The Future Ocean
How the Ocean will save civilization
The reversal of international efforts, agreements, and treaties calls out for a new articulation of a creative plan to sustain the ocean as a matter of survival.
It’s time for a new coherent vision
Any reversal will demand new perspectives, new concepts, new solutions, with new allies, and a new state of mind to inform all our initiatives and actions.
1. Leadership and Youth: Expanding a global community of citizens of the ocean.
W2O is providing content for leadership and engagement with the ensuing generation for whom our success matters most. Many organizations and programs exist worldwide, but a far greater constituency will be needed to provide political support, social engagement, and expertise to surpass past failures, expand past success, and generate the new ideas required to overcome inertia, vested interests, and fear of change. Through innovative advocacy, responsible science, accessible educational service, and extensive global communications, the World Ocean Observatory is designed to provide content and leadership for this purpose.
2. A New Way of Seeing: We must change the way we see the world.
Past vision has been compromised and blinded by values that are counter to sustainability; by structures that deny or compromise best practice and intention, and by behaviors that corrode and weaken forward-thinking and global resolve. A new vision shines light on the past, sharpens our understanding of next steps, and illuminates a new way forward.
3. Blue Mind: We need to think and practice blue.
The ocean is a natural system that through the circulation of water, from mountain-top to abyssal plain, connects us all, and without which, physically and psychologically, we cannot thrive. All religions have connection to water: for cleansing and blessing, for community and equity, and for personal, political, and social health and unification. The brain responds to the sanctity of water; the body quiets and heals; the mind finds tranquility and peace.
4. Thinking Like an Island: Islands are exceptions in the dynamic sea.
Islands exist as both symbol and reality, they demand certain responses to protect self, others, institutions, investments, and beliefs. A continent is an island. A nation state is an island. A village, a family, a friendship, a life that is constructive and clear: all these are islands sustained by a mental state that is calm, directed, communal, and open to the essentials of living. A context that provides for the success of island living, for the tools to protect and to build, and for the reciprocity demanded to exist successfully in Nature, is essential to our new way of being in a global community, a new hydraulic society, and oceanic world that offers opportunity, justice, and health for all.
How to practice a new ocean ethos
Values are only as good as the structures created to apply them and the actions taken to assure their performance and outcomes. Beyond a new state of mind, beyond a new conceptual organization, we need also a set of new tools to enable specific change.
1. A New Way of Teaching
How do we inform, embed, and realize the application of new ideas?
2. A New Way of Planning
How do we plan for a new future without extending and repeating the mistakes of the past? How do we establish new criteria for permitting, regulating, enforcing, and maintaining a new vision?
3. A New Way of Communicating
How do we talk among ourselves, across the barriers of languages, proprietary interests, long-standing institutions, and past biases and cultural traditions?
4. A New Way of Believing
How do give and take differently? How do we measure value? How we embrace new ideas without fear? How do we re-learn how to trust each other? How do we welcome the new?
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