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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.
I recently returned from Morocco, where I found a country so full of color and equanimity, so proud of its religious and cultural history, so alive to its emerging place as a small, developing, mostly secure kingdom that can welcome tourists with confidence, embrace its religious heritage, build its social infrastructure, and enter the international community as a mature nation with a foreign policy that matters.
In September, Morocco became the 60th country to ratify the UN High Seas Treaty that is designed to protect marine biodiversity in the open ocean by establishing new high seas marine protected areas, provide through regulation and best practice the conservation of threatened ocean ecosystems, promote ocean research and resource sharing, and encourage cooperation among nations for ocean health. With the 60th ratification, a 120-day countdown began to January 2026 when the Treaty will become international law.
Morocco has every reason to be proud, just as all of us must be similarly gratified that such an endeavor can be established as precedent and context for a giant step forward for ocean sustainability and the future.
As part of our tourist itinerary, we visited Volubilus, the ruins of a 3rd century BC Roman outpost, one extent of the empire, a trading place where Romans met Berbers, the intersection of cultures, where exchange of goods, people, and ideas left behind a visible architecture and social-interaction that oddly endures on a dusty, olive-treed hillside as temple arches and mosaic floors in a setting that looks one way to the desert and the other way to the sea.
Volubilus was designed, as are all cities in Morocco to this day, around the distribution and economy of water. It seems so obvious: indeed, how can any settlement in a climate, dry or wet, exist without the nurturing volume of water, from the ground, the aquifer, the rivers, the and the ocean, enabling life in the most challenging of physical, hence human conditions? There are the remains of conduits, basins, fountains, kitchens, sanitation, and gardens in arrays of sandstone piled, and carved, evidence of an underlying system of support that enabled the place over centuries to that day a rest room and café for the ubiquitous class of Moroccan mint tea.
In the cities, that organizational principle remains, in the gardens and hotel atria, in the markets, and in the mosques – the Grand Mosque in Casablanca being a modern complement to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, in its great hall and soaring interior spaces, intricate, inlaid decoration, fountains and spaces for ritual, internal cleansing water as a fundamental tenet of Islam.
The significance of water in the Quran is described as follows:
Source of Life: as essential for all living beings, emphasizing its role in sustaining life;
Divine Blessing: as a blessing from Allah, signifying His mercy and provision;
Symbol of Purity: as association with purity and cleanliness, both physically and spiritually;
Metaphor for Knowledge: as a metaphor for knowledge and guidance, nourishing the soul like it nourishes the earth;
Environmental Stewardship: as responsible use, promoting conservation and respect for natural resources; and
Spiritual Cleansing: as ritual ablution before prayers to underscore the importance of water in spiritual practices.
And so, as a visitor, I found an unexpected, overt assertion of water as the essence of life, for body and soul, for endurance, longevity, sustenance, and the future, built into the predominant religion and its practice, into the organization of government and civic architecture, into the national past and its future, and into the everyday understanding of what is the most sustaining, most sustainable element of human survival. I did not first see it there, until I did, and recognized the presence of its slow and steady stream, vital, enabling, nurturing a most essential need.
A very old paradigm indeed, not an historical vestige, but a present-day, progressive reality, understood and applied, from the High Atlas Mountains to the Atlantic coast, as an exemplary demonstration of the future we might well emulate, soon.
We will disuss these issues and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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