Dirt Day

The irony was painful.

On the 40th anniversary of the original Earth Day, a deep-water oil drilling rig, aflame in the Gulf of Mexico, sank to the bottom of the sea, triggering one of the worst environmental disasters in American history.

Two days earlier, the rig, called Deepwater Horizon and owned by the oil giant British Petroleum (BP), exploded and caught fire. Fifteen oil workers were injured in the blast, which was caused by a sudden rush of methane gas up from the well site. Eleven others were reported missing and are now presumed dead. At the time, BP had been drilling an 18,000-foot exploratory well in the Macondo Prospect, an oil-and-gas deposit located 13,000 feet below the sea floor. Although the precise cause of the explosion is not yet clear, the failure of a so-called 'blowout preventer' to seal the broken well after the explosion means that an unknown amount of crude oil is now pouring directly into the Gulf. When and how the broken well might be capped and what damage it might do ecologically and economically to the region is unknown at this point, but the potential for devastation is high.

When early attempts to shut off the flow of crude came up woefully short, one BP executive complained to the media that working with robots at a depth of 5000 feet below sea level was like "working in outer space."

Welcome to the Age of Consequences, where our unquenchable appetite for oil now requires us to drill in 'outer space' – a place where when things go wrong, they go tragically wrong (the BP executive's comment recalled a famous poster for a