OCEAN BLOOD

The oceans are the lifeblood of this planet. Like human blood, it carries oxygen, nutrients, and heat to all parts of the planet-body and takes the waste away. It is simple enough to understand this principle on an intellectual level, but to understand it at the level of our bone marrow is very different. If most people had this deeper understanding of our world, we wouldn’t be as wasteful and uncaring as we are.

In the middle of the Atlantic ocean, I didn’t see as much garbage as I thought I would (the ocean happens to be bigger than we think), but when I did see a piece of floating debris, it was very upsetting. More often than not, it was pieces of plastic wandering past. In those moments, I realized how easily it might be mistaken for food. In the world of sea creatures, everything is edible. The fish and birds have no reason to think it isn’t. Who ever heard of a non-edible creature? But we, humans, have created non-edible creatures and no one told the fish and birds. Even if we wanted to, we have no way of telling them.

I don’t think humans are bad creatures. We just do things without thinking about their effects on the rest of the world because we forgot we were connected to every other part of the body. Maybe if we had fish and birds emailing us en masse complaining about their dying comrades, we would be more aware of the connection. We can’t be too hard on ourselves for not knowing something. After all, most knowledge is learned over time. But if we knew better and we didn’t act better, then we deserve to feel the full effect of our harmful consumerism and selfish lifestyles.

Gradually, we are hearing the Earth creatures speak to us the only way they can, by being absent for duty, and therefore, creating bad blood.

--Soanya