…it will take 24.9 million times more oil than the worst projected levels of the current spill to make the gulf toxic.

Ok, ok. I’m not usually for snap analysis of such serious issues as the current Gulf of Mexico oil crisis. Every effort to stop the leak should be made and any party determined responsible should be held accountable, of course!

But FWIW, I used to be a chemical analyst for an environmental laboratory and tested for petroleum related compounds on a daily basis usually against EPA regulatory limits. All I want to know how toxic this oil spill will make the Gulf of Mexico given the worst case scenario. So the following haphazard conglomeration of tidbits from internet articles and references will, at the very best, give a spotty, blurry and narrow view of the big picture of the Gulf’s future.

That said, here’s what I came up with:

Volume of oil spilled (worst case scenario) as x in gallons: 112.7 million

Volume of the Gulf of Mexico (gallons) as y: 660 quadrillion (2.5 × 10¹⁵ m³)

This makes a total concentration (x/y = C) of 0.000000000171 per one , or 0.171 parts per trillion (PPT). Caveat: This number represents a “uniform mixture” scenario, whereas oil is currently dispersed in specific areas of much denser concentrations drifting about, each causing their own unique havoc in specific areas, but hypothetically thinking down the road if / when the oil actually and inevitably mixes…

Lethal dose for gulf killfish (LD50): .00425 per one, or 4250 parts per million (PPM)

Factor needed to raise worst-case-scenario-levels of oil in the gulf to make entire gulf toxic: LD50 / C = 24900000 or 24.9 million times more oil than that.

Ok. Last disclaimer: In reality given that BP has used chemical dispersants and the like to help dissipate the surface oil (Which BTW would raise the toxicity level of the resultant crude oil product by a factor of 11), and if they used that same dispersant–called Corexit 9500—on all of the resulting leaked oil, then this would reduce the number of equally sized oil leaks needed for the above mentioned lethal dose to only 2.26 million. This is still not to make light of the drastic shock to the livelyhood of people living near the damage, or the drastic short and long-term effects of the oil on marine life and habitats there! But for those of us who believe we are the custodians of this planet’s entire ecosystem, yes we must work diligently to clean this up, but at the same time, this single incident will not, on a grand and ultimate scale, come anywhere near destroying the Gulf of Mexico.

Note:  Couldn’t find a study of oil toxicity on humans.  No volunteers i guess, but EPA does regulate Benzene in drinking water at 0.005mg/L or parts per million (PPM).  Here is the Material Safety Data Sheet (PDF) on crude oil which features more info like lethal doses (LD 50) of Benzene for rats, for instance (0.93 to 5.96g/kg or PPT).  It says that the level of benzene in crude oil varies but usually contains “small amounts of benzene, polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH’s) and compounds of sulphur.”

Robert Wright seems to have answered his own question:

…why is it that, so far as we can tell, early religion had no real moral dimension?

Here in his book:

Whenever we look at a “primitive” religion, we are looking at a religion that has been evolving culturally for a long time. Though observed hunter-gatherer religions give clues about what the average religion was like 12,000 years ago, before the invention of agriculture, none of them much resembles religion in its literally primitive phase, the time (whenever that was) when religious beliefs and practices emerged. Rather, what are called “primitive” religions are bodies of belief and practice that have been evolving—culturally—over tens or even hundreds of millennia. Generation after generation, human minds have been accepting some beliefs, rejecting others, shaping and reshaping religion along the way.

The problem is looking at religion as an independent system free from the other pressures of life which spanned multiple eras (each of which have their own life conditions, and their own collective worldviews to adapt to them). As one Redditor put it in response to my suggestion to learn about Levels of Development:

Now, now - refined superstition in chart form is superstition all the same.

Basically equating superstition as equivalent to Religion.  Not that any given religion today doesn’t involve some superstitious content, not my point, rather fundamentalist religion today (the one that gets all the New Athiests in a tizzy) stems from the religion of the Agrarian age, and not earlier.   Imagine trying to “not steal” in a hunter gatherer society come wintertime.  Or to “not kill” in a horticultural age when no one you knew has any form of education, and there is no rule of law to stop an individual or group from pillaging your livestock, your house, or your family.  It wasn’t until a society develops a rigid code of conduct which tempers chaos within a group, that fundamentalism appeared. As Nicholas Wade puts it:

to instill, through group cohesion, morality within a group and hostility toward those outside it. So in very early human societies, groups with strong religious behavior would have prevailed over less cohesive adversaries. We are descended from the religious groups, the argument goes, and that is why everyone harbors a religious instinct. …

Or harbors Blue meme (a developmental stage) in Spiral Dynamics:

Blue - Rule/Role Self - age 7–8 years. Later Mythic
Nation States, Authoritarian - starting 5,000 years ago
Life has meaning, direction, and purpose with predetermined outcomes.
Quest: ultimate peace.
Method: follow the given rules, don’t exceed your role…
Pitfalls: archetypal role identification, script pathology, fundamentalism, fascism,etc

So a basic difference between the religion of the Archaic or Magical (superstitious), and the Mythic one of today’s fundamentalists. Believing in myth to substantiate morals is not the same as believing in voodoo magic to curse your enemy. Ken Wilber:

Laotzu was 900 years old when he was born. According to the Hindus, the earth is resting on a serpent, which is resting on an elephant, which is resting on a turtle. Those kinds of mythic approaches aren’t wrong. They’re just a stage of development. Look at [Swiss philosopher] Jean Gebser’s structural stages of development. They go from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral and higher. Magic and mythic are actual stages. They’re not wrong any more than saying “5 years old” is wrong. It’s just 5 years old. We expect there to be higher stages. There was a time when the magic and mythic approaches years ago were evolution’s leading edge of development. So we can’t belittle them.

