If there is a God, she's surely bewildered by the apparent determination of the human race to ignore the deafening wake-up call she's recently sent our way.

As wake-up calls go, it's hard to beat the BP oil spill. The relentless gush of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for the past 85 days, captured live on camera, should be enough to finally force us to look critically at the deeply flawed concepts that have become the guiding ideologies of our times -- starting with unbridled capitalism, and its elevation of economic gain above the very sustainability of the Earth we inhabit.

Another dominant creed that cries out for rethinking is blind faith in technology and the human ability to solve any problem.

"Deep Spill 2" sounds like a sequel to a Hollywood thriller.

Unfortunately, it is more of a reality show. "Deep Spill 2" is the name of an ambitious series of proposed scientific experiments that should be happening right now. Scientists from around the globe are ready, literally, to dive in to understand what is happening with the oil and gas that are spewing into the Gulf of Mexico with the force of a volcano.

There is one problem, though: BP won't let them.

Writing in The Guardian on the Gulf spill as a "hole in the world," Naomi Klein says: "Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world. ... Calling the Earth ‘sacred' is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution." I'd like to extend this intriguing thought beyond smallish surviving cultures to most of the history of thought about the nature of the world and our place in it.

For those of us who live far away from the Gulf of Mexico, the oily videos and doomsaying headlines are getting to be a bit wearying and are drifting to the back of the news.

After all, we get stunned by the repetition after a while and in the end we can live with environ mental disaster as long as it hap pens elsewhere and as long as it doesn't really affect us. In this case, specifically as long as oil prices don't go up. So far so good, right?

Well, maybe not. Here's the other side of the story. Among the energy institutes, oil economists and other thinkers, the question is whether we have in fact come to the long-predicted tipping point with regard to oil production and prices.