A year ago today. Depending on who you ask it seems like either a few days ago or in some deep, dark past. The Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig disaster continues to reverberate throughout the region in the gulf of Mexico a year after it happened. Listening to these newscasts which begin during the early morning hours of the 21st of April last year and continue to the 25th where the true nature of the disaster began to become apparent, the thing that sticks out is the rush to deny that anything serious was actually taking place. Call it the "fog of war" or "fog of smokescreen", the overwhelming desire to put a lid on what quickly raced out of control into a catastrophic disaster seems to be a running reaction, or perhaps it's just human nature to look the other way. More recently, we're experiencing a similar situation with the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster in Japan. The rush to deny anything is wrong, the overwhelming desire to placate the public. To pretend.

Strangely, Fukushima is slipping back further and further from our collective psyche, even though it's still very much unfolding. Just as the Deepwater Horizon disaster has faded from our collective psyche, unless if you live in the affected region, you probably can't think back a year ago and remember how glued you were to the news, hanging on every report, hearing every conflicting assessment.

The frames of reference are there, not to turn us into walking paranoiacs, but to give us perspective and a reason to question the wisdom of deep-water drilling or putting a nuclear power plant on an active fault line.

Shit happens, but it doesn't always have to.