putting around some ideas

From the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico to Michigan's Kalamazoo River, all represent oil spills that occurred this year. When will we wake up and realize the real price that drilling for oil today costs? We are paying for the obvious environmental impacts that have come from these disasters – such as oil spill clean-up efforts, animal clean-up, rehabilitation or loss of sensitive shoreline ecosystems, prevention of further contamination, problems that arise from dead or decaying plant and animal life, etc. Furthermore there are economic impacts that have hit the affected regions – things like tourism rate declines, businesses affected by spills (i.e. fishing, boat tours, etc.), lost crude revenue from spilled oil, and the costs of rebuilding a company's reputation after a spill has occurred. Another impact is the human impact – clean water is necessary to sustain life (if oil spills occur in fresh water regions that use the water for a drinking water source, then there is a serious problem), if fishing is the major source of food in a region (i.e. the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska devastated both local commercial and non-commercial fishing) regions can go hungry, and toxic fumes from oil spills and oil fires can create uninhabitable living conditions.

The implications of lost oil from a global perspective go beyond what we see at the pump. Oil or petroleum is obtained primarily through drilling practices, and goes into a large number of consumer products, from gasoline and kerosene to asphalt and chemical reagents used to make plastics and pharmaceuticals. To resolve the problems that arise from oil spills we must also factor in the problems of oil in general – the fact that it's a limited resource and that it's becoming more difficult to gather the oil that exists today due to the uniquely difficult and or sensitive locations of the oil deposits. The world needs to rely less on oil and all the products that come downstream from oil. Unless people have in some way experienced the negative impacts at a personal level, it might be difficult to convince people of the urgency of this issue. From the perspective of the average oil-using state, these are all problems that seem to be out of sight and out of mind.

The "Big Oil" business has an immediate link to global oil related issues. Their impacts range from tax cuts given in favor of these companies (often hurts the community with lost revenue) to, record profits (this is good for the share holders) and the use of questionable new drilling practices (to secure hard to reach oil deposits). The Oil industry needs more regulation. Oil is a limited resource that belongs to the sovereign it resides within. Any oil-state should be the main benefactor of the sale of its own oil. "Big Oil" can still be a contractor through these oil-states to provide drilling and refining services but globally we need to be accountable for the global oil supply and reserves. This is something that clearly will take more time because it requires diplomacy and negotiations between states regarding international policy and law. The main problem with international legal issues is that jurisdiction doesn't allow for there to be an unbiased tribunal that is globally recognized by all state players.

bringing in the new

It's amazing the moment when things finally become clear enough to see your future. The brilliance that is entirely obtainable provided one is willing to fulfill the necessary prerequisites to get there. Sometimes small sacrafices will pay off huge dividends down the road so people should consider this prior to making life decisions when it comes to how we spend our extra time. Likewise, compromise can be benificial if it allows you to add something new that otherwise may not be possible. New experiences give breadth to one's global understanding and often become enriching leisure activities. These activities can also serve to set you apart moving forward as the candidate that has a background in a given activity, language, skill, etc.

vision: to be or not to be?

According to Niccolo Machiavelli and Leslie Gelb visionaries often do more harm than good. Quoting Gelb "Without vision, men die; with vision, more men die." (Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy, 2009) It has been my observation that vision leads people astray from their intentions, as it creates an unattainable reality that neither serves to improve their situation nor the situation of their neighbors. The most important tool in life is to remain open-minded to all possibilities whether you agree with the positions or not; to dismiss these viable options will leave you in peril. By no means is this a definitive statement conveying that all options, at all times, are functional solutions to a given problem. On the contrary, resolution will only come from thinking through all the steps of a situation and appropriately planning for their occurrence.

Visions can hide potential outcomes from our view, because we are unwilling to divert our gaze from the predetermined, prescribed pathway that we have already began to tread upon. Having and obtaining goals for the purpose of improvement is not to be discouraged but one must remain open to change if the goal is to be completed; no one can fully predict what barriers might stand to impede their progress. The question at this point becomes: How to get past the barriers that exist? (Does one go over, through, or around the given barrier? Moreover, what are the various consequences for their actions?) Regardless of the goal, if people cannot see a way past the existing barriers it is often because they have closed their mind's eye to the possibility. In other words, they have already told themselves that it will not work, without taking the time to play out all variations of the idea.

Visions are dangerous because we close ourselves up to change and treat visions as "paint-by-number" exercises where we have given up our free will and sense of imagination prior to even beginning the process. In this we are effectively following orders without question. This is not to say authority has no place in the world, but rather, that authority should be questioned as to its rightful place, time and use. When you remove the human component from the decision-making process, we are no different than machines. Machines can only calculate raw data, and translate it into a variety of possible outcomes. What machines lack is the ability to think outside the box; beyond the vision. This is uniquely human. The world needs thoughtful innovation not desultory idleness.