An Exxon Valdez worth of oil may be spilling into the Gulf of Mexico every two days - time to get punk

Music video by The Clash performing Rock The Casbah.
(C) 1982 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT (UK) Limited

One report I read today estimates that an Exxon Valdez worth of oil [1] may be spilling into the Gulf of Mexico every two days, 50 miles off the shores of Louisiana [2], in what is in my mind the worst environmental catastrophe (besides war) in human history - and that may continue for months (no end in sight, at all). All happening 2 miles under some of the most treacherous seas in the world - I've known deep rig divers to confirm that - and they don't even know what caused this blowout. Bottom line, a huge area of the Gulf of Mexico and its shorelines are now probably dead for our lifetimes and generations to come, if not forever. Where the oil will invade beyond is to be determined by Mother Nature, in response. Man shook the Etch-a-sketch of the environment [3] for eternity in an area spanning many states and international boundaries... ending the global sustainability movement forever.

It's 1969 all over again... America's rivers are burning... time for the punks to take charge!

To me this oil spill is just a flashback - I've lived this before - I grew up in toxic hell Cleveland, in toxic hell America of the Industrial 1960s and 1970s, and our mutant response was to become punk. We created punk rock and punk culture - exposing decay and being decayed with our songs, our attitudes, our lifestyles, and our ideologies. Many of us have died - some sold-out - most I believe have kept expressing our anti-authoritarian ideologies.

As such, many of the world's great environmentalists and  environmentalist statements have been punk, expressing the toxic reality of our sick world through bands like Rocket From The Tombs, Dead Boys, Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu and the Clash - they sang of toxic mutation as we saw it happening, in worlds of flaring factories and belching industrial blight, in places so sick water burned.

Sort of like the Gulf of Mexico today, around 40 years later.

Seems Americans have spent too much time drunk in Margaritaville and not enough time rocking the Casbah.

Punk songs and lives have shaken up the world and been raising ultimate social awareness ever since the early 1970s - kept culture uncomfortable and at edge - made more enemies than friends - as environmentalists must. That has kept at least some of the population on alert for situations like these, when the world tumbles out of its Bon Jovi zone and into the oblivion where it seems we punks are most at home.... surrounded by burning rivers and global conflict not known as war, all for nothing.

Time to listen to the punks again - we've grown up and control more of the world than folks think - and we are still as blunt, loud and right as ever.

The Dead Boys were one of the first punk bands to escalate the level of violence, nihilism, and pure ugliness of punk rock to extreme new levels. Although considered part of New York's mid-'70s CBGB's scene, all of its bandmembers originally hailed from Cleveland, OH. The group's roots lay in the early-'70s Cleveland cult band Rocket from the Tombs, which included future Dead Boys Cheetah Chrome (aka Gene O'Connor) on guitar, and Johnny Blitz (aka John Madansky) on drums, along with future Pere Ubu members David Thomas and Peter Laughner. The group's sound was a bit too comparable to art rock for Chrome and Blitz's tastes (whose influences included the Stooges, Alice Cooper, and the New York Dolls), and by 1975, Rocket from the Tombs had split up.

Punk rock [4] is a rock music [5] genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Rooted in garage rock [6] and other forms of what is now known as protopunk [7] music, punk rock bands eschewed the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock. They created fast, hard-edged music, typically with short songs, stripped-down instrumentation, and often political, anti-establishment [8] lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY [9] (do it yourself) ethic, with many bands self-producing their recordings and distributing them through informal channels.

By late 1976, bands such as the Ramones [10], in New York City, and the Sex Pistols [11] and The Clash [12], in London, were recognized as the vanguard of a new musical movement. The following year saw punk rock spreading around the world. Punk quickly, though briefly, became a major cultural phenomenon in the United Kingdom. For the most part, punk took root in local scenes that tended to reject association with the mainstream. An associated punk subculture [13] emerged, expressing youthful rebellion and characterized by distinctive styles of clothing and adornment [14] and a variety of anti-authoritarian ideologies [15].

When I think of the revolutionaries for environmentalism in the world, they are a small slice of society.