Why is there so much war? So much strife in the Middle East: what are we fighting for? This week Peter Neill,founder of W2O and host of World Ocean Radio, argues that it's all about the water. It's always been about the water: rivers, access to the sea...water is the source of life--and of conflict. Water, necessary to sustain our cities, our agriculture, our selves: we all need it in equal measure each day to endure.
This week we're discussing the circulation of water worldwide, and the importance of our waterways--canals in particular--as the great highways and distribution centers of our busy lives, now storing and transferring water and energy, and revitalized for recreational use and enjoyment of natural spaces.
This week on World Ocean Radio we are discussing the Ocean Literacy movement and the need for more ocean science and fresh water understanding in the classroom. Ocean Literacy is comprised of seven basic principles, and host Peter Neill provides further perspective to include the global fresh water cycle by which to expand the principles into a set of curricular approaches that pertain to science, climate impacts, solutions, and a new paradigm for a future built on this knowledge.
Apprenticing has long been thought of as a term to describe someone working beside a master craftsperson to learn a trade and to refine a professional skill: whether it be pottery or electrical, cabinetry or plumbing. As an educational model it has long been mostly lost or forgotten, except in a place in midcoast Maine: The Apprenticeshop, where apprentices are learning the craft of building and restoring small traditional wooden boats and associated seamanship, in what can be argued as a most effective way of learning and living in a time when education is challenged by convention and complexity.
Each year on June 8th we celebrate World Ocean Day to recognize our relationship with the ocean, the vast watery world that covers 71% of our planet. Despite gains in ocean education and increased awareness and importance of the Ocean Literacy movement, public awareness of ocean issues in the United States does not advance much over time. What does it take for the will of the people to coalesce around a single issue, to be informed and changed into a voice for change, not just on World Ocean Day, but every day?
We live in a world of invisible circulation. It is in us and around us at all times, transporting and exchanging all things good and bad, some natural, some man-made. This week we're discussing the ocean-fresh water system--the full global circulation on which all life depends.
Will the children set us free? Has it come to that? Have we abandoned the future for our children to solve, leaving them accountable for what we have failed to do? This week on World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill shares where he finds hope for the future, including in a web-based educational initiative that introduces children worldwide to the complexity, significance, and beauty of the ocean--the one ocean which gives us so much: freshwater, food, energy, health, wealth, community, security, and cultural/spiritual traditions.
This week marks the 750th episode of World Ocean Radio: 15 years of weekly short audio that reaches millions around the globe, sharing concepts, demands, and solutions related to ocean technology and science, policy, examples of best practice, personal reflections, and solutions for how the ocean connects, sustains, inspires, and engages us in common history, traditions, sustenance, communication, community, and well-being. Thank you for listening!
W2O is an example of a contrarian vector discussed this week by World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill: an improbable concept from the beginning, a project that pursues the opposite of what is established, especially as strategies and solutions relate to ocean systems and health. This week contrarianism and contrarians are celebrated as inventors, revolutionaries, sometimes convention-breakers, sometimes adamant actors standing against an established way of being.
This week on World Ocean Radio, host Peter Neill reflects on the importance of water in our lives, our culture, our memories, our very being. Water, he argues, is the essence of home, and the grace and gift of knowing it’s there for our return.
Pope Francis, outspoken voice for climate and the environment, passed away on Monday, April 21st. Throughout his reign as leader of the Catholic Church, he was very clear in his views on climate change as a real factor in today's world, and expressed that we must understand and respond to these problems for our future survival. In 2015, Pope Francis issued a papal encyclical entitled "Laudato Si--on Care of our Common Home" in which he addressed the moral imperative to steward our natural world for the benefit of succeeding generations. At many times in the address, he mentions fresh water and oceans; this week on World Ocean Radio we revisit some of the Pope's ideas and perspectives that demonstrate a deep reverence for natural systems.
Discovery of a curriculum developed for coastal Africa some years ago sent World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill on a journey of discovery and revelation about salt as a construct to be observed, understood, and taught. A western scientific perspective might teach students about salt from a chemistry-led lesson, whereas the African curriculum taught salt as serving a role in the enhancement of and as means to preserve food, the harvesting for work, as way of life, and as financial support by its production and harvest. This latter perspective is not first and foremost chemistry-led but community-focused, with methods of teaching and learning through the wisdom of Nature. What might we learn by diving in to teaching and learning a different way?
