(part one, trees, is available here)
the story of this world is the history of water. there is no world without it. water has been here since the beginning. life began in the water. we living things on land carry water in us. one of the many profound powers of water is that it absorbs, it dissolves, it consumes; water is always impure, it always carries some thing else with it, nutrients, living things, terrible pollutants, molecules of all kinds of substances, water is full to bursting, water teems, water accepts. since living things have lived, we have also changed the water we live with and within. to be touched, after all, is to be become with.
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the facts—the oceans absorb heat from the air, they absorb gasses (such as carbon dioxide) from the air. they also relase heat and release gasses. there is no giving in this world without a taking in return. in 2023–24 the temperature of the oceans surface has been astronomically hotter than the average temperature between 1982–2011. the number is six standard deviations above average, the probably of this occuring randomly is two-in-a-billion, 0.000000002%. when oceans absorb carbon dioxide, some of it dissolves into carbonic acid, making the water more acidic and more hostile to much ocean life, bleaching coral reefs. melting ice-pack at the poles, sea ice, greenland and antarctica, is diluting the oceans, making them locally colder and less salty. there are major ocean currents that are driven by differences in saltiness and temperature, colder water sinks. if these currents slow down or collapse, temperatures in western europe will plummet, warmer water on the east coast of north america would cause a rise in sea levels there. the melting ice will irreversibly change this cycle of water overturning, no one is sure yet how. the entire global climate is tied to the ocean and its conditions. once its fucked it cannot be unfucked.
more than half of breathable oxygen production comes from photosynthesizers in the ocean, more than from plants on land. the first light-eating happened in the ocean. the very first seems to have not produced oxygen at all, using hydrogen sulfide instead, appearing purple instead of green. eventually though, light-eaters started exhaling oxygen. before this new way of living there was very little oxygen in the worlds atmosphere. once living things started producing oxygen gas, the world changed dramatically. first the oxygen stayed dissolved in the water, where it changed the chemical composition of the oceans. for instance, it joined with dissolved iron to create a solid form of iron that settled to the bottom of the sea in thick layers. we still mine much of the worlds iron from these deposits. once the iron in the water was used up, oxygen began to enter the atmosphere. the presence of oxygen in the air and water killed a huge amount of the life that existed at that time. the ancestors of that life still live in low oxygen environments, scratching out a living. the flow of gasses in and out of the ocean have a tremendous effect on the shape of all life in this world.
this is a lot of a science talk. theres not space here to go very in-depth with any of it. its all pretty grim! one last note though—there is a very very thin layer on the top of the ocean, aptly called the sea surface microlayer. it has an entirely different composition than the rest of the ocean column below it, an entirely different ecosystem. this tiny film, one millimeter at its thickest and sometimes a hundred times thinner than a hair, covers 70% of the surface of the planet. all the gasses and the heat that move between the air and the seas pass through this layer. the global climate, storms, famines, blizzards, are all influenced by this sublimely tiny thing, full of life.
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nothing happens unless things touch each other. the edges of things are more important than their centers—what you touch is bigger than what you are. when things touch, they exchange, this is how the world works. this is how the air we breathe was formed, this is how your social life works, this is where god lives. the intuition we tend to have about the world is based on objects, that existence is some kind of empty space filled with objects. the “void” of space is empty except where it is filled with planets and stars. a room is empty except where it is full with tables, people, conversations overheard, spiderwebs in the corners. air is empty unless it is full of smoke, smog, dust, mist. that there is some inherent emptiness that is a kind of blank canvas, a stage for all the players of the world, a space that is meant only to be filled.
in truth, no thing is empty, no place is no where. what we see with our eyes as objects are little ecosystems, bursting at the seams, leaving residues and fingerprints, leaking, absorbing. there is no emptiness to be filled, only a world of immense touching, friction between surfaces, the crossing and recrossing of border and boundaries. i will keep insisting that this bad thinking is a root cause of human driven climate change. its why we would never consider that the sky is greedy, eating up the material that used to be the log we burned for heat, that the sky is also generous, gifting this material to the oceans and soils, that the ocean returns gifts of its own. the exact sites of this giving and taking, like the tiny surface layer of the ocean or the layer of topsoils in the earth, are vitally important to the health of the planet and those of us who live on it. the edges matter more than the centers.
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its not that the centers dont matter at all. the movement of waters deep at the sea floor to the surface and back keeps the oceans healthy. without this turning, the water at the bottom doesnt replenish its oxygen and becomes suffocating and deadly. melting ice threatens this cycle, not the surface layer as such. (these low/no-oxygen events are often associated with mass extinctions, which im sure is nothing to worry about.) these processes take a very long time, hundreds of years at least, but things do not bode well. oceans are slow, they're unthinkably huge. once changes get going though, they're very hard to stop, and they're already rolling down that hill. we’ve measurably dramatically changed ocean temperatures, we’ve measurably changed the acidity of the oceans as well. the cycle of warm and cold water threatened by the melting of greenlands ice is already measurably slowing down, and we’ve almost definitely passed a point of warming that guarantees that all of the ice in greenland will melt. you and i likely (hopefully) wont live to see it, though. the cynical refrain that we dont need to “save the planet” because the planet will be ok, its humans that are doomed, is short-sighted and selfish. humans are not separate from the world and we pose a serious risk to almost life on the planet, as it stands. things have gone terribly wrong.
i mean more to argue that the kind of thinking that values the center over the edge, the body over the skin, is what has gotten us into this mess, thinking of the air as empty or the ocean as vast and unchanging. we need to shift our understandings to see the ocean as a place of uncountable interweavings, the home of bacteria that keep the air breathable, a generous being that gives and takes, we need to remember that the pollution, the sewage, the petroleum we burn, the very breath we exhale, will in some way return to the waters and the skies.
its too late to make much of a difference as far as global warming goes. the damage has been done, the systems of the planet are slow, and the effects we are seeing are the result of things that happened decades ago. warm ocean waters killed billions of crabs in the north pacific seas, melting ice caused a total collapse of emperor penguin chicks in 2023, virtually none survived. these waters arent cooling down any time soon. no matter what any hacky philosopher says, you cant roll a boulder back up a hill. however, i still firmly believe that we need this new spiritual outlook—this attunement to the touching, friction, pressing up against, smearing on, breathing into—to carry us into whatever new world is bearing down on us. we, the humans the seas and everyone else.
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we have a sense that is not often considered or discussed. its called proprioception. it is the feeling we have of where our body is in space, and it relationship to itself. its why you can touch your nose with your eyes closed, you have a sense of where your hand and your nose are without having to see them. some people have a very diminished sense or absent of proprioception. they dont have a sense of where their body is, the edges of themself. unless they feel the wind, feel an embrace, feel the waves of the ocean lapping against them, giving shape to their form, tracing their outline.
we are made whole to the world, revealed to ourselves by the touching. in this moment of calamity and pain, we can touch water, touch one another, be touched. in this way we have to be true, and loving, and mournful.