I’ve been consuming quite a bit of media about climate change and how it’s been affecting the ocean in particular. I’ve had a hyper fixation on the ocean for some time now and it’s been fun for the most part. It’s not when I think about the harm we as humans are doing to it.
While I consider myself more knowledgeable on this topic than most people I know, I am by no means an expert. I’ve been trying to learn about the environment not just out of interest— but out of a necessity and duty to the planet and other inhabitants of it. Which sounds dramatic but when you think about it; walking around ignorant to the issues involving the air we breathe, the ground we walk on, the water surrounding us—hurts everyone.
After we become knowledgeable on the issues, the question becomes “how do we fix what’s been done-what we’ve done?”. From this point on things start to feel pretty bleak. Like I said earlier, I’m no scientist so I don’t have these answers so I can only mourn what’s been lost already and hope for a better future. And get angry…never forget the anger.
I’ve been reading Warmth by Daniel Sherrell lately and it’s had some points that really resonated with me (and I’m not even halfway through the book). The first one was made early on in the book about what I’ll call “shock activism” in this piece. What I mean by shock activism is doing things like throwing tomato soup on a Van Gogh to protest coal mining. To me it’s not a very valuable tactic and I’ll explain why. Simply put it has no lasting effect. As Sherrell puts it on pages 6 and 7; “‘It’s such a tragedy, and everyone’s already forgotten.’” As well as “It wouldn’t do a thing; it was a bad strategy…even if you bowed definitively and dramatically out, the problem would simply go on without you.” These quotes sum up my point exactly. But I’d like to add that two wrongs rarely make a right. One attempt at a relatively small scale destruction won’t help reverse decades of world affecting harm and neglect, nor will it change people’s minds. These painting vandalism attempts and other forms of shock activism never even spur needed conversation for more than the 10 minutes combined of the news coverage of these events.
One could argue that any conversation about climate change whenever is good but if it’s brought by realistically minor annoyances or inconveniences most of the time and only once every so often, is that really helping?
That brings me to my next point: the ocean. The ocean covers over half of the earth’s surface (71%). It controls the weather and the earth's temperature. That should be enough to make us want to pay more attention to it. Not to mention a good bit of food and even medicine comes from the ocean in the form of the flora and fauna under the waves. Why do we not care or talk about the ocean when discussing climate change if not to mention rising sea levels and melting ice caps—there’s so much more to it.
“The ocean holds 60 times more carbon than the atmosphere and absorbs almost 30% of carbon dioxide emissions from human activities.” This quote was taken from an article by a group of marine scientists and experts, and it makes me wonder once again why we aren’t talking about this. This causes the ocean to heat up and rise in level. The main killer (literally) is the rising acidity of the waters. This is harming the ecosystem in ways that might soon be irreversible— maybe it already is.
Enter corals: we’ve all heard of them (the Great Barrier Reef at least) but do we know how important they are? First off, they’re animals (I don’t see many animal activists talking about sea creatures or is that just me not looking in the right places?). Also, they are homes and food for a large portion of sea creatures and so much more. According to various sources, we’ve lost over 50% of corals worldwide, which of course has had negative effects on the ocean and by extension—us. Why is this happening you might ask: well climate change of course. If I sound angry right about now my bad, I am—but you should be too.
I’m trying not to make this too long, but I wanted to write this as it’s something that matters to me. I’m not great at conclusions so I’ll leave it at this: it might seem discouraging and downright maddening in every sense of the word to focus on these things but ignoring these issues is something we can’t afford.
Links:
https://www.epa.gov/coral-reefs/basic-information-about-coral-reefs
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2023/june/oceans-absorb-emissions
Coral are the trees of the sea and I agree they aren't talked about enough -- it's a rare topic outside of that one biology class in middle school, or a GOOD ocean documentary.
And the shock factor of protests damaging art is something I thought about recently! It enrages me. I'm 10000% for climate protests but as an artist, it hurts to see art being covered in soup (and cake).