How I See the Oceans Now
Oh, the turbulent seas! Immense spinning gyres of plastic detritus; roiling tides of chemical pollutants; carbon dioxide acidifying the oceans; plummeting fish populations. I admit, it sounds a bit grim. But here's the simple truth: whatever we dump into the ocean stays in the ocean. A seemingly obvious concept, until you examine its implications. Throughout the entire stretch of human history, that sense of limitation never arose even as a flicker of a thought. The sea, we believed, was nothing if not infinite in its bounty and mystery. As a corollary, whatever was removed from the sea would simply be replenished. (Evidence to the contrary began to emerge rather recently; one study calculates that we have depleted up to a third of the world's fisheries.)
Staggeringly apparent is that twenty-first-century humankind must adopt nothing less than an entirely new vision of the seas. Until now, we have been misled by the resilience of the ocean: it seemed always able to absorb our thoughtlessness into its churning amplitude. But we need to relinquish this antiquated myth and instead view the ocean as finite, limited, circumscribed -- quite the opposite of how we viscerally experience it as we stand on its shores looking outward to a vanishing horizon, or as we voyage from one distant land mass to another.
We asked Julia Whitty, the talented author of Deep Blue Home, to explore this important new paradigm for us. And she does so, beautifully, in our cover story, "The End of a Myth." She writes, "Only of late have we learned to see the ocean's surprising vulnerabilities. That it's the beleaguered terminus of all our downstream pollutants, part of a dynamic system intensely interactive with land and atmosphere and everything we do there. Only in the past decade has science discovered the ocean to be fragile in the way only really enormous things are fragile: with resilience teetering on the brink of collapse. Yet our behavior lags far behind our understanding, and the ocean awaits our enlightened action."
In an enlightened society, every video screen and billboard would blare this urgent message in a massive public-information campaign: SAVE OUR SEAS! But, hey, it hasn't happened for climate change, has it? Perhaps, though, the plight of the oceans will provoke a different response as more and more folks go down to the shore and find their favorite beach is closed because petroleum tar balls have washed up onto it; or raw sewage has overflowed into it after a heavy rain; or dangerous algal blooms ("red tides") have made swimming dangerous. Or perhaps the delicious fish they and their grandparents and grandparents' parents have always enjoyed are no longer available to them. Yes, the ocean awaits our enlightened action, and we hope Whitty's gorgeous essay helps begin an important conversation. Discuss, e-mail, tweet her article. Tell your fellow Earthlings that the time has arrived.
