The brown pelican in this clip is very hard to watch.
I grew up spending a week or two of the summer on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. I used to spend a lot of time walking on the beach looking for things.
Brown pelicans are kind of like the flying galleons of the seabird world. They glide through the air with a kind of graceful majesty one would not expect from such strange looking birds.
But what brown pelicans are best known for is their unusual predatory behavior.
Unlike any other species of pelican, they dive.
I have no idea what the full effects of the BP oil well disaster are going to be.
All I know is that it won’t be good for just about every living thing that relies upon the Gulf’s waters for survival. In fact, it’s going to very bad for just about everything that relies upon the North Atlantic.
The birds are going to suffer, just as the shrimp, oysters, and fish are.
People’s livelihoods are simply gone.
I don’t know how much this disaster will affect the numbers of brown pelicans living along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, but my guess is that I will see fewer of these birds diving into the surf after fish when I see the Outer Banks again.
And I can’t help but feel a little remorse at the loss.
Why couldn’t we have a different energy policy?
Why couldn’t we be smart about something?
We can blame Obama, Bush and Cheney, BP, and everyone else.
But maybe we should look at ourselves for just a moment.
Why did we allow ourselves to become so dependent upon oil?
Oil feeds and sustains us.
But it also can kill us.
We have made a bargain with the devil, but just as Faust found out, those bargains never turn out as we expected.
Maybe we’ll grow up.
Maybe we’ll expect more.
If we feel sad or angry about this, we should let it inform our actions.
Things must be changed.
But they won’t change unless we do something.
Don’t look for leadership. Leadership can never solve this problem.
This change must come from us.
That’s what’s going to be so hard.
