This whole Gulf oil spill business is becoming a series of misattributions. A little while ago, I made mention of the fact that a lot of people looking for someone to blame for this disaster are blaming the good people of England instead of BP, who, through negligence toward safety and good craftsmanship, got this whole tarball rolling.

I’m not seeing that as much lately, which is refreshing. However, I’m seeing yet another misrepresentation, this time coming almost exclusively from the Right, attempting to redefine the spill as a “Natural” disaster or phenomenon.

This has a few benefits for those of the conservative persuasion. First, it allows for the spill to be characterized as the act of a wrathful God who’s really angry at the non-pious, because kicking hippies is fun for them. Secondly, by classifying this spill as an unavoidable unfortuanate quirk of nature, blame can be rhetorically deflected away from BP and other large multinational oil companies, who have traditionally allied themselves with (and supported monetarily) the Republican party and other conservative entities*, who tend to support the sort of regulation (lax, laisse-faire, revering profit over all other concerns) that’s favorable to the oil companies. This protects the lucrative relationship between the conservative faction in government and the energy companies in a more subtle way than simply apologizing publically to BP for how inconvenient this must be for them, because, not surprisingly, doing that didn’t go over so well with the public when Rep. Barton tried it.

The position of defining the oil spill as a “natural disaster” even has the value of being semantically true, assuming one’s also comfortable calling the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “natural”, since nuclear fission is a naturally-occurring phenomenon.

As one might assume, I’m not comfortable doing that.

There’s no question that the effects of the gulf oil spill are and will continue to be disastrous for nature and the environment, but it wasn’t nature that caused the problem in the first place. We can’t let it be forgotten that this is a case of a collection of human beings attempting to harness nature’s power in an irresponsible manner, and now it’s costing all of us.

This problem is BIG, and it’s going to take the cooperation of all of us to eventually solve it. I’m not interested in laying blame, other than making sure that those responsible do their duty to help clean up the mess, though we can’t cloud the issue of what caused this in the first place; we have to call it what it is: a human blunder, not some random act of nature or god, or we risk missing the important lessons the mistakes that caused this man-made disaster can teach us.

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* – I make this claim with full knowledge that any big corporation is going to hedge its bets and make big contributions to both major parties – big political money is all about access; it gets contributors face-time with politicians to make their case; it’s unfortunate, but it’s true. I will, however, posit that it’s unlikely that even a full-blooded conservative Blue Dog democrat would let oil company lobbyists simply draft government energy policy without question the way say, the previous republican administration did.