The pelicans sit on their nests in the picture on the left along with other shore birds seemingly oblivious to the orange containment boom behind them. The pelicans are doing what their instincts and nature have co-evolved as a survival game plan over milliuons of years. It's been a successful plan for these shore birds so far but it looks like the jig is up for most of them.This could be a useful metaphor for humans. We too sit wrapped in our security blanket seemingly oblivious to the ecological destruction just beyond our immedite attention. We've served and been served by our paradigm of 'more' for thoousands of generations and, like the pelicans, have become glued to our worldview. The pelicans have the ability to fly away and live to have more eggs in a better place one day but instead sit on their nests trapped by a net woven of their past success and their inability to forsee the logical outcome of the events surrounding them.
The forces of ecological and enviromental destruction caused by human consumption encircle us just as the oil slick encircles the pelicans. We deny the obvious because it suits our immediate wants, our short term convienence and comfort and because it's worked to do this in the past. Both the pelicans and the humans are blind to the outcome of their short-term success.
