^{U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Polly Bennett.}

It's been 101 days since April 20, 2010, the day the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded and the Macondo well began gushing oil into the water. After 100 days, where are we?

We're in the middle of the beginning, I think. Sure,hen the oil stopped flowing into the Gulf on July 15, that was a kind of end. If and when BP is actually able to stop the well completely, whether with a relief well or through the procedure they'll try this weekend, the static kill, that, too, will be a kind of end.

What worries me most is that the public, whose attention is already drifting (Chelsea Clinton's getting married!), will see the permanent closure of the well as the official end of the need to worry. TV crews will pack up their cameras and go back to their comfy studios, leaving BP even less observed than it was before.

Remember Haiti? Six months after the earthquake, only 28,000 -- that's not quite 2 percent -- of the 1.5 million people left homeless had found new homes. Yet when was the last time you heard about it on the news? When was the last time you thought about it?

People have amazing capacities to focus on catastrophes while they're still happening, but we have equally amazing capacities to forget things or underestimate the urgency of something that's a long-term emergency.

There's still plenty to be worried about in the Gulf, and in some ways, the worst is probably yet to come. Those who made their livelihood in the water face many difficult hurdles before they can resume anything like a normal life. One of them -- discussed at FireDogLake -- is the underfunding of BP's assistance fund. The other will most likely be the swift turn of public attention away from the problems of the Gulf and on to other "breaking news." Without outside assistance, which is often born from outside attention, the people of the Gulf have an extremely long and undoubtedly ugly recovery process ahead, only a few years after the country neatly turned its head from the aftermath of Katrina.

The moratorium on new drilling will continue through November, at least, but already I'm afraid that the oil spill isn't going to get the billing it deserves when the country talks about our energy policy. Never mind that just this week, there was another offshore spill, or that Michigan is feeling the burn of a pipeline leak, a disaster that might be visited upon any number of states at any given time. The complex issue of where and how to drill for oil isn't as easy as "stop all drilling" or "drill, baby, drill." The moratorium does have extremely adverse effects on the economy of the Gulf Coast states, but to continue in the manner we have been has dire effects for our climate and the Gulf ecosystem. Yet the minute this discussion falls off of television, out of our newspapers, and off of our daily RSS feeds, I'm guessing that we'll simply be at status-quo plus -- a bit more regulation, but only a bit. No serious change of thought or approach. No serious change, whatsoever.

That's the real tragedy of the Gulf spill, 101 days in. I have no confidence that this world-altering environmental event will do anything to really alter the carbon-sucking world we've created.