Cultivating a Water Ethic from the Ocean Sciences Meeting to AltaSea.
By Evelyn McDonnell
It’s been a hard month for the port and peninsula areas of Los Angeles. Palos Verdes’s Wayfarers Chapel shuttered due to shifting land exacerbated by rain. A scientific study says that radioactive material was likely dumped into the San Pedro Channel decades ago, to nestle alongside DDT and WWII munitions. Eight million gallons of sewage overflowed into the Dominguez Channel and out into the sea, closing beaches from Cabrillo to Seal Beach. Tide pool access remains barred at Point Fermin because of a slide that sent agave plants cascading down to the Spanish wall. It seems you can’t swim, surf, look for octopuses, or pray for a NON-rainy day at Lloyd Wright’s glass church. What’s a water baby to do?
Stories like these are being repeated up and down the Pacific Coast, as one atmospheric river after another overflows our sewage systems, harbors, and rivers, and turns clay into mud. It seems that California has jumped from the fire into the pot of water — reversed from drought to flood. Forget climate change; this is climate chaos.
Almost two thousand miles away in New Orleans – a city that knows well the murderous power of nature – 5,500 people gathered at the Ocean Sciences Meeting to figure out what is going on in the giant bodies of water that make planet Earth blue (as David Bowie sang in 1969). From February 18 to 23 oceanographers, marine biologists, NASA and NOAA executives, physicists, geologists, city planners, zoologists, artists, activists, and journalists from New Zealand to Spain to Denmark to Alaska presented research. I came as a concerned resident of a coastal community to see what the experts had to say about algae blooms, changing currents, microplastic pollutants, dwindling biodiversity, carbon recovery, oil spills, coral bleaching, rising seas, flooding coasts, disappearing deltas, and other perils of the Anthropocene era. Is there something we can do?
Those are some of the topics I, a layperson, understood at least. I have to admit that the plenary session on the evolution of eukaryote ecosystems lost me. Instead, I wandered out into the Louisiana sun and thought about the last time I had stood in front of the Ernest N. Memorial Convention Center, 18 years ago. It was just months after Hurricane Katrina displaced tens of thousands of people who took refuge in these giant halls, abandoned by their government and left to fend for – and die by – themselves. In 2006 this building was a shuttered, sodden symbol of nature’s fury and society’s failure. A gravesite.
We were warned.
The OSM was by no means a week of doom and gloom (though puppies were stocked in the exhibit hall so conference-goers could get some de-stressing play, and one large meeting space was dedicated to soothing relaxation, kind of like a chillout room at a rave). In fact, there was a pulse of energy to match the urgency, a sense that, in some quarters at least, material help is on the way. In the host city, $50 billion is being invested over 50 years to protect and preserve the Mississippi delta that has been decimated by oil drilling, rising seas, and hurricanes Katrina and Ida. That won’t be enough to save the most vulnerable areas south of New Orleans, but it’s an impressive mix of “gray and green” solutions: man-built barriers and environmental restoration. Mother nature has already lent a hand, leaving a miles-wide stretch of sediment at Neptune Pass where previously there had only been water. As artist Monique Verdin said, these disappearing soles of the Louisiana boot are the “in-between places, where salt and fresh water meet.” As a member of the Houma tribe who have inhabited the delta for centuries, she knows well what it means to be in an imperiled, liminal state. “It took 5000 years for earth to build the delta, 100 for man to ruin it,” she noted.
OSM sessions focused on not just the problems but the solutions, from technology to conservation to communication to repair. For instance, the NASA folks were giddy after the successful launch a fortnight earlier of the new Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem satellite, which will provide a hyperspectral view of the oceans. PACE will help scientists identify specific species of phytoplankton including those that can cause deadly algae blooms like the one in the Pacific last year, which sent hundreds of dead marine mammals washing up on Southern California beaches. “We’ll be able to detect toxins themselves,” said Clarissa Anderson, an executive director at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Thrilling as the prospect of a psychedelic light show beamed from the deep blue sea to satellites in space, then back to NASA headquarters may be, two other developments at the convention center excited this reporter more. One was the elevation of native ways of knowing and living. The final plenary featured the First People’s Conservation Council of New Orleans.A panel was devoted to indigenous science, and others included papers in which the researchers emphasized the importance of collaborating with local populations. As Ava Hamilton of the Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences said, “Science is colonizing.” From studies of the effects of spearfishing on Pacific atolls to a Songhees artist’s story of her time spent on a research vessel off the Vancouver coast, presenters urged scientists to be “two-eyed seeing” in their methods and epistemology. “Not all knowledge is found in one school,” said expedition leader Megan Cook, recounting the work done on the Nautilus Live vessel in cooperation with Hawai’i’s First Nations.
