Bright Side Wednesday: Oil Spills

I'd like to introduce you to a new feature on this here blog: Bright Side Wednesdays.

Most days start off the same. You lie in bed and think about your failures, the lifetime's worth of burned and never-built-in-the-first-place bridges, and the evil in the world, and the dwindling number of days separating you and the moment when you're pulled from the game by the Pale Gym Teacher and told to hand in your earthly gym clothes and hit the eternal locker room, and so on. At about 11:00 am you pull yourself together enough to finally get up and make scrambled eggs, but you don't do a very good job at that either.

But not on Wednesdays, brother. Wednesdays, we wake up early and hit the coffee hard. Wednesdays, we look on the Bright Side.

Pictured: the bright side of things
(note: Photo taken in May. Flowers are now wilted and dead. Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday)

And where better to look for a Bright Side than the world's oil spills? It seems like no matter where we look - the Gulf of Mexico (they just added another spill!), China, Nigeria for years, and now, Michigan - oil companies everywhere are jumping on the oil spill bandwagon. Hard hats, chemical suits, and pinched facial expressions are all the rage among corporate leaders this summer. Basically, if you're an oil company, and you want to be competitive, you've got to find some birds to slather in oil. Heck, just this Monday, Canada's very own Enbridge apparently got tired of being a wallflower at the Oil Spill Dance and jumped right in - by spilling over 3 million liters of oil into a river in Michigan.

We here in British Columbia know all about Enbridge because they want to build a massive pipeline to run oil from the Alberta tar sands to Kitimat, B.C., where it will be loaded onto tankers that would travel through inside waters en route to Asian markets. Only problem for them is that there is a lot of opposition to this project - it seems that a lot of people on the coast of B.C. don't want them around, because of the devastating effects that a spill would have on the coast and all of the living things that depend on it, yada yada yada. In fact, my own organization even has a way to take action to fight Enbridge's pipeline and tanker project by ensuring that oil tankers are permanently banned from B.C.'s north and central coasts.

But perhaps we're being a bit too judgmental. Maybe, in fact, we need to look at the Bright Side of oil spills, which is:

Oil-resistant wildlife. Let's face it: for far too long we've been held back by the weakness and fragility of things like sea turtles, pelicans, and now, Canada geese. Sure, back in the 80s it was cool for your average sea otter to be totally not oil-resistant, but times change. Here in 2010, all non-human living things have got to hear the message that oil companies are sending: if you cannot go about your business while covered in crude, you don't have a place in the competitive global economy of the 21st century. So, sorry and thanks for all the photos, pelicans, but a new day is dawning and it belongs to things like oil-metabolizing bacteria.

So, on this Bright Side Wednesday,  let's all salute B.P. and Enbridge for their selfless efforts to create a better, more oil-resistant natural world. B.P. and Enbridge: putting natural selection to work for you, by coating everything in oil and seeing what survives!