[intro music, ocean sounds]
Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory.
I am often asked to describe the purpose of the World Ocean Observatory, to articulate a credo, a statement of beliefs by which to guide our actions. In response, here is a list of intentions:
• To change the way we see the world;
• To focus perspective and motivation beyond self to others, beyond consumption to conservation, beyond conflict to civility, beyond denial and intolerance to acknowledgement and engagement;
• To celebrate the continuum of water, from fresh to salt, from the mountain-top to the abyssal plain, as locus of and process for a new system of values, structures, and behaviors;
• To promote the connections between the ocean and human health, food, energy, security, community, and culture as a dynamic system uniting land and sea;
• To extend knowledge to action through the promotion of science, policy, education and communication as a mean for global unification and peace;
• To build a circle of Citizen of the Ocean worldwide as a constituency for political will and social change;
• To advance a vision of a new hydraulic society as a response to the existential challenge of climate change and as a transformational model for human relation and endeavor united and sustained by water;
• To articulate a plan by which to relate the asset value of the ocean to global finance, law, governance, cooperation, equity, and justice as an evolutionary process toward a viable, benevolent, enduring society;
• To shift public understanding and engagement to support of such a plan for the near and long-term benefit of future generations, indeed for all mankind;
• To advance the conservation and sustainability of oceanic systems as the best methodology for and political response to our critical need for transformational change;
• To embrace water, the most essential natural resource on earth, as the primary force for the future of our selves, families, communities, and nation states, for the continuity of human enterprise, creativity, and survival.
I am often asked, “What can I do?” There is a suggestion of hopelessness in the question, as if the problems are so large and an individual’s ability to act effectively so small as to paralyze any possibility of successful engagement. My answer is: pick one.
P ick one thing that you think should and can be done, within your place and your capacity, and pursue it with relentless intensity using any all means available. You see such determination around us often, one person on a mission to create, organize, finance, pursue what may seem an impossible goal, yet achieved one way or another as an outcome, a realization of intent that drives change for the better.
The World Ocean Observatory goals may seem too ambitious, too grandiose to be possible. I argue not. The fact is that the information required to achieve incremental progress is readily available; the technology via radio, podcast, and social media offers economical, efficient, and effective means to amplify any message, virtually unlimited broadcast that can, and does, reach measurably millions worldwide through audio, video, and other platforms for messaging and connection that transmit ideas and stimulates connections heretofore impossible, now real, often with enthusiastic reply and endorsement -- a link one to one that adds up to millions.
We are so privileged to have such an opportunity: to express our views freely and with effect. We vote: an equally powerful collective act of intention. We meet to combine, and apply our ideas, toward goals local and abroad. We come together to organize an event, to support an institution, to share our aspirations through collective engagement and responsibility. We make change, however incremental, however impossible at first it may seem.
Pick one thing.
World Ocean Observatory is my choice. A credo? A plan of action? To change the way we see the world? Why not? To embrace water, the most essential natural resource on earth, as the primary force for the future of our selves, families, communities, and nation states, for the continuity of human enterprise, creativity, and survival? Why not? The connection we know and feel in this moment through airwaves and Internet as a means to share ideas and innovations worldwide? Why not?
Why not indeed. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being a Citizen of the Ocean.
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
[outro music, ocean sounds]
