[intro music, ocean sounds]
Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.
Over the past several years, primarily at the hands of American policy reversal, our national investment in reaction to the challenges of climate change has been collapsed by ideological disengagement and withdrawal from policies, projects, alliances, and international agreements and treaties that have transformed us from a progressive leader to a regressive denier and destroyer indifferent to local, national, and international engagement, social and political sustainability, and prospect for human survival. It has been a suicidal attach on the body politic, worldwide.
Let’s enumerate and you be the judge. Here is an incomplete list of unilateral actions taken:
• withdrawal from the international climate change treaty and multi-national climate movement;
• official denial of climate science through the negation of program grants for research by National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health;
• active de-regulation by the US Environmental Protection Agency and other government organizations defining and upholding standards for environmental health;
• decimation of staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, its ocean programs and meteorological services;
• cancellation of multiple leases, wind, wave, and tidal energy projects extensively reviewed , approved, and under construction;
• massive incentives to re-invest in documented, polluting conventional energy generation by oil and coal;
• on-going indifference to polluting emissions, a primary cause of the climate emergency and documented negative effects on human health;
• abandonment of protections of American and international marine protected areas;
• failure to ratify global treaties, old and recent, to administer the law of the sea and ocean resources beyond national jurisdiction;
• closure of federal programs and agencies to protect and react to the devastation of climate-induced weather events such as wildfires and coastal storms;
• incentivization of intensive new water and energy consuming technologies;
• dis-incentivization of alternative conservation-based invention;
• indifference to any US national ocean plans approved by Congress;
• undermining of historical alliances and partnerships;
• financial upheaval, and social decline on land and sea.
This is just a partial list. It expands every day, and goes deeper still into our basic premises for governance and the understanding and demonstration of our national character. Withdrawal for all aspects and elements of the human community, might over right, self over selfless embrace of peace, is suicidal and ignorant. Destruction is not a strategy for the future.
I am often asked: given the magnitude and complexity of these issues, “What can one person do?”
My response has been to pick one thing to do to counter this present, to build, by individual and collective will, the affirmation of lost principles and actions through personal actions, to have what I call a “pro-volutionary plan”, a schematic for individual and collective action, forward and through, enough, in time, to enable our future.
Resilience can be overt protest, or renewed engagement in overt strategies to confront and correct the process as an individual or as part of a collective counter-force of redress and renewal.
Personally, I have chosen three ways to engage in solution:
1) the continuity of the World Ocean Observatory as continued global advocacy, education, and communication in support of the sustainable ocean worldwide;
2) a new commitment to a new tool for open access and engagement through the free sharing of local community news, profiles, and the accomplishments of my neighbors through a new digital non-profit news service; and
3) renewed commitment to involvement and support of my family, my friends, and the strangers with whom I live, to mitigate, to strengthen, and inspire the best of who we are as an antidote to what disables and releases the worst we must not become.
The ocean is the great equalizer. It is a universal, sustaining system of knowledge, health, and future welfare. It is a penultimate democratic place wherein all things can engage and survive. It is not without its stresses and dangers, but it is for possibility over closure, for actuality over denial, for sustenance over starvation, for natural laws for living over executive orders for dying, for future over past, for the benefit of all mankind. The sea connects all things.
We will discuss these issues and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
[outro music, ocean sounds]
