From a Gulf Oyster, a Domino Effect

[phantom power]

The rocklike oyster and the burlap sack. As basic as it gets in the gulf, yet both are integral to a complex system of recycling and ingenuity, a system now threatened, along with most everything else, by the continuing oil-spill catastrophe in the gulf.

The disaster’s economic fallout has had a sneaky domino effect, touching the lives of everyone from the French Quarter shuckers who turn oyster-opening into theater to the Minnesota businessman who grinds the shells for chicken-feed supplement. Some victims were unaware that they were even tiles in the game, so removed were they from the damaged waters.

Take the burlap sacks on this oyster boat, for example, bearing the markings of Brazilian, Costa Rican and Mexican coffee companies. They come from a simple business, Steve’s Burlap Sacks, run out of a hot warehouse in Waveland, Miss., 120 miles away. And if you were to go there today, you would find the warehouse quiet, and the work-hardened owner trying very hard to keep it together.

“I don’t think the Lord’s looking this way no more,” he says.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/us/16land.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

[Blue Owl]

1. Now we'll see just how interconnected we are with our ecosystem

The world will be affected by this, in unpleasant ways.

[JuniperLea]

2. Earth is a biosphere...

People forget this. Yes, she can heal herself, but it takes a very, very long time.