I don’t know about you, but I find the whole Gulf spill to be very overwhelming. Crabs in oil, boats in oil, the entire southeastern United States in oil. A friend recently posted an app that super-imposes the current dimensions of the oil slick over any region of the US. It’s crazy, seeing a black shadow stretch from Philadelphia to Boston. It provides perspective of the disaster that continues to unfold, and it brings home the devastation.

But then again . . . .  It’s nothing. I’m sorry, but just think about the numbers with me. There are, on the high side, twenty thousand barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf every day. Terrible! Insane. A certified disaster of historic proportions. And we consume, in the United States alone, twenty MILLION barrels of oil . . . a day. At the current rate of discharge, the broken well would have to spew oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 2.7 years, just to provide for one single day of America’s consumption. That may be more horrifying than the ever-spreading oil slick that is clinging to Florida like hot Saran Wrap.

And I really don’t know what to do. I ride public transportation at almost every opportunity. My family downsized to one car last year, and it only has four cylinders. My wife leads the recycling charge. But it’s not enough, is it? We tend to do small, eco-friendly things that make us feel better (less guilty?), while continuing to live lifestyles that maintain the economic incentive to drill for a limited resource a mile under the ocean.

Here is my question: how do we shift the issue from “an oil spill that BP did to America” to the more important issue of “oil consumption that America is doing to itself?” Does the Government step in, like taxing tobacco/Pepsi/whatever? Do we essentially admit that we do not have the collective will to change our ways and improve our environmental future? Or do we begin taking action ourselves, giving up the idea that it should always be our preferred temperature inside our homes, or that we have the right to drive the largest car we can (or can’t) afford?

My sense is that we don’t really like the idea of making sacrifices for the environmental well being of our children. It’s too far out, too far removed from us. Digital maps, like the one that puts the spill on top of my house, may help me to feel the pain, but I’m fairly certain we will all need to have our lively hood destroyed like the fishermen in the Gulf, or at least our front lawn covered in crude, before we get disturbed enough to take action.