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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.
We live in a world of invisible oscillation. X-rays, ocean waves, inaudible sonics, tremors within the earth, vacillating light, heart beats, good, and bad, vibrations. Each is part of systemic circulation that affects our lives, naturally, and unnaturally, as we pass through experience, place, and time.
For example, global ocean circulation is an inter-action of currents and gyres, measurable albeit shifting flows of water, at the surface and below, that determines horizontal and vertical distribution of temperature, food, species migration, and gravitational pull locally and globally to real, but often not immediately perceivable effect. The atmosphere is a co-dependent locus, with weather and wind, heat and luminous impact on things that grow, water supply, human enterprise, health, welfare, and community. We study and measure these always changing phenomena as history, prediction, and adaptation to natural cycles with consequence.
Things spread through these forces. Disease is one, the impact of the distribution of the common cold and other insidious agents against normality and well-being, within the home to across the sea in a global pandemic. Persistent pollutants are another, depositing as effluent from industry worldwide, and taken up and circulated from Europe to the Galapagos, from industrial Chicago down the Mississippi to New Orleans and the Gulf, moving and leaving toxic detritus along the way.
River systems are another form of circulation: aerial maps of the descent of rivers from the Alps to the Atlantic, form the Himalayas to the Gulf of Tonkin, from heights of the central South American mountain range down the length of the Amazon to the Southern Ocean – all nurturing, changing, transporting everything from energy to food, freshwater to human sustenance and survival.
The demography of the Earth, the record of changing population is a visualization of that exchange. The intersections of circulation are where we choose to build our inland cities – indeed transportation and trade, internally and worldwide, are the overt surface operation in the form of exchange and finance, just as the migration of people and ideas, along the same paths, are the convert lines of passage of cultural traditions, inventions, philosophical concepts, ideologies and politics, even gossip.
The Internet, social media, and smart phones and computers are all accelerating tools for such circulation worldwide. Tell a lie and it’s heard in seconds around the world. Endorse a product from China and it’s instantly for sale worldwide. The algorithms that shape that distribution, tailored from our personal data and changing interests, are but amplifiers for the circulation of consumption and social communication that has become so central to the tumult of our world. With artificial intelligence comes the fear that natural circulation can be corrupted to unnatural distribution of ideas not always under our control.
If we accept that these systems are natural, and essential to the world we live in, then we must ask why, and by whom, and for what reason these systems are corrupted. Who morphs the oil to plastic to cheap goods and waste to corrupt our land, our waterways, and our bodies? Natural systems have a fixed utility; human intervention is the culprit, the inability to protect ourselves from ourselves, driven by psychological forces that are antithetical to necessary physical needs.
The full global circulation of water, is the primal system that sustains life. Drain the rivers and seas, drain the water from our sustaining endeavor, drain the water from our bodies, and you have destroyed the circulation that is operating system for life. All else pales, distracts from and undermines our livelihood. What will it take?
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
World Ocean Radio is celebrating 15 years on the air in 2025, with more than 750 episodes to date, all searchable by them at world ocean observatory dot org. 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, at the WERU archive, and at world ocean observatory.org.
[outro music, ocean sounds]
