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It went on for weeks before it became world news. On August 21, an offshore oil drilling platform in the Timor Sea, northwest of Australia, began to leak hundreds of barrels of oil a day from a rupture a mile and a half underwater. The resulting slick spread across several thousand square miles of ocean in the vicinity of some particularly rich marine reserves. In early November the company that owns the well finally succeeded in stanching the leak. It pledged to fund the Australian government’s monitoring and cleanup operations at an estimated cost of 5.3 million dollars. (This comment is based on web-accessed news reports. Figures varied widely from story to story and over time.)

On October 23, The Guardian (UK) published a portfolio of photographs taken around the Montara rig and the spill. We see a sinuous sea snake trying to make its way through the oil sludge, a dead nautilus. We see booms and skimmers and helmeted workers attempting to clean up at least some of the spilled oil. There are the totem animals of oil spills, oil soaked birds, pitch-black and shiny now, their feathers rendered useless for insulation against the ocean’s chill. A bird awaits cleaning, its innocent yellow eye gazing out at a world in which its misery is just a cost of doing business.

We look at, but hate to see, a photo of an emaciated dolphin whose ribs show through its sleek, taupe skin. Trying to survive in a sea of oil is debilitating. Think of it: cetaceans’ nostrils are on the back of their heads. When they surface they pass through a layer of crude oil and inhale its fumes. And they don’t have any way to wipe their noses. Regarding the pictures of the scrawny dolphins and the suffering seabirds, I find myself on the verge of tears of sorrow and shame.

How do we persist in activities that do such wanton harm? Clearly our ability to empathize with members of our own species, let alone with other beings, is uneven and easily trumped by inertia. It was not so long ago that the apparatus of a nation-state methodically annihilated several million human beings. With respect to the planet’s biodiversity, a small but not insignificant portion of which is now choking on oil in the Timor Sea, we may not all be SS but we are all "Good Germans." Petrocivilization assumes that oil spills, poisoned coastal and marine life, and climate change are acceptable prices to pay for our modern way of life.

The area of the Timor Sea hit by the spill was a pristine ocean wilderness rich in marine life, including those dolphins, more than a score of seabird species, hawksbill and flatback turtles (both threatened with extinction), and a diversity of sea snakes. Menacing invertebrates also, the spill transpired during prime spawning time for corals in the affected region. A World Wildlife Fund ecologist who led a survey of the affected area said, “Clearly wildlife is dying and hundreds if not thousands of dolphins, seabirds, and sea snakes are being exposed to toxic oil.”

The long term effects of the spill may be comparable to those of the Exxon Valdez twenty years ago in south central Alaska, where crude oil still contaminates the marine environment. Ten thousand communities, said the Asia Sentinel, rely on the Timor Sea for subsistence. Residents of small islands there report having been sickened by eating contaminated fish.

The Timorese spill is nothing new under the sun. Oil spills, whether resulting from extraction or transportation of the commodity, inevitably occur despite the varying efforts of oil companies to ensure the safety of their operations. Bloomberg reported that this is the first such incident to occur among the 1,500 offshore oil wells drilled in Australian waters since 1984—but that is no help to the inhabitants of the area around the Montara rig.

In January of 1969, a Union Oil drilling platform in the pristine Santa Barbara channel blew and spewed millions of gallons of oil into the sea. It was close enough to the California shore and some affluent communities that when the oil-soaked birds and seals started washing up on the beaches, there were plenty of people around to be shocked into action. Public outrage over that spill was one of the factors in the rise of the ecology movement and the passage, nearly unimaginable in our time, of a strong array of environmental protection laws.

Yet as long as oil is being extracted, transported, and consumed, there will be oil spills—offshore drilling rigs, tankers, and pipelines all will continue to prove fallible. Oil companies will continue to apologize and promise to clean up the messes. Government officials will try to steer a middle way.

On November 3, reported Environment News Service, Australia’s Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson said, “It is vital that we understand what caused this incident, that we learn from it, and that we put in place any measures that would help prevent such an incident occurring in the future.” Does he mean measures like a shift to local organic food production, a serious commitment to mass transit, an oil depletion protocol, and a wholesale embrace of the necessity to plan for energy descent and a steady-state economy?

We know that the end of the oil age is nigh, that petroleum production has peaked, and that to suck up the dregs of Earth’s oil and gas, ever more advanced technologies—like deep drilling from mid-ocean platforms—will be required. The practical reasons for making our segue to the post-petroleum era with alacrity are many and obvious. The moral reasons are equally clear. Our species is precipitating the Earth’s sixth great extinction crisis, a calamity that’s gone into overdrive on fossil fuels. Homo sapiens is abrogating the evolutionary destinies of thousands of other kinds of beings, not a single one of them less worthy of its place in the sun than you or me.

Stephanie Mills is the author of Tough Little Beauties (2007), Epicurean Simplicity (2002), and Turning Away from Technology (1997). She has written and lectured on bioregionalism, ecological restoration, community economics, and voluntary simplicity for over 30 years. She is a Fellow of Post Carbon Institute.

Photo credit: SkyTruth/flickr