“There’s no ‘them’ there. There’s no ‘there’ there. There’s just us, here.”- Juanita Brown

Watching the coverage on the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the glaciers melting in the Himalayas, the drought and wildfires in Australia, or the Plastic Gyre swirling around in several seas, it’s easy to think “Glad it’s not here”. But in fact, it is.

The Buddha was once asked to discourse on the nature of the universe. He held up a flower. If in a single flower lies the whole universe, how much of the world is in the Gulf of Mexico? It drains the Mississippi, is winter home to migratory nesting birds from all around the world, and provides spawning grounds not just for locals like oysters and shrimp, but also world travelers like bluefin tuna.

Marine plants create 70-80% of the world’s oxygen- what happens if they are damaged in large scale by this spill, or any combination of environmental mishaps?

Could the air quality in Boston be affected by Gulf breezes this summer? Probably. Will there be fewer shrimp on the buffet in Wichita? Almost certainly.  Will an asthmatic girl in Memphis get worse? Only when she’s downwind. The problem is we are all downwind and downstream. It’s a globe.

The waters near my cabin in northern Minnesota, along with most of theland east of the Rockies, drain via the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. Those waters of the Gulf are evaporated by warm southerly breezes and sweep into New England to drop as rain.

The birds of Norway migrate to the Gulf for the winter. At least migratory 60 bird species are facing decline as a result. And the waters of the Gulf travel into the Atlantic and around the world, borne both by ocean currents and global wind patterns. What affects the dolphins and the fisherman and the birds and the countless thousands of other species in the Gulf eventually comes around to affect us all. As Ernest Hemmingway wrote: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls… It tolls for thee. “



The good news is that any action we take to help locally has an impact globally. There’s an old saying that “a butterfly flaps its wings in wings in Tokyo and a tornado forms in Texas”. Buying locally grown food, walking or biking more trips instead of driving, buying a few carbon offsets, recycling another bottle or can, all have an impact. You are the Gulf, you are the seas, and you are the world. Sooner or later it all boils down to one question. What will you do today to leave the place better than you found it?