A vEDik TAKE ON BP GULF OIL SPILL OF SAY 35,000 TO 60,000 BARREL A DAY (guess estimate and nobody really knows) FOR 89 DAYS TO JULY 16, 2010 Left Photo: BP'S Deepwater Horizon rig in Gulf of Mexico prior to explosion Right Photo: AHTS and PS vessels combat the fire on the Deepwater Horizon while the United States Coast Guard searches for missing crew .....THE BP'S GULF OF MEXICO APRIL 2000 OIL SPILL AS IT HAPPENED OVERVIEW.... The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also referred to as the BP oil spill, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the BP oil disaster or the Macondo blowout) is a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that is the largest offshore spill in U.S. history.   Some estimates placed it by late May or early June 2010, as among the largest oil spills in history with hundreds of millions of gallons spilled to date. The spill stems from a sea floor oil gusher that resulted from the April 20, 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion. The explosion killed 11 platform workers and injured 17 others.    On July 15, 2010, BP said the leak had been stopped by capping the gushing oil wellhead, though there is a risk that a significant pressure shift could create a new leak on the sea floor. The drilling of relief wells to permanently close the well is ongoing.   The gusher was estimated by the quasi-official Flow Rate Technical Group to be flowing at 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of crude oil per day. For comparison, this is an amount equal to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill every four to seven days.   The exact flow rate is uncertain due to the difficulty of installing measurement devices at that depth and is a matter of ongoing debate. The resulting oil slick covers at least 2,500 square miles (6,500 km2), fluctuating from day to day depending on weather conditions.   Scientists have also reported immense underwater plumes of oil not visible at the surface. The spill continues to cause extensive damage to marine and wildlife habitats as well as the Gulf's fishing and tourism industries. There have been a variety of efforts to stem the flow at the wellhead. Crews have been working to protect hundreds of miles of beaches, wetlands and estuaries along the northern Gulf coast, using skimmer ships, floating containment booms, anchored barriers, and sand-filled barricades along shorelines. The U.S. Government has named BP as the responsible party, and officials have committed to hold the company accountable for all cleanup costs and other damage.......(You can continue reading the entire story at Wikipedia updated daily by clicking here....)   ......PVAF'S TAKE ON THIS NEWS STORY..... (contributed by PVAF Program Development volunteer Champaklal Dajibhai Mistry of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada since PVAF's natural birth in 1996) PVAF for the first time is publishing today's new story... although it has been the hot and headliner story for over 90 days to July 16, 2010 and still hitting the headlines around the world..... PVAF delayed publishing because PVAF was looking for a vEDik angle on this human-made calamity resulting from extracting natural resources for its sustenance and prosperity.....This mining of natural resources by humanity is humanity's natural life right ordained by God but has to be done with the rules and regulations of DHARm...But this oil-spill which is the largest in the currently known history of mankind on this planet earth and especially since 1850's when fossil oil replaced whale oil and started to become the driving economical commodity in western civilization's current growth to material prosperity. And oil need and greed has shown how much the current humanity lacks in living its daily life by the tenets of DHARm... Also when one looks at such man-made events.....a commercial giant like BP and other resource extractors have shown a regular trait to break the tenets of DHARm for its greed beyond normally acceptable profits in its economic and commercial activities..... PVAF was looking for a take on this oil spill calamity from a vEDik perspective and finally found one....from Dr. Aseem Sukla, MD  who is an Associate Professor in urologic surgery at the University of Minnesota medical school and is also a Co-founder and board member with a mandate of  "Promoting Understanding, Tolerance and Pluralism." under the auspices of   Hindu American Foundation   This sharing by Dr. Shukla who is American-born and American educated medical scholar is profound because it contains so much of basic concepts of  vEDik sciences  of life and creation....of course,  expressed to the limits of understanding and use of vEDik knowledge in the time-era called kli-yug the current humanity lives in......in kli-yug, as kli-yug progresses from its current 5012th year to its yug-completion after a total kli-yug duration of 432,000 years (in 428,988 AD)...the natural tendency of the majority of humanity will be  to live by progressively breaking more and more the rules of DHARm in daily life and also break the man-made laws at the first chance it gets in its materialistic life focus to create more and more wealth at any cost at an individual level.....  Please click on the next line to read Dr. Shukla on BP Gulf Oil Spill and also about Dr. Shukla himself to understand his writing.....PVAF invites more vEDik takes on the BP Gulf Oil Spill and you can share this on this AASHRAM NEWS by clicking the red button POST A COMMENT in the header of this news item and/or email your sharing for publication by clicking here....

