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"We have met the enemy, and he is us," said Pogo, Walt Kelly's immortal possum philosopher of the Okefenokee Swamp.

Those words, first inked in 1971, echo across the decades. Environmental disasters repeatedly drain Mother Earth of resources and vitality as 7 billion hungry offspring tug at her overextended breasts.

All fingers point toward the BP oil company, as a well drilled a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico gushes raw petroleum into waters that provide us with succulent seafood as they lap against sandy beaches drenched in sunshine for most of the year.

Twenty-one years ago, they pointed toward Exxon, as an oil tanker struck a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound and gushed 10.8 million gallons of oil into the marine environment.

Twenty-four years ago, the finger pointing was directed at the Soviet state as the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine blew its lid, partially melted down and spewed fallout over Europe. The accident has been blamed directly for up to 50 deaths and indirectly for as many as 4,000.

Thirty-one years ago, the target was Metropolitan Edison, owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear complex on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. The reactor core overheated, resulting in a partial meltdown, but no deaths.

Forty-one years ago, it was Union Oil, owner of an oil platform offshore from Santa Barbara, Calif. A blowout 3,500 feet below the surface released 200,000 gallons of crude. It stopped the blowholes of dolphins, killed seals, fish and birds and devastated 35 miles of coastline. The BP well is gushing that many gallons of oil into the Gulf each day. It not only is jeopardizing the fish and wildlife and the recreational facilities along the Gulf Coast; it is also endangering the marsh grass that holds together the islands and wetlands that form a fragile shield against hurricanes that buffet the New Orleans area.

BP is hoping a huge dome lowered by crane will contain the oil and allow it to be pumped, under control, to the surface. Meanwhile, it's trying to activate a faulty "blow-out preventer" that was supposed to stanch the bleeding as soon as things went wrong. On ABC's "This Week," BP chairman Lamar McKay compared the task to "doing open-heart surgery at 5,000 feet ... in the dark."

The disaster, like its malevolent predecessors, will pass. Human technology will somehow solve the immediate problem, and human resilience will enable a recovery of sorts.

Each time we experience a disaster of this proportion, we tend to tell ourselves that we've learned our lesson. But the fundamental lesson is not that we need to find ways of preventing oil wells on the ocean floor from blowing their tops; not that we need to find ways to prevent tankers from colliding with reefs; not that we need to prevent nuclear reactors from melting down.

The fundamental lesson is that we can't do without technology, and we can't make technology fool-proof.

The industrial world is trapped in a dependency on oil, and that dependency, for the time being, can be satisfied only by tapping hard-to-reach sources that threaten dire consequences to the environment. As Thomas Jefferson once said about slavery, "We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."

Nuclear power is one way of easing the dependency on petroleum, but it too poses incalculable dangers. One of the highlights of my career as a reporter was a series of articles I wrote during the '70s about defective welding in the core cooling system of a nuclear power plant across the James River from Williamsburg, Va. The welders had inadvertently used the wrong electrodes when they welded the stainless-steel pipes, and had welded them at the wrong temperatures. As a result, the welds were vulnerable to corrosion. If the cooling system were to suffer a massive failure and all the water were to drain from around the reactor, the equipment would have 12 seconds to replace it before the super-heated reactor began to melt down. If that happened, it could melt through any structure built to contain it, with disastrous consequences for the James River, the Chesapeake Bay, and the people along their shores.

I struggled with the challenge of putting the threat in perspective. Power company officials took me on a tour of a comparable plant and pointed out the elaborate system of redundancies designed to prevent a reactor meltdown. I was convinced that such a total failure was extremely unlikely. But if the extremely unlikely happened ...

Federal regulators required the company to repair as many of the welds as possible and to inspect the plant at three times the normal frequency. Nearly four decades later, it's still operating, and the million-plus inhabitants downstream, including the huge Hampton Roads naval and shipbuilding complex, have suffered no discernible ill effects.

But Three Mile Island and Chernobyl demonstrated that a "China" accident was not unimaginable. And the BP crisis demonstrates that nuclear plants are not the only dangerous sources of energy.

The earth, I am convinced, will survive this particular epoch of civilization, though I'm not sure in what form civilization itself will survive long-term ravages. Putting a dome over the gusher at the bottom of the Gulf may be the immediate answer for BP. But in the long run, it's a Band-Aid. In the long run, we've got to do something about us.

 Write to Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625. E-mail: Swampscum2@aol.com