For the Plankton and Diatoms and All That Gyre and Gimble in the Wabe

There will be eulogies to come for small, destroyed lives of the water and land of the Gulf written in word and sung in music that will be of a piece the same grief ever entrained by the most sere piobaireachd or felt like the sharp edge of a knife in halls of remembrance for the loved and lost.  Save  celebrations and local festivities to drink joyfully the new wine whatever its form, we people become most open with compassion for each other in times of disaster.  Now we have before us a disaster of smothering oil and reeking gas roiled up from the ocean floor that will call us as a nation to deliver our best, free of any constraining belief that recovery from this international disaster is a zero-sum game.  We may not salvage profit at the expense of the good of the environment because doing so will lead us, inevitably, to that tipping point marking us as a species as lost as the once living creatures gone now forever in the balance sheet of oil production cost effectiveness.