Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, standing in wonder not at humanity’s power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else, too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in the living organism that is Earth itself. And thanks to BP’s live underwater camera feed, we can all watch our planet’s guts gush forth, in real time, twenty-four hours a day.
