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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory.
The four parts to our plan for RESCUE are: science, policy, education, and communication. We have discussed the status of the first two, along with our suggestions for change, in previous editions of World Ocean Radio. We turn now to discussion of the missing links.
For any substantive social change, a basic understanding of the problem is essential, as access to the full extent of the challenge we face. We need to know what’s wrong, to suggest alternatives, and to enlist partners, informed allies, to understand, support, and implement solutions. The process, seemingly simple, is complicated by the breadth and depth of the problem, its pre-occupation with our past values, structures, and behaviors. Clearly, a fully informed public is required, and our primary, trans-generational tool is education. There is paradox in the confrontation between old and new ideas, vision for past and future. My generation has immersed in and benefitted from the global expansion of consumption-driven governance and finance. As population increases, and natural resources are expended, and the consequences of the status quo are revealed, we, but more importantly, our children, are confronted with the need for rescue. No place on Earth is immune from the climate impact of fossil fuel energy; no one can avoid the heat, drought, extreme weather, and social dismay that has resulted. Despair is unacceptable. Hope without strategy is useless. The critical need is to coalesce around rejection of the enervating conditions and to unite around acceptance of a new social contract that engages, protects, and unites a world population in pursuit of a just and viable future.
As the ocean features in every aspect of future change, ocean literacy driven by educational inclusion and pedagogical focus is a powerful vector forward. It demands our immediate attention. It recognizes essential principles:
that the Earth is one big ocean with many features;
that the ocean and life in the ocean shape the features of Earth;
that the ocean is a major influence on weather and climate;
that the ocean makes Earth habitable;
that the ocean supports a great diversity of life and ecosystems;
that the ocean and humans are inextricably interconnected; and
that the ocean is largely unexplored.
Ocean literacy enables communication and informs responsible decisions regarding its sustainability and our survivability, now before we succumb to “too little, too late.”
Ocean literacy asserts the value of Nature as part of responsible teaching and learning. It encourages exploration, not just through books and studies, but also real-time observation and engagement. Outdoor education, sea experience, place-based learning—these are all new ways of providing access and instruction to young people who constitute the force for generational transfer and value transformation. New alliances are emerging: outdoor classrooms for early childhood, cross-disciplinary teaching in middle-and-high school, environmental studies majors at colleges across the world, and a new cohort of Doctorates, Post-Docs, Professors and Managers who bring a new, broader, sustainability-driven set of skills and values to teaching, planning, and building the new entities of tomorrow. Consider the study of engineering 75 years ago, when focus was primarily on structures, construction design, and large-scale developments—all a functional response to a society commanded by growth. Governance was centralized; regulations and controls were typically a function of obvious abuse; the unexpected outfall of acid, pollutants, and other by-products of the systems were largely disputed and ignored.
When I was young, industrial smog was real and destructive. Today, similar air quality decline is becoming more than a memory or an exceptional state of being. Today, clean water standards and wetland protections are being revised or removed. All that must be reversed; all that must be supplanted by new values, structures, and behaviors; all that must be replaced. We are in great danger of ignoring what we know, denying what we’ve learned. We risk the abandonment of science, the failure of policy, by failing still with the education of ourselves and our children, through application and communication. Don’t be cajoled or deceived; we still must seek RESCUE:
R for renewal;
E for environment;
S for society;
C for collaboration;
U for understanding, and
E for engagement.
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
World Ocean Radio is distributed by the Public Radio Exchange and the Pacifica Network for use by college and community radio stations worldwide. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts and at World Ocean Observatory dot org.
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