What will replace the notion of a land of plenty? A fiction.
>> August 1, 2010
I.
This is a fiction.
Our destruction, my Gulf of Mexico, La Louisiane, Luisiana, Land of La Cadie, the lands I grew up in, it sickens me.
I know intimately and love dearly, how our destruction came. It came by truck, by an avoidable human waste called oil slick that imitates life... disaster hits the swamps. It makes me want to ask the world a question: What will we do to replace the notion of our planet as a land of plenty?
This land was named after the Micmac word for, “land of plenty.” Yet, we have took more than land could bear. It was new land. It was land for unkempt flood and excessive natural wealth. Our land - Louisiana.
News and continuing shock comes from another disaster in our homeland. Tears of mine reflect on me in the oil sheens of streetlights. The reels turn. Where will our lands rise hence?
II.
Life here mirrors the suffering of our city and countryside in small but no less absolute terms.
Children dive off rocks and swim in to a harbor that glistens with the coat of motor oil exhausted by the boats at anchor. Near the 400 year old Portugese fort there is a sheen that coats plastic bottles and washed up detris along with a thick grass in bright green algae and mosses.
On top of a brutal hard breakwater six small children are playing, they look up to me on a wall and smile… the sharp jetty will not cut their feet.
We never leave where we are from, where we are conscious, when we are from here.
III.
Valdez. Perhaps this one place where I gained my first memory expectation of the disaster. A human disaster in gold rush following a real disaster (black gold - slickening our natures)!!!
Louisiana and Alaska share much in common for being world’s apart. They are colonies in impossible to reach lands found critical for natural resource and natural human pathways.
....
I am walking the otherside. Beaches in Africa. Yet, their brutality and hard living make for only a small number of residents who can ‘make it’ where others try and give up. The salt air curls.
IV.
Martha Serpas, in her beautiful opinion article is summarizing the sweep of environmental, cultural, and economic destruction brought on us all with the most recent BP oil spill disaster. Her biases refer us to our state flag of Louisiana - where a pelican tears at its own flesh to feed its young. She writes - this 'message... stood too long.'
“Ecological self-sacrifice is not pious; cultural self-destruction is not our duty,” she says.
This is an analogy which I find applicable to the place where the world stands today.
Our citizens and civic leadership ready and willing to lend hands as stewards of our planetary health - but under what conditions? When will our efforts begin? Who will shepherd the costs?
V.
Pictures, images, stories from home are always so valued to us as we are off in these distant lands. When we read about what you are reading, when we hear the local anecdotes and your news, it reminds us of the similarities which all of us share with the world.
This week in Morocco, we were invited to attend a wedding, we visited festivals, passed funerals, saw school groups taking field trips to the sea. If you are involved with something special, please share it. We love to hear about you. Many other people do to. You are the shepherds of our trail.
This was my excerpt, a personal fiction, devised for response to a very nice piece of Louisiana literature. ‘Well done, Well said,’ I say. Beautiful Op-Ed by Martha Serpas.
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It is also a beautiful and morbid reminder of how environmental degradation, human oppression, sordid incongruous power histories - through them all - that it is human resiliency which has overwhelmed the events of disaster. We are the caretakers because we contain a memory of soul on planet Earth. I can remember. I was in VALDEZ, AK, just after the oil spill. It was external and internal. There was a convergence of the sacred, the profane, and our time.
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