I really hope this isn't true

So, according to a report via CNN's iReport feature (whose posts are not verified or vetted by CNN itself), the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is not just a single uncapped well, but many seperate leaks besides, all welling up from a fractured seafloor. If this is true, it is extremely disturbing, and is probably one of the most serious ecological disasters in human history--something akin to Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez spill, and the Dust Bowl all rolled into one.

The problems of a massive, ongoing, undersea oil geyser are, of course, manifold; besides devastating the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico (which is pretty diverse), ruining the economy of coastal communities dependent on that ecology, and annihilating the coastal wetlands that are an integral part of the nearby terrestrial ecology (and act as protection from hurricane storm surges for nearby cities and towns, including New Orleans), there is the simple fact that the world's oceans produce something like sixty or seventy percent of the oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, and that all oceans on the planet are connected. If standard methods are used to attempt to stop the oil geyser and fail, and alternate methods are not employed, for fear they will inhibit the Gulf's capacity to produce additional oil in the future, we're looking at something like a 30-year wait for the gusher to stop on its own. In several months, this leak has caused untold devastation on a massive scale (admittedly mostly out of sight, hidden beneath the ocean); I cannot imagine what the consequences would be if it continued for decades.

The article has another disturbing assertion in it: the Gulf is the last oil-producing region capable of increasing its production. We have always known that oil was a limited resource, yet as time has gone on, we have only increased the rate at which we have used it. Besides anthropogenic climate change, fueled (pun intended) by our use of oil and gas, we are now reaping an altogether more urgent consequence of our refusal to invest in alternate energy sources. We have hampered ourselves through capitalistic greed, the assurance of profit today via an already commonly-used resource, instead of looking to the future; we are cursing ourselves with political and corporate inaction.

Ruin is the fate of all societies who stagnate, or become regressive; like species faced with external environmental pressure, we must adapt, or perish. Rome, once the mightiest empire in the world, could not change with the times, and fell into ruin; likewise the British Empire, the largest ever known. Ecological disaster through overexploitation of the environment has doomed countless human populations: from Greenland to the Fertile Crescent, throughout human history. Faced with the signs of their own impending collapse, these people, like many today, ignored them; and rather than change their habits, they attempted to continue according to the old customs, and they are now gone, and mostly forgotten; they are a smattering of archaeological sites, and footnotes in the history books.

I am not so arrogant and self-centered as to claim that humanity is doomed; so-called prophets with an inflated sense of importance have proclaimed their age the last age of human history since the dawn of time, and they have all (so far) been wrong; but unless we find within ourselves the strength to really change, to really look to the future, to hold within our minds an ideal that is radically different from the society we live in today, and to work towards bringing our world closer to that ideal than it has ever been, we will face terrible hardship in the decades to come. Already the rich-poor gap in industrialized nations is widening; as African nations develop, the same process repeats itself there, magnified a thousand times according to the relative quantity of development required. Authoritarian tendencies in government abound, and are largely ignored. Regardless of what action we take, our grandchildren will live in a world entirely unlike the one inhabited by America and Europe in the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st; but it is up to the current generation to decide whether it will be a better one, or a worse.