It is hard to know what to say about the BP oil spill, except that it is a human-made environmental catastrophe.  As we learn more and more about what BP knew prior to the explosion, it is easy to focus our anger on a corporation that did not take adequate precautions. In some ways, it is Katrina all over again, with arguments being hashed and re-hashed about what BP could have or should have done in advance that might have prevented or mitigated the environmental impact of its underwater drilling.

Regardless of what caused it, the explosion and its aftermath raise questions about our country’s deep dependency on oil and our willingness to permit risky underwater drilling to obtain it. Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina exposed a bevy of existing race- and class-based disparities in the City of New Orleans. Katrina didn’t create those disparities – it just made them impossible to ignore any longer. Likewise, the BP fiasco lays bare the terrible environmental costs of our oil-driven economy, most of which are not nearly as visible as the giant oil slick that now covers the Gulf coast.  Even as the Obama Administration has made some efforts to expand green technologies, we are nowhere near where we need to be — as a nation or as a global community — in terms of controlling energy consumption or developing alternative fuel technologies.

We need to channel anger about this disaster into a serious campaign for developing the types of technologies that will make deep sea drilling as unnecessary as BP is now unpopular.  Just as with Katrina, standing by and waiting for the Government (or multinational corporations) to figure it out, is not a tenable option.

One way that educators can contribute to these objectives is by making sure that students are not only taught the  fundamental math and science skills that they will need to develop the green technologies of the future, but also that they are inspired with the creativity and ingenuity that they will need to envision a different world.