The roots draw up all the good things, water and minerals create sugars, food for the new growth, the meristems with their primordials, where wood cells called xylem, elongate and divide, creating new cambium, while the bark cells called phloem take the food to the extremities, where the leaves begin, the green green leaves, wide open to the sunlight and carbon dioxide that are magically converted into more food, sugars and starches. Plants store starch for the long winter sleep. When the tree feels the spring urge, starches begin the perennial waking up process.
It is difficult to live consciously in the world and be happy. As we grow older there seem to be more and more awful things that we hear about and that we then keep in our heads and look at every now and then, even if we don't really want to. How do we balance these images with good ones, and with being able to forget? I find watching this little tree somewhat helpful.
Some things are so huge they are impossible to be rid of. I have this terrible feeling that it is already too late for the earth, this gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is just the beginning of the end of the ocean as we know it. There are smaller gushers which have been found more than 100 miles away from the main BP one, so it seems as though they might have ruptured something which can never be fixed. So much life affected, it is heart-wrenching to try to comprehend. Entire ecosystems can disappear because of one missing link, like plankton. This is the worst oil disaster ever. Everyone is going on about the money, the money that BP must pay out to each fisherman, every hotel owner, any person who has lost income due to this catastrophe. But I don't think enough is being done with regard to the ocean itself. How and if it can be saved.
And people are so disappointingly despicable. There is a theory as to why it has taken so long to find any sort of solution (and what they have done now is not a solution by any means), which is that BP was trying to find the best way to cap the well so that they could collect the most oil. This was their primary motivation, not just to stop it! And, incomprehensibly, the fact that other boats are purposely spilling waste oil and dirty oil-laced bilge water into areas already fouled by the BP spill, hoping not to get caught! Dumping like that is cheaper than having tanks pumped out and cleaned properly according to government regulations when they get to shore. And the reason they know this is that the Coast Guard have a forensics lab in Connecticut which is for the exclusive analysis of oil samples found on beaches. The oil washing up on Florida beaches right now is not from BP's Deepwater Horizon!
When I was 16 the Wafra oil tanker went aground off Cape Agulhas, and I volunteered many hours at the South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) cleaning African penguins. They were forlorn, covered in oil, refusing to eat, standing in the pens looking so woebegone, their little flightless wings the saddest thing about them. I don't know how many we saved, but the lessons gained from our experience went towards the recovery of oil-covered animals in all subsequent spills
Between 15 and 20 000 barrels of oil went into the sea in that case, but it was a finite amount. As was the case in most of the other spills where tankers ran aground, including the terrible Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska twenty years ago. That coastline and its ecosystem with orcas, river and sea otters, seals, and numerous birds, has still not recovered, in fact has taken much longer to recover than scientists predicted. In the BP disaster, millions and millions of barrels have already streamed into the Gulf and are still spurting strongly, 52 days later. (The word "spill" sounds like a glass of milk which you accidentally push over, we need a bigger word.)
Six months into my quest, today, a day of cold and drizzle, I worked out a 1km circuit, so all I have to do now is run five of those and I have my 5 km distance, which has eluded me. It took me 45 minutes to run 5.13km, which is very slow really, and for the first three km I coughed and hacked away, probably due to the damp air. Ended with a 200m dash, and clean lungs.
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