How oil has seeped deep into our lives
If you want to make a statement about the gushing oil in the Gulf of Mexico, should you still wash your hair, put on lipstick, and take aspirin?
Should you also wear flip-flops, use scotch tape, and paint the living room?
Those items are much more connected to the BP catastrophe than they might seem. Every day a tsunami of petroleum goes into myriad consumer products, including those listed above, and it’s all but impossible to avoid them.
The petrochemical industry started to saturate our lives in the 1950s and ’60s. Plastics were its steroid, its killer app.
While my generation was blithely twisting to Chubby Checker, industry was inserting petroleum-based chemicals and byproducts into everything imaginable…
Read the original article at philly
