SYSTEMS FAILURE in the GULF

This has been edited from an article written by Margaret Wheatley for YES! Magazine:

We must deepen our understanding of what's happening in the Gulf and what it means for our future. And what it means for us right now. "My sadness over our American Sea is becoming unspeakable. Few, and not I, can imagine the damage that will be done for generations to come.”

An oil company executive has said, 'I've been in the deep water drilling business for years and none of us can figure out how this happened. Nothing that should have stopped it worked. And the damage is limitless. 25,000 barrels a day is the more realistic number. It will take months to stop it much less clean it up. Nobody knows how to do this.'

This is a major SYSTEMS FAIL. The Gulf Coast has always been sacrificed for oil and industry. By everyone. SYSTEMS FAIL. Game over.

What do we do with our anger, our outrage, our frustration, our impotence as we tune into what's happening there? How do we avoid being consumed by these dark, swirling emotions that, like oil in the Gulf, destroy life's capacities? How do we persevere, and find the strength and faith to keep working for what we believe in?

If you're watching or reading the news, do you feel as I do how broken we are as a people?

We have choice here, as a nation, and as individuals. We can recognize that we're in new territory, that we're truly lost.

Well, nothing is working as it should. We find ourselves prisoners of arrogant technology magnified by insistent greed.

People who are lost in the mountains or wilderness, who either survive or die by the choices they make, at first fight to make their old maps work. They do everything possible to make the old maps fit the present circumstance-but they never can.

In wilderness situations, this grasping goes on until the person is confronted with the fact that they're about to die. They will survive only if they acknowledge that there's no way out of their present peril; they must give up their old maps and acknowledge that they're truly lost. Once they recognize this, they begin to notice where they really are, what's going on, what's useful information available here and now.

They make new maps and find their way home.

Laurence Gonzales, in his book Extreme Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, writes: "Not being lost is not a matter of getting back to where you started from; it is a decision not to be lost wherever you happen to find yourself. It's simply saying, `I'm not lost, I'm right here.'"

I hold in my heart the vision of what's possible if we realize that, with the Gulf tragedy, nobody knows what to do, we're in new territory, we're lost.

I don't think we have a choice here. We have to come together to find what's needed for the Gulf, its people, and all its living beings. But will we make this choice? I have no idea.


Margaret Wheatley wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.

Margaret is an internationally acclaimed writer, speaker, and teacher. Her books include Leadership and the New Science and, most recently Perseverance.

She is co-founder and President emerita of The Berkana Institute, a charitable foundation that works with people around the world who strengthen their communities using the wisdom and wealth already present in their people, traditions, and environment.