[intro music, ocean sounds]
Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory.
At the center of the climate crisis lies carbon, the excess of which, derived from the massive extraction and burning of fossil fuels ,explains the change in atmosphere and ocean with all the negative consequences and prospective impacts on the way we live. The debate over the reality of climate change seems over; there is no place on land or sea now immune from carbon saturation and the concomitant effect of extreme weather, drought and fire, erosion and flooding, water and public health, agriculture, financial impact, social mobility and disruption, and confusion about what to do, when, how, and to what affect.
Carbon is the culprit -- too much of it, and, to support our existing life-styles, not enough. Across my virtual desk pass hundreds of alarums, plans, and technologies designed to respond. One such is carbon sequestration, methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and from the ocean, to capture and store using machines, natural processes, speculative investment – all new, risky, expensive, unproven, and desperate. The complexity of the suggestions seems equal to the complexity of the problem. But there is no certainty in any of it, no assurance that it will work or fail or just exacerbate the problem.
On such idea proposes to use organic compounds to remove carbon from sea-water using sunlight to drive a chemical reaction to release CO2 to be stored in geologic formations or used by industry, the sequestered carbon value sold as a carbon credit and the excess electrical energy sold back into the grid as an alternative to fossil fuels. The cycle makes sense, until you look for truth in the details: the cost of changeover, infrastructure, insufficient scale, and the contradiction that the credits are purchased typically by energy companies or investors enabled thereby to perpetuate the problem by producing more carbon into a never-ending cycle of contradiction. Good people are thinking these things up, and good money is being tentatively invested, albeit not enough to bring anything to scale.
All the intellect and invention seem so complicated at every level: the technology, the policy, the implementation, the regulation, the upscaling to effective impact, and the political climate and social reaction for or against. Complexity breeds complexity: is there no simple answer?
All this ignores two important realities: the first is that the best way to stop pollution is to stop it at the source; that is, to understand that any technology that masks and perpetuates the problem is not a solution even close to the second reality, the eradication of the source by an existing alternative technology that solves the problem through change. We seem incapable of simply saying yes to alternatives that by their adoption would simply say no to the original problem. The failure of the energy companies to foresee and drive this change from within baffles me, as the transition executed from within the industry would have sustained corporate growth and retained all the new investment and future profits to themselves. This lack of foresight, this fear of change, and this lack of imagination and invention, hallmarks of American ingenuity, was, and remains, sad and appalling.
There is in Nature the power to adapt and to heal and to maintain. The ocean is a prime example – where complex dynamics of light and movement, constantly changing, are allocated toward sustainability and survival. As we study the ocean, we find amazingly complex entities and systems that are interdependent and self-supporting, a simple outcome in a very complicated space. We can feel that natural stability ourselves, when we walk the beach, sit by the lake and river, where we can sense that condition ourselves, in the quiet, in the storm, an explanation and equation that balance our observations and feelings. In a place so complicated, simplicity holds it all together, immutable, unchangeable, soothing, nurturing, enduring.
Our tendency to complexify things, systematize things, does not have to guide our way forward. Only simplify, the philosopher says; reduce things to their essentials and choose those that remove the cause of crisis and apply imagination and energy to new forms of simple things that matter, the simple things that sustain life, not reduce it to a complex of rubble, waste, and war.
Question complexity. Embrace simplicity. Oppose authority. Sustain Nature. Immerse in the ocean. Be at peace in the swim.
Recently, it was pointed out to me that my thoughts about these things resemble a new social science concept called “ecopsychology,” a view of the world solely as relationship between systems, an interconnection that accepts our belonging, not our dominance over Nature, an interdependence between natural elements and human values, structures, and behaviors. When I write over and over again, “the sea connects all things,” it may be that I am simply an unaware, practicing ecopsychologist. We’ll see. It is all so complicated.
We will discuss these things, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
[outro music, ocean sounds]
