Next stop for the Earth and what are you gonna do about it?

The world doesn't stop for humans. She keeps spinning, wobbling around the sixth sun.

Lately, she's hobbling after being badly hurt once again by human activity that humans, some of us, call corporate greed for oil, profits, accumulation for private consumption.

BP was drilling into the crust of the earth, to suck up oil to process into fuel for our cars, trains, and other energy and forms.

We are now living under one of the worst oil spills in human history after an explosion ripped open a gash in her belly allowing crude to swoosh up in hundreds of thousands of gallons per day, poisoning everything in its wake.

Humans, specifically corporate humans, are responsible for the spill; it was not an accident; the spill is a warning and a sign that our relationship to the natural world doesn't work.

The human corporate polluter, ravager of the earth, has a name, British Petroleum, BP. And he has accomplices, every day sitting in gridlock on their way to shop, work or home.

The Big Bang Strikes Again at the Belly-Button of the Moon

Six millions years ago, give or take a few millennia, an asteroid ripped into earth, gashing a crescent wound into the continent where the Yucatán peninsula now sits. The impact was of such an intensity that part of the earth was lopped off and drifted into space, eventually becoming our moon.

Humans in the Mesoamerican region venerated the almost perfect arc after arc of cenotes, wells (that were created by the backfire of the asteroid's impact on the earth), that covered the Yucatán peninsula. The cenotes were treated as sacred portals or places that were given human and plant sacrifices or offerings.

Mesoamerican naturalists thousands of years ago made the connection between the moon and Mesoamerica and began calling the entire region Mexico. Mexico is the Spanish-ized version of Mexica (pronounced: meh shee kah), formed by the fusion of two Nahuatl language words, metztli (moon) [pronounced: mets-tuhlee] and xictli [sheek-tuhlee] (belly-button) "Belly-button of the Moon."

The asteroid's destruction of animal and plant life created the sediment that eventually over millions of years was compressed and transformed into crude. Coal, oil, in other words, fossil fuel, are the remnants of animal and plant life, which humans have learned badly to use as fuel for extremely short-sighted needs. Human dominant industrial social formations, mainly Europe and the U.S. are using up the past faster than we can create the future, any future that might be sustainable or survivable for humans.

The Wétiko Disease: Gulf of Mexico Oil Disasters

This is the second oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. In the 1980s another oil rig accident caused a tremendous oil spill. I lived in south Texas, close to Padre Island, at the time and I remember the oil clumping into fist-sized balls of crude. The beaches, the sea-life, the water suffered tremendously; other than sitting on the beach sands, the gulf waters were deadly to all life forms.

But no one should worry.

Humans, especially those of us who have lived under and through the the dominant industrial society cannot destroy the earth. We can only destroy the habitat, the eco-systems of air, water and soil, that support human life.

What is destroying us is what Jack Forbes, renown Native American scholar and poet, calls the "wétiko" disease. Jack Forbes writes, the wétiko disease is "... the consuming of another's life for one's own private purpose or profit."

The wétiko disease is the disease of possession, that anyone of us can own land or build, drill, shovel it around -- or in the case of BP, oil that is over five thousand feet below the surface of the Gulf waters -- without consequences.

The U'wa a few years ago reminded humans, especially those of us from the dominant industrial societies, that the oil in the land and under the crust of the earth is there for its own reasons.

The oil is part of the balance and once you pilfer it, suck it up into ocean carriers and transport it to refineries, we will pay a heavy price, said the U'wa. The whole process of unbalancing comes to the fore. The result? The current and most deadly spill ever of crude gushing from the bottom of the Gulf.