The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can’t. Christopher Paolini
If the ocean can calm itself, so can you. We are both salt water mixed with air. Nayyirah Waheed
And the ocean, calling out to us both. A song of freedom and longing. Alexandra Christo
Then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. Herman Melville
The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being. Vera Nazarian
Mist to mist, drops to drops. For water thou art, and unto water shalt thou return. Kamand Kojouri
This past week, in the video chat format which is likely to rule multilateral engagements until at least the end of July, the UN held discussions highlighting a series of global challenges, some of which have now come to dominate our collective consciousness while others have receded to the background, at least for a time.
At this week’s “Multilateralism in a Fragmented World” event, speakers highlighted the “universal aspirations” that the UN has had some success in both defining and meeting despite the fact, as noted by SG Guterres, that “we are not yet pulling in the same direction.” This view was reinforced by Mary Robinson, chair of the Group of Elders, who not only highlighted some of the existential threats that the COVID pandemic has rendered more serious – including global hunger, gender-based violence and armed conflict – but also underscored the tendency of some governments to use the pandemic as “cover” for efforts to restrict fundamental rights and freedoms, including those of the journalists who seek to “make sense of an anxious and dangerous world.”
For months, the virus has been the UN’s core policy obsession, in part because of challenges to the messaging emanating from its World Health Organization but mostly due to the fact that so much in global policy and practice has been negatively impacted by COVID threats. We have been forced to spend as much time adjusting to our new realities as we do addressing the large problems which confront us endlessly through our video screens. Indeed, the pandemic has thrown many of us back on needs and issues that are less structural and more personal in nature – the children whose education is on pause, the bills that can’t be paid on time, the physical distance that complicates emotional connection, the dreams and aspirations indefinitely put on hold.
It is harder to find energy for global issues when our private lives require so much vigilance, when the failure to wipe down a doorknob might provide a pathway to a deadly illness, when a child’s window for reading comprehension is slowly closing because of long breaks in schooling, when a dwindling bank balance foretells another round of unwelcome lifestyle adjustments.
And then there is the matter of racial justice, the chronic absence of which has filled streets in the US and around the world, calling attention to the numerous instances of excessive use of force by police against black and brown people (now including the killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta), patterns which merely exacerbate conditions of health and other inequalities and which only serve to widen chasms of mistrust between communities and the police forces which, in too many instances, have demonstrated an unjustifiably stubborn unwillingness to police themselves.
These two crises now dominate public consciousness and seem destined to do so for some time. The images that fill our screens – the elderly gasping for air as COVID ravages their lungs, the protesters gagging on pepper spray so that our political leadership can pose for the cameras, the men and women pleading for relief from choke holds and knees on their windpipes – such disturbing images as these are not easily dislodged. Indeed, these images and the crises which lie behind them are almost more than many people can take, creating waves that rock their metaphorical boats and promise considerably more nausea than calm
We who work in policy know that part of our “job,” however challenging, is to find the words to remind people of issues and images that also constitute genuine crises but at this moment seem just a bit less compelling. One of these is the declining health of our oceans, a topic which was featured last Monday during a large UN “World Oceans Day” event and a subsequent discussion later in the week on ocean governance. For us, this is a high-priority discussion as sea levels rise, fish stocks deplete, coral bleaches, plastics over-run ocean eco-systems – this and more highlights the ocean’s now-compromised ability to sustain coastal livelihoods and absorb the carbon that, even during a pandemic, we continue to produce in vast, climate-unhealthy measure.
The discussions this week highlighted the many technological innovations which allow us to, among other things, survey the vast unexplored expanses of our ocean floor and remove plastics from our rivers before they find their way into seas and sea creatures. Also highlighted were the evolving forms of ocean governance that are slowly expanding beyond areas of national jurisdiction with hopeful implications for marine protected areas, sea bed mining and the practices of shipping which has too often used the open sea as a surrogate dump.
While technology and governance are critically important matters to policy, for most people they simply do not sufficiently compel interest, certainly not in this time of viral spread and social unrest. Indeed, for all who are drawn to shorelines and their beach cultures, for all who fill boardwalks and fishing boats, most do not immediately connect their leisure with a responsibility to protect our planet’s most indispensable eco-system and the life and livelihoods which it sustains worldwide.
But there were other lessons from this week, other human reactions which oceans are still capable of invoking and which can help us see our way through crises both immediately compelling and looming at a distance. This was highlighted best during the World Oceans Day event by the Cousteau family, a name synonymous with the wonder, mystery and even “romance” of our ocean habitats, seas that were once a ubiquitous theme in our literary corpus with which we are now urged to reconnect. It was good to listen to esteemed ocean advocates talking about seeking out stories — focused on oceans but also on water and ecosystems more generally – that can help reconnect people and planet, recapture some of the “freedom and longing” that constitute much of human aspiration, and motivate a greater sense of care for the resources that are critical to our common survival and that we simply cannot under any circumstances replace.
This to my mind is “romance” in the best sense – not so much steeped in sentimentalism as in a deep, rich and practical engagement with what a Namibian Minister this week referred to as our “interconnected normal.” As the Cousteau family put it, “falling in love” again with the oceans (or for that matter our forests, deserts, rivers, wetlands and mountains) is worth the emotional investment, but it is also not enough. We must, they insisted, “move care forward.”
Yes, that is the lesson directly relevant to our now-sick oceans –our increasingly indigestible “soup of being” — but also to other aspects of our stressed and agitated planet. Move care forward such that access to food and health care is more abundant and equitable. Move care forward such that our tendencies to discriminate and punish based on race and ethnicity are finally overcome. Move care forward such that gross inequalities are narrowed and “protect and serve” becomes a mantra applicable equally to communities and its policing. Move care forward such that our collective disposition is to share more abundantly and horde less habitually.
And move care forward such that our planet, its oceans and other ecosystems, remain healthy enough to sustain the life that now appears to be more elusive than is actually the case, a life offering greater opportunity for justice, wonder and connection by all, and a life far less threatened than at present by bullets and bullies, by pandemics and pollution.
gapwblog 
Leave a comment