[intro music, ocean sounds]
Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.
Where I live, come spring, we enjoy a special season of the year – mud season – a time when all the moisture, all the melt of ice and snow that has saturated the land, especially the roads, transforms solidarity into a terraqueous muck, land and water combined, neither in its proper form, but mixed, neither one nor the other, a superfluous layer of admixture into which boots sink, cars are stuck, and the functionality of land and water as distinct forms is compromised as unnatural and impassable.
Of course, the inter-relationship of land and water is central to biodiversity worldwide – the mudbanks where the crabs and clams hide, the layers of earth wherein live the worms and grubs and other sub-terranean creatures. Walking the land in other seasons, one may not be aware of the teeming life, the seeps of water, that wherein lie the basic life forms and systems that, when magnified, enable our gardens and fields, our ponds and streams, that amplify into the wetlands, rivers, and coastal connections that are so essential to our health, our economy, all aspects of our lives. Terraqueous is the basic condition of earth, manifested in many different forms, degrees and ecosystems services. Mud season is but an inconvenient passage along the way.
Understanding this symbiosis is key to every step toward sustainability of biodiversity and life. In each moment, in every place, some balance of the two parts must be maintained. To do so, however, requires us to have the knowledge, the science required to define actions, or to shape policy, to react to natural and man-made changes to our environment. When we deny, or cease inquiry, into these conditions, we choose to ignore reality, as if we have decided to live in mud season all year round.
Such things are easily evident on land. But the ocean has its counterpart, seemingly all aqueous, but mixed with many things from landside – streams of waste, plastic, poisons, debris, erosion, and other human detritus that is dumped into the sea to a point when, in some places, it too becomes a noxious muck in which we sink, and possibly drown.
It is easy enough to extend the dynamic condition to the human body. If flesh is land, and blood is water, we are our own admixture, our own terraqueous being. The maintenance of life, yours and mine, is a basic human aspiration. We punish those who take it from us. We fight the conditions of disease that corrupt and deny health and longevity. We grieve deeply when that life is lost. In some places these days, governments are declaring the sanctity of “personhood” of natural resources: sacred places, waterways, and cultural vestiges, recognized as collectively valuable to society as our own. Some nations have re-written constitutions, laws, re-built structures and institutions, to assert such value, adopting the idea of admixture as a natural, societal reality that should be reflected in our definition of best behavior.
Ofttimes, as I write the brief reflections, I get caught in the muck of metaphor. But as rhetorical device, metaphor is a tool for clarity, correspondence, and understanding. We see things we cannot see by seeing something else that we can, and the realization is instructive. Terraqueous is a condition, not exclusive to either of its parts, but an inclusive, complex, and familiar fact of the natural, and human world. We are both land and sea. Our mud seasons pass into the freshness of spring, the fullness of summer, the beauty of the autumn, and the austerity of winter – as life cycles for flora and fauna, including ourselves.
I revel in my two-part being. It pains me to see us deny such a basic fact of life. I despair as we take action to reverse what we know to be right, not for one interest or another, but for us all. I am angry when I see the outcomes measured in human loss and community disruption. Is this just another iteration of mud season? Are we stuck in a cycle of singularity, selfishness, and incivility? Or is this just a changing moment, and that spring will come, and natural balance will return?
We will disuss these issues and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
[outro music, ocean sounds]
ter·ra·que·ous
/terˈākwēəs/
adjective: consisting of land and water