BP'S GULF OIL SPILL FOR 89 DAYS TO JULY 16, 2010: ......A vEDik TAKE ON THE NATURAL LIFE KILLING HAPPENING..... A barometer of greatness? How a nation treats the vulnerable "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. - Mahatma Gandhi (From Washington Post: June 15, 2010: by Dr. Aseem Shukla) Dr. Aseem Sukla  Associate Professor in urologic surgery at the University of Minnesota medical school. Co-founder and board member of Hindu American Foundation at 5268G Nicholson Lane #164, Kensington, MD 20895 USA. Views expressed in the article below here are the personal views of Dr. Aseem Shukla, and do not necessarily represent those of the University of Minnesota or Hindu American Foundation. (PLEASE READ A DETAILED PROFILE ON Dr. Shukla at the end of this news story)  " Deer, camel, donkey, monkey, rats, creeping animals, birds and flies - one should consider them like one's own children, and not differentiate between one's children and these creatures."  (Bhagavata Purana 7.14.9) For anentheistic Hindus, who with many Dharma faiths and Pagan traditions worship Earth as a manifestation of the Mother Goddess, divinity is found within every part of nature just as it transcends an earthly realm. The suffering animals endure in our blind pursuit of black gold to support a craven addiction will bear the brunt of the consequences of karma. It is empirical that every action has an equal and opposite reaction; while today the shrimpers and oyster harvesters are enduring for our collective sins, we must know that all of us will be affected as the dominoes of suffering fall. Hindu iconography is replete with representations of animals and even trees and plants as infused with the divine (Lord Ganesha, famously endowed with an elephant head) or godly vehicles--Lord Vishnu's serpent, Ganesha's mouse or Shiva's bull. Hindu seers describe how the souls of seemingly insensate animals are very much on their own path to liberation, or moksha. The difference between the Dharma traditions view of animals and the Abrahamic perspective that man has dominion over animals and the earth is stark indeed. It is a logical consequence, then, that over 400 million of mostly Hindu India's billion declare themselves vegetarian according to a recent poll, and make up more vegetarians than the rest of the world combined. Amongst Dharma traditions, many Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs join Jains, whose unequivocal insistence on ahimsa, or non-violence, is absolute and doctrinally fundamental. Violence against animals is tantamount to harming one's self, as the Jain scripture Acaranga Sutra states:         - To do harm to others is to do harm to oneself.        - You are he whom you intend to kill. You are he whom you intend to dominate.        - We corrupt ourselves as soon as we intend to corrupt others.       - We kill ourselves as soon as we intend to kill others. Animals most certainly belie emotions. My own dog's eyes showed sad confusion recently when she lacerated her coat on a tree branch in our backyard, and I felt certain that I saw the same innocent perplexity in the face of the oil-coated pelican flashed across the news wires last week. To a Hindu, eating meat causes one to ingest and absorb the slaughtered creature's pain, suffering and terror before its death. Stop the cycle of accumulating negative karma, our scriptures tell us, and work we must to ameliorate not only the suffering of animals caused by the oil spill in the Gulf, but also species endangered by human assaults on habitats elsewhere. Exponents of Hinduism's heterodoxy will insist that many Hindus do eat meat, and abhorrent animal sacrifices continue in some Hindu temples in India. And just as I sacrificed animals as a pre-med student mapping neural pathways to understand the effects of a stroke years ago, I would not flinch prescribing chemotherapy drugs known to work because of the sacrifice of millions of mice, guinea pigs, rhesus monkeys and the like. We all have our personal heterodoxies/hypocrisies perhaps, but just as Hindus must call out and condemn the few temples among millions where retrograde animal sacrifices still occur, as scientists, we must redouble efforts to create suitable artificial substitutes for animal models and treat every laboratory animal humanely. Animals are integral to human life and we can exploit our trust with this kingdom only when our survival is at stake.   