Oil Derricks Feeding Cows?

Last night I dreamed that I was at the farm where my grandfather used to raise cattle. I looked out across the rolling hills and instead of beautiful, lush grass saw a monstrous tank filled with blue-black fluid being filled by a pumping derrick. There was a lone steer standing at the huge tank drinking and drinking and drinking. The landscape lay in ruins, the ground blackened. The other cows were standing huddled in a mass of despair.

I thought the cows were being fed antibiotics and growth hormones, which is a practice many farmers use to make their cows grow faster or produce more milk. I was sobbing at the fate of our children who eat beef or drink milk contaminated with these products.

It wasn’t until I awoke and was trying to understand the dream that I remembered the oil derrick device pumping fluid from the ground (oil) into the container. What was my subconscious trying to work out?

Whenever I have a dream so profound in symbolism I pay attention and use it to bring awareness to my waking consciousness. I know that at times I feel despair about the kind of place we are leaving our children and their children’s children. It seems collectively we have a need to go faster, grow faster and produce more and more no matter what the cost. Fatter, bigger cows who produce more milk….fatter oil executives–BP had a $6 BILLION profit in the first 3 months of this year.

What if we allowed cows to grow at the natural rate that eating delicious grass would promote? What if we stopped new explorations for offshore drilling? It only accounts for 12% of the oil we use anyway. What if we slowed down to 55 or 60 mph–I’m doing it and have increased my gas mileage on the highway from 26 to 31 mpg. There are many proven ways to increase efficiency in fossil fuel use. We have to discipline ourselves to put them into practice. And perhaps if we got serious about implementing them we wouldn’t have to take the environmental risk of more offshore oil drilling….and I wouldn’t be dreaming about cows feeding from oil derricks.