Hands Across the Sand is a grassroots phenomenon the likes of which we have not seen since the first Earth Day in April, 1970. Last Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people came to beaches, lakes and bridges across the planet (see videos below) to join hands together all because one man decided to draw a line in the sand to put a stop to drilling off Florida’s coast. Dave Rauschkolb, creator of Hands is a surfer and restaurant owner in the panhandle town of Seaside, Florida. He is a businessman, not the classic definition of “environmentalist”. And that is a basis of the story that has launched this mass awakening.
The first Hands event took place on a cold day in February, before the start of the Florida legislative session. The goal of the 3,000 people that showed up in Pinellas and the 10,000 on 80 Florida beaches was to stop Florida’s lawmakers from making a very big mistake by allowing drilling within 3-12 miles of our shores. Now, we are living in the miasma of the ‘worst that can happen’. Oil and dangerous gasses gush from the sea floor every moment — as we go about our daily lives, as we joined hands on Saturday, and as I write this. BP failed to live up to its contract of safety. MMS failed to enforce that contract. Our government does not have the know-how to stop the gusher, the oil industry seems unable to stop it, and the “clean-up” is fraught with dangerous dispersants with unknown toxic effect. We have poked and prodded and disregarded the Earth that nurtures and feeds us. We have burned and consumed and destroyed — most, not from malice, but from a “necessity” that was created by money and power.
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2010.