(This is text from video. Watch the video.)

The live video feed from the fractured oil pipe a mile beneath the surface is allowing anyone with Internet access (currently more than 1.7 billion of us) to watch the plume of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. And, moreover, to watch live the various attempts to plug the leak. It has become, in the words of Associated Press, “an Internet sensation.” Thank you Obama for insisting that BP didn’t cut the video feed.

When I wrote The Global Brain, 30 years ago, I (and just about everyone else in the field) was imagining the embryonic Internet in terms of text and data processing. None of us foresaw the rich audio-visual medium it would become. Or that we, the neurons of the global brain, would be able to watch live as global catastrophes such as this unfold. Our eyes have become the eyes of Gaia, collectively observing our unfolding collective destiny.

And what, from a Gaian perspective, is this oil that threatens, not just the fishing business in Louisiana, but, far more importantly, the coral reefs and sea floor life that lie at the base of the ocean food chain?

Oil is but highly concentrated life. Dead forests from hundreds of millions of years ago, compressed by immense geological pressures into this hydrocarbon rich liquid that we prize so much for all the energy it contains. As Tom Hartmann points out in his book Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, it is, in the final analysis, energy captured by plants way back in the past.

To the energy of the trapped sunlight was then added the energy of the immense compression it underwent beneath the weight of continents. That compression changed the chemical nature of the vegetable remains. The hydrocarbons we prize so much are seldom found in nature. It took unimaginable pressure to force the chains of carbon atoms to be found throughout life on Earth into rings of carbon atoms. (Today we have taken this a step further, using intense pressures in the laboratory to create spheres of carbon atoms – so-called Buckyballs.)

These hydrocarbon rings don’t fit well with life back on the surface of Gaia. Being immiscible with water, they clog up the metabolic processes of most lifeforms. To us, liberated oil is pollution.

A few bacteria do like this dense nutrient-rich material. They live on the sea floor happily gobbling the trickle of oil that oozes through numerous cracks in the ocean bed, breaking down the carbon rings into more hospitable molecules. But they never evolved to cope with hundreds of thousands of barrels a day pouring out of a single vent.

Where will it end? No one knows. Eventually, microbes on the ocean floor will slowly break down the carbon rings, feeding them back into the food chain hundreds of million years after they were first formed. And life will, in time, cope with the dispersants that have been added to the mix (themselves a product of the oil industry.) In the long term, Gaia shows a remarkable resilience.

Meanwhile, the world watches with baited-breath, half mesmerized, half devastated – and perhaps just a tiny part glad that it may take such a catastrophe to bring this crazy bunch of monkeys to their senses.

Apple launched the mouse nearly thirty years ago as a way of pointing to places on a computer screen. It freed us from having to navigate by keyboard strokes. (Remember MS-DOS?) The mouse was the best that could be done back then. Now with the touch-screen capabilities of the iPhone, iPad, and similar devices, we don’t need mice anymore. We can use our fingers directly, and with much greater power.

It will not be long before laptops and desktops also have touch-screens. We will be interacting with our computers in the way we see in Avatar, manipulating the screen directly with our fingers. In five year’s time the mouse will be “so twentieth-century” we will come across them tucked away in boxes in the closet.

This is one reason I believe the iPad will spawn as great a breakthrough in computing as did the original Macintosh.

There are other predictions in the world which may not be so precise in terms of the date, but which also suggest we are facing major changes. In ancient India the Vedas talked about an age of Kali Yoga which lasts thousands of years and is dominated by greed, corruption and materialistic values. They say this age is coming to an end and we are entering an age called Sat Yoga, a golden age.

In North America the Hopi Indians talked about the coming of an end of an era, when there would be a great purification. Astrologers talk about the Age of Aquarius that we are entering into, a time when we learn to live in peace with each other and with the planet.

Many other people have had similar visions that we are moving into times of catastrophic change which will be accompanied by a great spiritual awakening and a shift to a wiser, more loving, more compassionate way of being, perhaps the emergence of a global consciousness.

Whether there will actually be momentous changes in 2012, or even on December 21st, 2012 remains to be seen. For me the exact date is not so important. I see 2012 as a symbol of a critical period in human history. The first two decades of the 21st century seem to be the time when this crisis is really coming to a head. In fact many environmentalists say that if we don’t change by 2020 we are going to be in deep trouble.

The year 2012 sits in the middle of this period. Rather than being a precise date at which major changes happen, I see it as the temporal epicenter of a cultural earthquake. No one actually knows what is going to happen in the coming years. There may be breakdowns in the systems, major social disruptions, perhaps even completely unexpected calamities. And at the same time there’s probably going to be breakthroughs, some positive transformations, people letting go of old attitudes ands beliefs. In reality its probably going to be both. All that we can probably say with certainty is that there is going to be a lot more change, and some of it totally unexpected.

People sometimes talk about the winds of change. I think we’re heading into a storm of change. The question is how can we prepare ourselves for this, how can we cope with an increasingly unpredictable world?

We can get some clues by looking at what helps a tree survive a storm. First, it needs strong roots, so it does not blow over. Similarly, we need to be able to remain stable so that we are not shaken by every unexpected change. If we loose our inner balance, if we react emotionally to everything that happens, we end up getting more stressed and more likely to burn out.

Second, like a tree we also need to be flexible. We need to be able to move with the flow of change. This means letting go of past assumptions. We need to learn to think more clearly, allow new ideas in, let deeper intuitions and feelings come to the surface.

And third, just as a tree is much better off if it is protected by other trees in the forest, so too we will be much better able to withstand change if we have a strong sense of community. We need to care for each, support each other in times of need. We need to develop greater care and compassion, to open our hearts to kindness, and have our vision guide us in these turbulent times.

See Also: A Singularity in Time