In celebration of World Water Day on March 22nd, World Ocean Radio is revisiting some favorite episodes dedicated to fresh water and the global water cycle. This week: How old is water? Where on earth is water found? How is it circulated, cycled, and recycled? We know where water is distributed on the planet down to the fraction of a percentage. We know that water is finite in volume and its utility is constant. What happens when we pollute water? What happens when there is no water?
ter·ra·que·ous
/terˈākwēəs/
Adjective: consisting of land and water
Mud season: a special time of year in the northeastern corner of the United States, when winter and spring collide in a soggy muck: the rains come, ice and snow melts, saturating the land, creating a terraqueous mess for cars and boots. This week on World Ocean Radio, in celebration of World Water Day, we're applying the metaphor of "mud season" to fresh water and ocean systems, to climate and biodiversity, to the human condition, to community--all the cycles and systems that rely on the balance of nature.
March 22nd is World Water Day, a celebration of what Jacques Cousteau called The Great Hydrosphere, expanded beyond Ocean to include the entirety of the water cycle: the one natural system that controls our planet's utility. From mountaintop to abyssal plain, water is the great circulatory system that connects all things. This week on World Ocean Radio we pay homage to water, without which we would not exist. Think about it: where and when is water not present in our lives?
This week on World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill shares a smart, succinct new title from the Forerunners: Ideas First series entitled "Coralatations" by Melody Jue. The book is a philosophical exploration of coral reefs, technology, and media and how, through co-relation, we might expand our understanding of natural resources beyond endangerment to how we communicate about climate change.
Ocean Literacy is a bottom-up movement driven by classroom teachers who understand the full implication of education, adaptation, and innovation for our future. In Venice, Italy, in 2024, a conference gathered to address today's issues, and to produce the Venice Declaration for Ocean Literacy to provide goals and agenda items for the UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France in June of 2025. New goals and new items, or a new arrangement of old ideas? How might the agenda be revised? Tune in to World Ocean Radio this week to learn more.
"Power is like water. It flows all around us at all times. Sometimes it takes the liquid form of politics-in-action...Sometimes it takes the solid form of settled law: policy is power frozen. Sometimes it is like vapor in the air, invisibly shaping the climate and our behavior in just the way beliefs or ideology or emotions do..."
So states Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University and Director of the Aspen Institute Program on Citizen and American Identity. This week on World Ocean Radio, founder Peter Neill expands upon water as metaphor for our changing political landscape and exceptional time of transition.
Eco-psychology studies the relationships between people and nature, and seeks to develop ways to expand the emotional connections between individuals and the natural world. There is progression in the term: understanding of Eco-psychology presents plans, promise, and action toward transformational outcomes, strategies, and prognoses for the future.
This week on World Ocean Radio we are introducing listeners to The Jena Declaration, a new W2O partnership with a UNESCO-Chair project for Sustainability. The Jena Declaration (TJD), is officially described as being built on the premise that information is not reaching the people that need it most: those who are directly affected by climate change, shifting ocean patterns, an increasingly unpredictable systems response. In essence, the Declaration states that a top-down strategy to inform and communicate the change required is not working. The Declaration calls for a new strategy to achieve living sustainably everywhere, through integration of the arts and sciences and new partnerships to further amplify information, communication, and engagement.
Eudaemonism: What does it mean? What does it have to do with happiness? And what is its context for the ocean?
Tune in to find out.
What are the five key reasons for ocean conservation? What are the five areas where progress matters most? With the world in an off-axis state of turmoil, W2O founder Peter Neill is taking stock this week, asking the questions and distilling the essential reasons why the ocean is central to human survival.
This week on World Ocean Radio, host Peter Neill shares views and observations of the town of Isafjordur, Iceland, and the values it possesses as related to water, food, transportation, tourism, education, health, and cultural history--the qualities that give the area its unique identity.
KNOT: a word with many definitions: from a tight constriction to something hard to solve; a cluster of persons or things; an ornamental ribbon; a closed curve in three dimensional space. And of course, the word comes back to the ocean: is not the ocean a dynamic of knots: entangled and integral, inter-placed with ornamental flexible bodies, comprised of the ties that bind.
At the Fishhouses, is among our favorite poems here at World Ocean Observatory. In its richly-detailed mastery, it distills Bishop’s seaside meditations, evokes the clarity of meaning contained in personal encounters at the shore and with the ocean, and holds the reader and the listener in the space that lies between land and sea, a site of transience, mystery, and the sublime. It is a seasonal favorite for those of us that dwell at the water's edge. Happy New Year from World Ocean Radio and World Ocean Observatory.
