cosmetics, and be aware of what goes into what you're purchasing. Ultimately, even if you do nothing else, just paying a little more attention to what goes into what you use is helpful over the long term, because it will start to influence your choices, and that's knowledge you can share with other people. Anything from thinking twice about getting that silly plastic toy at the dollar store to considering something fuel-efficient or alternate fuel as your ideal car makes a difference, if a small one, and the more individuals change the choices they are making, the more the society as a whole will change.

You can't always fix these problems; there are an awful lot of things dying in the gulf right now, and none of us have the god-like powers to fix that. But you can work on your little corner of the problem that set us up for it, and twenty years from now, the world may be a better place for the decisions you've made. It's something to think about, at least.