Since my post yesterday I’ve run across a few more organizations who are crucially involved with the Gulf oil spill in several different ways:

• American Bird Conservancy is mapping the locations of important bird areas in relation to the oil spill, among other contributions.  They have a detailed page about birds and the spill, including links for volunteer opportunities in each state.  They also are accepting donations on that page.
• The Center for Biological Diversity has a LOT of pertinent and accurate information about the oil spill; they are accepting donations to their Gulf disaster fund to fight future drilling and also have a page with other opportunities to take action, including links to petitions
• The Greater New Orleans Foundation is accepting donations to a fund to help affected fishermen and their families.

All three of these organizations have been awarded 4 stars by Charity Navigator, which means they are very very good at using donations effectively.

Also, I’m thinking through how we might hook up the volunteers with people who could help sponsor their travel expenses.  Do you have ideas about how to do this, or resources that might help it happen?  Please contribute your ideas in the comments below…

This is a listing of a variety of specific ways you can help with the Gulf oil spill.

In compiling this list, my starting place was the article Heroes needed: how to help the victims of the Gulf Coast oil spill. I’ve added more specific information and live links, to make it easier to get involved.  If you can’t help in person, there are still several one-click opportunities to donate to the organizations who are on the ground and helping with wildlife rescue and cleanup.  No donation is too small.

· The National Wildlife Federation is working with the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana; to get involved with these organizations you could donate to the NWF oil spill fund to help fund wildlife protection and cleanup in affected areas, or volunteer as a spotter for distressed wildlife, or volunteer to help with cleanup
· The International Bird Rescue and Research Center has sent a team of specialists to the region to help with oiled wildlife. If you spot oiled wildlife, call the Wildlife Reporting Hotline at 866-557-1401. Please note that oiled birds (or any other oiled wildlife) should not be captured, but reported to the hotline.  A couple of good ways to get involved with IBRRC are to adopt a bird, or set up a monthly donation.
· The National Audubon Society is recruiting volunteers to be trained to help wash oiled birds. They are also encouraging members of the public to contact the Interior Department and encourage them to halt the expansion of offshore oil drilling in the eastern United States.  The Audubon Society is asking that people NOT call them–please contact them online, as their phone lines are inundated.
· Alabama residents are asked to contact the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program at 251-431-6409; or contact the Mobile Baykeeper at 251- 433-4229 to volunteer anywhere along the Gulf Coast, or volunteer online at the Safe the Gulf website; you can also donate to the Coastal Estuary Restoration Fund (there is a field in the form where you can designate that your donation be used to help with the oil spill).
· Save Our Seabirds is a Florida bird rescue group that is looking for volunteers as its response team prepares to help oiled wildlife. To help, call 941-388-3010.  They also welcome donations.  Their volunteer coordinator has posted a list of sister organizations you could contact, as well.
· The Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary’s G.R.I.T. (Gulf Response Involvement Team) is looking for donations of life vests and other supplies as needed (their webpage says they will keep updating current needs).

The following suggestions were contributed by Clairee, a volunteer, in the comments field of the ‘Heroes’ article cited above:

MOST IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER: Just because you might not be able to get there in person doesn’t mean you can’t help in a very direct way. Volunteer to help in your local wildlife shelter to help take up the slack of those trained individuals who are about to leave for the gulf, or want to go but can’t find anyone to help cover their duties at home. Plus, you’ll start getting that wildlife experience in doing so. Win/win.

Sponsor a volunteer. If you know someone who is about to go to the gulf, sponsor them. Travel expenses add up. A gift certificate to a gas station might be just the thing to ease the financial burden on a volunteer. Or if you have a coworker who needs to get off of work to go volunteer, cover shifts for them. Do whatever you can to help that trained volunteer get to the site and do their job.

Last night I saw video footage of the BP oil spill here and here.  I had already been deeply concerned about it; seeing the footage, I was grief-stricken.

At first, I was focused on the horror of it.  I saw that the thing had already happened. I felt the death of all that life very very keenly.  My heart hurt.

Fortunately, I’ve spent enough time with grief to know a few things about how to navigate the territory.  I shifted modes, and prayed: “how is one to relate to this?”

The answer was a shift in how I was carrying the disaster.  Instead of something that I couldn’t do anything about, it became something I could help with.  I didn’t yet know how I could help, but I did know that there would be a way of lending my particular strengths.

This morning as I woke I saw those images again in my mind’s eye.  But today I saw the images peacefully, as a thinker and troubleshooter.  (This is a big part of what I do for a living.)

Looking at the whole thing from this new perspective, I saw an instance of something I see all the time at a smaller scale: people frantically continuing to do what isn’t working because they are caught in a particular interpretation of the situation.

I noticed that the word carrying the heaviest load in the oil spill disaster is ‘containment’.  Thousands of people are trying very very hard to surround that oil.  The thinking goes, “it should have been prevented, but now that it’s happened, we’ve got to contain it.”

But it’s becoming apparent that it’s too big to contain.  The last words I heard on one of the videos last night were, “for the first time, I’m seeing that it’s hopeless.”

Right here, I see something crucial: the speaker was equating ‘uncontainable’ with ‘hopeless’.  But that’s an error in thought.  Containment isn’t working, but that doesn’t mean that the situation is hopeless.  What it does mean, is that we have to think differently here.

The second video I watched showed the leak itself.  This is the root of the problem.  When BP tried to cap it (a form of containment) it didn’t work because inside the container, the leak itself was still a leak.

What we need is not to contain the leak, but to stop it:  to mend that wound.  Now I begin to think of a gushing artery, and to wonder what would happen if we were to bring skilled surgeons together in the same room with the kind of engineers who mend enormous leaks that happen under pressure.  I think ‘tourniquet': take the pressure off enough to be able to work at the site.

These thoughts are very unskilled of course; I don’t actually know enough here to think the next thoughts.  But it’s a possible direction.

But this particular possible direction is not my real message here.  My real message is the meta-direction, and I want to say something to Obama in particular, here:

You won the election because you never allowed yourself to get caught in a defensive position.  You didn’t let your opponent define your next moves.  You took in reality very accurately, and then you thought three steps ahead of it.  This is your strength.  We need it here.

The oil that’s already spilled, is spilled.  We can’t contain it, but we can work to mend. Obama, your job as our leader in this moment is to cast the nets widely for thinkers who know a lot, from their day in day out work of mending this kind of  thing.  Let ‘this kind of thing’ be generous enough to hold a variety of kinds of thinking.

Bring these thinkers together, face to face.  Don’t let BP try to handle this alone.  They’re in panic mode, they’re stuck merely responding.

And when the flow has been staunched, the next task will be to find how to think about this new ground zero: not as a dead zone, but as … what?  That question, I’ll leave open.  But let’s not leave it just to the ‘experts’, okay?