To many Indians living on rugged coastlines where subsistence fishing is the norm, for example, fish is considered vegetarian. But sacrificing animals for human comfort--eating a hamburger, hunting deer, fishing for walleye, wearing mink--most certainly begets a time of karmic reckoning. Hinduism's relationship with animals is predicated on mutuality and an essential equality that finds expression and common cause with animal welfare organizations. The Hindu American Foundation just completed an exposition of Hinduism's view of animals in partnership with the Humane Society emphasizing the core concepts raised here. Along with the promotion of pluralism in the public sphere, I firmly believe that ahimsa, in all its varied expressions, are essential contributions of Dharma traditions to our nation's spiritual legacy and ethos. Divine premonition, perhaps, but the same Puranas, a popular genre of Hindu scripture quoted in the excerpt above, also describe a mystical churning of the ocean of milk in the quest for the nectar of immortality. Devas, or benificent divine beings, formed an alliance with the asuras, those with demonic qualities, to commence the Samudra Manthan, or churning of said ocean. While the churning yielded the sought after nectar and many other treasures, it first yielded an overpowering poison that nearly consumed the nascent universe. Lord Shiva, this story that is widely celebrated in Hindu, Buddhist and East Asian art tells, captured the poison within his neck that then turned deep blue. So the churning of the Gulf has indeed yielded a sought after nectar, but the black gold gusher is poisoning all that it touches. So many weeks have gone without respite, and no Lord has appeared to ingest the poison and end this nightmare. And the casualty count of livelihoods, marshes, beaches and, yes, within the animal kingdom, relentlessly mounts. Humanity has proven itself imperfect stewards of creation, and the gulf disaster is simply an epic demonstration of our failures. But as other recent calamities--from 9/11 to Katrina--brought forth our essential goodness, nobility and brotherhood, our redemption in the gulf will be in the compassion and care we show for the seaborne creatures that are the innocent casualties of our latest folly. .....TO UNDERSTAND THE VIEWS IN THE ABOVE ARTICLE YOU NEED TO KNOW WHO DR. ASEEM SHUKLA IS..... (From: himalayanacademy.com)  Dr. Shukla was born in Stamford, Connecticut (U.S.A.) and grew up in New York before moving with his family to Gujarat, India for his primary education.   His family then relocated to Florida, where Dr. Shukla completed his education from middle school through medical school. He completed a residency in urological surgery at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa, Florida and has completed a pediatric urology fellowship at the renowned Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.   Awarded a grant by the National Institutes for Health, Dr. Shukla had completed a two-year commitment in basic science urological research at the University of Pennsylvania. As of July 1, 2004, Dr. Shukla assumed a position as Assistant Professor of Urological Surgery at the Mayo Clinic and University of Florida in Jacksonville, Florida.   He currently lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Suhag, who is an attorney, and two sons.  Dr. Shukla is committed to the provision of advanced pediatric urological care in India. He has performed extensive reconstructive surgery and delivered scientific lectures at the Christian Medical College-Vellore and in various forums in Ahmedabad, Gujarat (India) and is in the process of initiating infrastructure for annual visits.   Dr. Shukla believes deeply in the preservation of Vedic heritage. His family founded and administers the Amritam Trust Ved Pathshala at Sola Vidyapeeth near Ahmedabad.   Placing equal importance on the quest for the social empowerment of women, Dr. Shukla's family also founded and supports the Vardhman Gruhudyog Mahila Mandal in Surendranagar, India. Continuing this tradition in the United States, Dr. Shukla became actively involved in the promotion of Hindu dharma within American society: first as a camp counselor for the Shanti Niketan camps in Miami, Florida, then assisting in the coordination of the Hindu Students Council chapter at the University of Florida. He was a co-founder of the Bhagavad Gita Group of Tampa Bay during his years in surgical residency.   Dr. Shukla enjoys writing frequently and is a contributor to the online magazine, sulekha.com. His essays have been published in an anthology on the post-Godhra state of affairs in Gujarat. Dr. Shukla is-committed to fostering greater understanding of Sanatana Dharma and the cause of Hindu advocacy in the United States. Dr. Shukla is a member of the Board of Directors of the Hindu American Foundation. ......Hindu American Foundation for "Promoting Understanding, Tolerance and Pluralism." website can be visited by clicking on the hilited name...

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