Bottom line is that to categorize all belief as belief in magic, superstition or childishness is too much of a generalization.  If one is really a proponent of evolution, then it takes a little intellectual honesty to see that religion itself is evolving right along with humanity.  A problem must be accurately diagnosed to most effectively deliver a solution, and I see too broad of a brush being swept by anti-theists.

How to dealThe ever-controversial Stuart Davis offers up a coping mechanism to deal with what is, in the end (or rather, the beginning), fundamentally (pun intended) a part of us all, and when it’s ugly side rears it’s head in the media:

The ‘answer’ to fundamentalism is not to get rid of Religion, but to get religion to evolve. How can we help Pat Robertson discover his hidden Father Thomas Keating? Will Francis Collins agree to mentor Sarah Palin? I’m kidding. But I’m not. The answer to low levels of religion is higher levels of religion. The real work ahead of us is religious development, not just embarrassing people into forfeiting their belief system (they will just trade it for an equivalent one anyway). If tomorrow, all the religions in the World magically vanished, we’d face the same dangers of low levels of consciousness in high positions of power.

Remember life before the internet? Or the cell phone? When TV, magazines or the newspaper were our primary sources of information? Of course, very few of us bloggers like to dwell on how much more of a hassle things used to be… Admittedly, life was much simpler the further you go back, but was the lack of complication in our lives a necessarily better thing overall?

40,000 years ago we used to hunt and gather as our primary means of sustenance, and existence. Also, given that the average lifespan might have been around 30 years, it’s probably safe to say that life was a little more difficult then, no?

The first major technological breakthrough that made life easier (besides maybe the bow or spear of the lower paleolithic era) was the advent of agriculture, roughly 10,000 years ago, which allowed the human population growth rate increase exponentially. The following simple graph represents the effect of this boom (I love the inclusion of the peak oil-type bell curve in the inset chart!):

So in the move from the forests to working the land, we gained a little more complexity in our lives tending to livestock and the crops, yet this gain in stability is likely a fundamental cause for me and you being here. This chart also shows how the industrial revolution had a similar effect.

I’m not trying to equate progress with population growth explosions, but historically major advancements in technology gave rise to betterment of the human condition. Population growth being only an indicator in these two instances. But life’s complexity increases in each of these instances. The industrial revolution: Clearly life gets more complicated as life gets easier. And by easier I mean life with cars, and washing machines, and computers, etc.–the way we travel, work and communicate is progressively less and less work on an individual basis.

Of course, many want to rebel against the industrial revolution, because of the obvious costs in areas of resources, pollution, environment–not to mention multiple other worldwide consequences of the types of destructive greed which too often thrive in the modern era. The stereotype of old environmentalism rebelling against modernity is not without it’s virtues. In fact, because of historically new problems like peak oil, global pollution, and overpopulation, a paradigmatic transformation looms (or is underway). So far there are two major trends in the mainstream:

1. The projected solution of population reduction and/or massive conservation efforts as indicated/foreshadowed by the movie An Inconvenient Truth.
2. Or… The optimism of the next-generation environmentalism usually referred to as “bright green.”

Optimism versus pessimism. One option is regression to a simpler yet harder life, the other an inspiring reliance and investment in the likely possibility that technology can solve many of the environmental problems we face. Whether it be application of these technologies in a conscious manner in work and life, or the pure economic drive away from an increasingly costly fossil fuel economy, it’s clear this shift must happen.

Don’t get me wrong. Technology alone wont do the job but if the technology we use can be an indication of the level of our collective internal development we’re at or heading to, then much work should be put into examining and scrutinizing our inner worlds and personal lives to see where waste (not just the material kind, but emotional and mental as well) can be curtailed and eliminated. After all, looking at all of these external conditions that threaten the planet as merely an outward reflection of our collective selfishness, or naiveté is half of the equation, I think.

So I frequent the blog of the popular political pundit, and writer for The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan. It might of been around the time of this bog post that drew my attention to Ron Paul. I don’t know about you, but when curious statements such as his on that video get laughed-off on mainstream media, I hone in on them and do some research!

The following thought process occurred:

Red flag: What the hell is all this “abolish the Federal Reserve” talk anyways? At first glance, his statements seemed archaic–as if somehow he’s really some old wash-out that hasn’t let go of the good-ol-days and just accepted the harsh reality the rest of us have, as in “nothing is certain but death and taxes.” I was gonna let it go had not the peculiar condescending laughter of the cock-sure status quo give me the chills, and therefore the motivation to inquire about all this.

What the hell is the Federal Reserve anyways? I don’t remember any in depth explanation in school or the media (although I remember middle and high school as being a more hormonal experience than an intellectual one. Fair enough). Yet I knew I had to be on to something when a Youtube search results list of “Federal Reserve” nearly knocked me over by the unanimous high regard on which all the video descriptions held it. Ok, sure any institution associated with taxation ain’t gonna be widely appreciated by default, but hey, if you want to defend “The Fed” please make an objective documentary and upload it to Youtube with-a-quickness, in order to counter the rest of this propaganda (lest the next generation grow up sabotage our current currency system)!

But in the hope that somebody had an education and career in economics and then explained this topic on video so I didn’t have to, I began watching some of these very intelligent pieces. And then wow, perhaps a wrench in the current machine is what we need. I don’t want to try and persuade you with my own words… (Except that my conclusion is that this is an extremely important issue, and we must find a way to transcend these problems, else first-world societies on this planet will cease to advance, or worse: totally collapse! (Hey, ya gotta throw in the worst-case scenario).).

But as always, you be the judge:

Here’s another very relevant and highly enlightening doc on the history of banking: