World Ocean Radio - Reflections
This week marks the 750th episode of World Ocean Radio: 15 years of weekly short audio that reaches millions around the globe, sharing concepts, demands, and solutions related to ocean technology and science, policy, examples of best practice, personal reflections, and solutions for how the ocean connects, sustains, inspires, and engages us in common history, traditions, sustenance, communication, community, and well-being. Thank you for listening!
W2O is an example of a contrarian vector discussed this week by World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill: an improbable concept from the beginning, a project that pursues the opposite of what is established, especially as strategies and solutions relate to ocean systems and health. This week contrarianism and contrarians are celebrated as inventors, revolutionaries, sometimes convention-breakers, sometimes adamant actors standing against an established way of being.
This week on World Ocean Radio, host Peter Neill reflects on the importance of water in our lives, our culture, our memories, our very being. Water, he argues, is the essence of home, and the grace and gift of knowing it’s there for our return.
Discovery of a curriculum developed for coastal Africa some years ago sent World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill on a journey of discovery and revelation about salt as a construct to be observed, understood, and taught. A western scientific perspective might teach students about salt from a chemistry-led lesson, whereas the African curriculum taught salt as serving a role in the enhancement of and as means to preserve food, the harvesting for work, as way of life, and as financial support by its production and harvest. This latter perspective is not first and foremost chemistry-led but community-focused, with methods of teaching and learning through the wisdom of Nature. What might we learn by diving in to teaching and learning a different way?
ter·ra·que·ous
/terˈākwēəs/
Adjective: consisting of land and water
Mud season: a special time of year in the northeastern corner of the United States, when winter and spring collide in a soggy muck: the rains come, ice and snow melts, saturating the land, creating a terraqueous mess for cars and boots. This week on World Ocean Radio, in celebration of World Water Day, we're applying the metaphor of "mud season" to fresh water and ocean systems, to climate and biodiversity, to the human condition, to community--all the cycles and systems that rely on the balance of nature.
KNOT: a word with many definitions: from a tight constriction to something hard to solve; a cluster of persons or things; an ornamental ribbon; a closed curve in three dimensional space. And of course, the word comes back to the ocean: is not the ocean a dynamic of knots: entangled and integral, inter-placed with ornamental flexible bodies, comprised of the ties that bind.
At the Fishhouses, is among our favorite poems here at World Ocean Observatory. In its richly-detailed mastery, it distills Bishop’s seaside meditations, evokes the clarity of meaning contained in personal encounters at the shore and with the ocean, and holds the reader and the listener in the space that lies between land and sea, a site of transience, mystery, and the sublime. It is a seasonal favorite for those of us that dwell at the water's edge. Happy New Year from World Ocean Radio and World Ocean Observatory.
This week on World Ocean Radio we are correlating relationships and connections east to west, Pacific to Atlantic, from weather to communications, from financial exchange to treaties, from defensive and offensive events in the world toward connections and perspectives, new imaginings and change for a new, sustainable future. The sea connects all things.
At each year's end, World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill reads "At The Fishhouses" by Elizabeth Bishop. This poem, a perennial favorite, was chosen not only for its relevance for the New Year, but also because it distills years of Bishop's seaside meditations and evokes the clarity of meaning contained in personal encounters with the world ocean.
This week on World Ocean Radio, part two of a two-part Thanksgiving special. In this episode we discuss the ways we can give back to the land and the sea that provide so much. What if we accept the obligation to give back in an exchange that sustains Nature, through our behaviors and our patterns of consumption?
Where we live in the northeastern United States, we are celebrating the holiday of Thanksgiving. In that spirit, what can we do to show our gratitude? What if we accept such reciprocal relationships with Nature as our obligation and our contribution to the public good? Let's all give thanks for the sustainability the ocean provides.
This week on World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill talks about the power of storytelling and the vast catalog of tales of adventure, sailors, song, battle, Captain's logs, letters home, and more that tell the stories of our ocean culture and civilization.
This week on World Ocean Radio we are broadcasting an early episode in which we look to the night sky, to ponder the wonder contained therein, and to explore the danger of polluting it forever in the name of modern navigation and instant communications worldwide.
This week on World Ocean Radio we lay the groundwork for a new and upcoming multi-part series--RESCUE--outlining a new plan for the ocean and a new perspective to enable a new set of actions: from the smallest to the largest solutions and inventions, to radical methods and policy changes for a sustainable future.
Our annual gift to World Ocean Radio listeners. In this episode, host Peter Neill reads "At the Fishhouses" by Elizabeth Bishop, a poem from 1955 that distills Bishop's seaside meditations and evokes the clarity of meaning contained in personal encounters with the ocean. A favorite of ours, with profound relevance for the New Year. Please enjoy.
This week on World Ocean Radio we have a special seasonal reading of "Christmas at Sea", an evocative poem by Robert Louis Stevenson written in 1883. Stevenson, the son of a lighthouse engineer, had intimate knowledge of extreme weather, storms, and especially nor'westers. Merry Christmas to all from the World Ocean Observatory.
This week on World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill reflects on a recent trip to Egypt, a dry desert land in the heart of Africa, the civilizations of which are clustered along the Nile, the longest river in the world. The desertification on display there offers clues to universal threats and our climate future: freshwater disruption, loss of land and wetland, urbanization, saltwater intrusion, and rising temperatures.
This summer we are revisiting some of our favorite World Ocean Radio episodes that highlight optimism for the ocean. In this episode, host Peter Neill discusses a recent full-moon rise he witnessed from an island perch in Maine. The silent, stealth-like way that it rose in the sky got him ruminating about water, tide, sun, current, power, light, nature, human emotion, and the often under-appreciated, surreal force of the moon.
This week on World Ocean Radio: reflections on the morality of nature and the ocean. How do we change the consequences of our actions, and take responsibility for what we have done to create the world we find ourselves in? Is it time for a bit of moral neutrality to return to a more accommodating, natural state?
In this episode of World Ocean Radio we take listeners to the shore, to be reminded of the importance of silence, solitude and renewal in our lives, and of the healing power of the ocean--or water in any form--that is there for us, if and when we choose to stop and listen.
This week on World Ocean Radio we're looking to the night sky, to ponder the wonder contained therein, and to explore the danger of polluting it forever in the name of modern navigation and instant communications worldwide.
This week on World Ocean Radio we reflect on "blue" and the profound stages of meaning beyond the color of the sea and sky to encompass depth, stability, wisdom, faith, truth, redemption, and the natural world.
This week, as we lean into the holiday season of giving and gratitude, World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill asks us to consider the concept of reciprocity--a give and take with the land and sea. And he provides us with three examples of ways that we can give back to Nature as part of our obligation and contribution.
This week on World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill asks us to look to the ocean during these turbulent times of social unrest, to recognize the ocean as at times a connector and circulator of slaves and refugees, but now also as the great equalizer and unifier for all who care to live collaboratively, in agreement, with equity and reciprocity.
This week on World Ocean Radio: host Peter Neill offers reflections on the word "blue" and the profound stages of meaning beyond the color of the sea and sky to encompass depth, stability, wisdom, faith, truth, redemption, and the natural world.
