:: May 2006 Volume 5/Number 3

Ecology Section:
Off the Mat, Onto the Road
Will Bike Trains make their way to School?
It could happen here.

By Julie Deife

The ocean displays to us a dismissive, inscrutable exterior, all motion and mood, all mask and disguise, seemingly rolling on as always, the extent of her wrinkles never varying over time. But don’t underestimate her. Because 99 percent of Earth’s living space is in the seas, this planet would likely bear abundant life if no land existed. But without an ocean, this planet would merely spin unnamed, three orbits from a star, its browned-out face its own sterile moonscape. How do we begin to acknowledge a debt of such magnitude?

Photo: eyefathom.com

Whether we can see, hear, or feel the ocean, the ocean certainly feels us. About a third of humanity now lives within fifty miles of a coast. Gravity takes the by-products of human enterprise to the water’s edge and beyond.

Even air quality affects water quality, because what goes up alights elsewhere, as the mercury from power plants that comes to the plate in your salmon. Coral reefs worldwide are struggling, polar ice systems melting, and billions of animals feel it. Most of us exert our most direct interaction with the sea through the fish we buy, and fisheries strain the ocean to satisfy the human appetite. The collective weight of humanity may rest on land, but we levy heavy pressure on the sea.

Of course, we also inflict disregard upon the land, but we consider the sea even further outside of us, rather than seeing ourselves within the ocean’s life-sustaining envelope of breathable atmosphere and stabilized temperature. Even many of us who maintain a nature ethic don’t give the sea much thought. We don’t consider what we do to “the oceans” the same as what we do to our families, our communities. We act like the ocean is merely a source of materials and a sink, largely because we lack an ethical framework encouraging us to see otherwise.

An ethic is not a strategy or a prescription or remedy. An ethic is a concept of relationship - one we wish to acknowledge or seek to forge. For example, one ethic, embodied in the U.S. Constitution, is that all people are created equal, endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights. None of this is strictly true - people differ, and rights are won, not endowed. But this ethical conceptualization of what it should mean to be human provides a moral compass pointing the way toward a truly great nation, striving for dignity and the fulfillment of human potential, with indefinite room for improvement toward that equal-rights ideal.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the same wilderness continent that gave thinkers enough breathing room to articulate such lofty aspiration for a new society also spawned the generosity of spirit embodied by such nature-inspired souls as Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold.

Aldo Leopold, a visionary forester, ended his classic 1949 book A Sand County Almanac with a famous call to extend our sense of community beyond humanity to encompass the whole living landscape. He called this extension of community “The Land Ethic” - a revolutionary idea at the time that has since become the implicit core of environmental thinking.

Leopold’s “Land Ethic” articulated a much bigger idea than the land that covers less than a third of Earth’s surface. It was really recognition that what he called his “search for a durable scale of values” led to inclusion, compassion, stewardship.

This ethic’s most fundamental corollary is its implication for right and wrong. An action is right, Leopold advised, when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of a living community and wrong when it tends otherwise. Rightness is reckoned in terms of safeguarding the present and preserving future options - not just for people, but for the living world that forms humanity’s crucible, context and endowment.

Leopold seemed to land-lock his great idea by its title. From Leopold’s Wisconsin farm, oceans lay distant, out of sight and generally out of mind, as for most people. Even for many nature lovers, oceans seem distant, vague. And for most people living near the California coast, the ocean is just “the beach,” not the realm that spreads in three dimensions for thousands of miles beyond the breaking surf. It now seems desirable that we should extend our sense of community below high tide - complementing the Land Ethic with a “Sea Ethic” - including all life on Earth in our concept of community.

Were it not for the fact that we are such visual creatures, our sense of community with the ocean should be easier and more intuitive to grasp than even our sense of the land, because our connection with the sea is more intimate. Most of the oxygen we breathe is made by ocean plankton. And when animals left the seas in which life arose, they took saltwater with them, in their bodies - an internal environment crucial for cellular survival. We are, in a sense, soft vessels of seawater. Seventy percent of our bodies is water, the same percentage that covers Earth’s surface. We are wrapped around an ocean within.

But the ocean does differ from land, mainly by its fluidity. The same fluidity that generates so much metaphor about life and time also closes the ocean’s skin instantly to hide the tracks of vessels and the scars inflicted by humanity. Yet this very same fluidity that makes the ocean look untrammeled actually smears and spreads the geographic footprint of people - our contaminants, trash, and alien species, the climate consequences of our combustion, and the largest commercial hunting of wildlife on Earth, which has already taken, on global average, 90 percent of the populations of big fishes. The ocean may be uncolonized by people, but it is hardly untrammeled wilderness.

The realms we call aesthetic, spiritual, climatological, nutritional and ethical interlock to form what we call the quality of life - which we can define as the proximity of the real to the ideal. The wealth of oceans spans these realms. Recognizing the ocean’s importance to life and to human futures would engender a sense of moral engagement. It would mean showing and sharing our sense of connectedness, dependence, gratitude and commitment to the sea, whose gifts include making this planet capable of supporting Life itself.

This is the first part of a speech Carl Safina delivered before the Unitarian Universality Church of Huntington, N.Y. on March 20, 2005. To read the rest of the talk, go to
http://www.blue ocean.org/writings/floating _ark.pdf.

This version was edited for LA YOGA Ayurveda and Health with the permission of Dr. Carl Safina.

Carl Safina is co-founder and president of Blue Ocean Institute. Blue Ocean works to inspire a closer relationship with the sea through science, art and literature. Visit Blue Ocean Institute at www.blueocean.org or email info@blueocean.org to join their email news list.

 

 

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