Wendell Berry and Brian Volck Ponder the Gulf Oil Spill

Here’s a four-minute video of Wendell Berry responding to the oil spill.

And here’s what Brian Volck says about the disaster in today’s Good Letters post:

The wisdom of twelve step programs lies in the embrace of a moral dimension to addiction. If Deepwater Horizon is exclusively a failure of complex science, technology, and regulation, those of us who are not petroleum engineers are left without any hope to claim as our own. …

The vast, swirling, and toxic mess euphemistically named the Gulf oil “spill” calls to mind Dante’s infernal law of contrapasso, which punishes those who refuse God’s mercy by finally giving each sinner what he wants—albeit in unanticipated ways. We wanted lots of oil; now we have what we want, though not where we wanted it.