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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.
I am always coming across words describing a situation in Nature that have metaphorical meaning beyond the specific definition. Here’s one: ecotone.
The official definition describes an ecotone as “the transition zone where two ecosystems meet and blend — for example, the marshland between a river and dry land, the mangroves between sea and shore, or the tree-line between forest and alpine meadow. Ecotones are famously rich in species, holding life from both adjacent ecosystems plus a few specialists found nowhere else — a phenomenon known as the edge effect.”
In my 2020 collection of essays: Aqua/Terra: Reflections on the World Ocean, I write about the categorization of ocean edges: the hard edge of breakwaters, highways, and dams, that confront the natural softness of wetlands and watersheds with a defined contradictory dimension: the soft edge of coastal conservation as welcome mitigation to the destruction and erosion of violent storm, extreme flooding, and, now, sea level rise; the working edge of the amalgam of social behavior, organizational structure, and constructed facilities – ports and harbors – for work, dock, load, repair, un-load, and trade – that has shaped coastlines and riverfront worldwide; and the leisure edge where land and sea come together as parks and beaches, resort centers and tourism facilities that provide solace and recreation. Each of these edges in an ecotone.
The term was coined by ecologist Frederic E. Clements in 1905, from the Greek oikos ("home") and tonos ("tension"), an interesting juxtaposition that includes the solicitude of safety with the uncertainty of conflict. How wonderful is our language that it can reconcile those two nouns, that have the active, seemingly contradictory aspects of verbs. We are addressing transition, the harmony and disharmony of extremes, a dynamic place yes, safe but dangerous, secure and insecure at the same time.
One could argue that every moment in time is an ecotone, with built in opposites, that confuse the certainly of a single understanding, and confirm the paradox and uncertainty, simultaneously in a single place and moment. It is a heady concept; but consider this: whether fully realized or not, are we not in a time of cascading contradictions, incomprehensible decisions, and amplifying conditions that have turned normal confusion into growing anxiety, with implications that extend from hearth, through our family and society, into world uncertainty, confrontation, and impending chaos? Is that not fair to say? As an example, let’s extrapolate from today’s oil consumption driven climate change and already felt personal and market consequences to making war over that oil and its distribution at a peak oil moment when our own reserves are severely diminished, as well as those of the heretofore immune oil-producing nations with their single product economy now facing at least the idea that their future too is no longer secure due to a complex international weave of financial, political, and religious interests – all in the context not of surplus but depletion. If these global conditions are not evidence of primal threat to “home” through “tension” based on the exhaustion of so many aspects of Nature, I don’t know what is. What are we doing to ourselves? It is all now beyond even the most positive justification of reason. And it is creating its own endgame, a point after which there is no return.
Can an ecotone become a monotone, or no tone at all? When does the edge effect turn from natural tension to consequential worry to collective self-fulfilling failure to an all-consuming silence when it is too late to call a warning, or to cry out in mourning, and there is nothing left to say? It’s time we go down to the ocean, to the natural edge between land and sea, where our survival lies, and think this through. It seems all now down to the question: is there world enough and time enough to save our home?
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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