Many of you might be feeling powerless about the situation in the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t want to descend into disaster porn to report how scary things look at the moment. But they do. And I, for one, have been feeling a lot of despair, angst and anger. However necessary these emotions are, I also feel the need to be proactive. Given that one of the primary problems of the situation is a lack of transparent communication, I thought it would be excellent if we could put our brain trust together to create a response that can can empower citizens to understand the discourse and spin surrounding what is happening, and also to guide our thoughts towards a systemic reflection on what we can learn from this horrible tragedy.

As such, I’m now referring to the Deepwater Horizon as the Event Horizon, because for me it reveals the broken condition of our world system’s operating paradigm and offers us a point of visualization that our future selves could look back upon and say: that was the moment we went into recovery and ended our addiction to oil.

Here is some background information that informs my thinking:

After 9/11 people the world over said, “We are all Americans now,” which unfortunately got used for jingoistic purposes and led to two wars (and perhaps in someways indirectly caused the Gulf spill in that oil companies were given free reign to do whatever they wanted as part of the same overall discourse about resource control). If Edward Lorenz could ask the question, Can the flapping of a butterfly cause a tornado in Kansas? Then we should ask, Can a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico lead to the realization that we are all environmentalists?

As strange as this may sound, on Planet BP the oil giant may even seize on this (along with other oil companies) to position itself as a caring and responsible global citizen comprised of environmentalists who love turtles, whales and dolphins. We can’t let this happen. I’m tired of this level of consciousness, and frankly, we need to stop the aliens from ruining the planet. To quote Mike Davis, “sci-fi happens.” Or J.G. Ballard, “The only truly alien planet is Earth.” We don’t need this spill to turn into a Spielberg production. In fact, this might end (we hope) the idea that we can geo-engineer our way out of environmental calamity. Clearly the solution is cultural, political, economic, moral and, I dare say, spiritual. Time for collective intelligence.

BP, and in my opinion with the cooperation with the US government, is spinning this event in ways that are not enabling people to properly prepare for the consequences of what’s “really” happening on the ground/water. I put “really” into quotes because the event has the opacity of oil itself through the censoring and blocking of the press, and of course PR. The spill response is apparently modeled after greenwashing, as the use of the highly toxic Corexit 9500A to disperse ugly oil patches attests to. It’s like trying to use Photoshop to contain an oil spill, except far deadlier (read this post for a not-too-surprising linkage of the money/chemical food chain).

Additionally, consider the following case study.

This is the Website for the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command. Everyday the images on the site’s splash page change, but none of them have oil in them. I find it interesting that today it features a turtle being cleaned, which is in stark contrast to a video linking throughout the Web that features the testimony of a boat captain who claims that turtles are being incinerated by BP’s oil burn.

Who is Deepwater Horizon Unified Command and who created the Website? The Economist pried a little and found the site’s origins a little dubious.

Regardless of who’s running the Website, it stinks of top level greenwashing. Meanwhile BP’s PR people have been masquerading themselves as journalists and reporting ridiculous things like, “It’s strangely peaceful up here – just right for surrendering to some meditation….I’m filled with the wonderment of what’s happening below our chopper only moments after it lifts off from an airport in Houma, La.” (Quoted here and also in BoingBoing.)

I could go on.

I intend to use this event as a case study during a summer course. I’d like to suggest that we craft a curricular response and teacher guide for the Fall semester. If we are really ambitious, we can also curate a series of Webinars. There could be a number of units, some of which could be based on the following themes and topics:

* Oil spill as case study of ecological disaster coverage in the media

* Frame analysis of disaster coverage

* Oil spill response as greenwashing

* History of BP greenwashing

* Golf spill discourse analysis

* Oil as a systems paradigm

* Alternative golf spill media

Anyone else game?