Equally significant to this moonlighting culture vulture was the emphasis on the need for scientists to creatively and effectively communicate their findings to the eukaryote-ignorant masses. The conference convened with a plenary session on storytelling. In between were panels and papers by artists and playwrights, about how to use music, movement, painting, sculpture, film, theater, social media, and yes, journalism to embody and explain discoveries, ideas, and solutions. Lawrence J. Pratt of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution bragged that more than 300 oceanographers showed up for opening night of the Boston Ballet’s La Mer, a piece created in collaboration with the storied Massachusetts research facility. New Orleans playwright Lisa D’Amour, author of Ocean Filibuster, talked about staging a “thermohaline rave.”
In my own life, I’m seeking to bridge what the scientific writer C.P. Snow described in 1959 as “the two cultures”: science and the humanities. I’ve spent most of my career writing about the arts, particularly music because it’s what I love. But I have always equally relished the natural world, and with the launch of this column in Random Lengths, I’m pivoting to cover what I see as the most important issue of our time: our earthly home. Specifically, water, and humans’ relationship to it.
Many writers define nature as that which is separate from human. Like so many binaries, this division blocks a more nuanced understanding of our world. Nature is part of us, and vice versa. Humans are bodies of water; H2O constitutes more than half of our makeup (the percentage varies based on gender). And yet in the 400 or so million years since animals crawled out of the sea and lost their gills, many homo sapiens have come to fear our aquatic origins and treat our lakes, rivers, and oceans as an old enemy – or a dump.
Here in the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles and the Harbor Cities, our lives are water-based. From Wilmington to Avalon and Seal Beach to Rat Beach, sailors, swimmers, fisherpeople, tugboat captains, lifeguards, artists, deckhands, surfers, windsurfers, kayakers, divers, chefs, and educators find their purpose, their livelihood, and their pleasure in the Pacific Ocean that surrounds us on three sides. We are “peninsula people,” as a character in the comedy Beef repeatedly tells his Korean cousin. Water surrounds and defines us.
Writing about nature can, and should, be writing about culture. I’m interested in exploring the human relationship to water through profiles of individuals who have compelling and diverse connections to it. Water is the next, and perhaps final, frontier in the environmental push to save our planet. We are four years into what the United Nations has declared the Ocean Decade, a time of international engagement with, and investment in, our seas. We must explore our relationship to bodies of water in order to save them, and ourselves.
Decades ago, the naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote about the need to cultivate a “land ethic,” in which we think of the land as a living entity with human rights. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect,” the Midwesterner wrote, stating a principle that has become a core belief of environmentalists’ approach to wilderness. I am among those who seek to articulate a water ethic: We must see our oceans, rivers, wetlands, lakes, ponds, and streams as part of our community and treat them with love and respect. Many of us peninsula people know this; some of us don’t. By exploring these relationships, we can think about what constitute acts of love and respect, and how we can nurture and promote them.
In Bodies of Water, I will write about an array of individuals who can help us see the color and shape of water in different and enlightening ways. These will be ethnographic articles about people who are our neighbors, coworkers, friends.
I went to New Orleans to gain deeper knowledge from experts who have spent their careers studying the ocean from multiple vantage points. Frankly, I was worried I’d be the crazy rock chick in a sea of nerds. Instead, I found a diverse group of vibrant, engaged, smart, and often very young people. Granted, I got confused by some of the terms. When a presenter on a panel about audio and the ocean referenced the “shrimp band,” I pictured a combo of crustaceans playing swing on saxophones and trumpets ― clearly, my stay in the French Quarter had affected me. In fact, the shrimp band is the decibel level at which the snapping sounds of shrimps are detected by microphones in coral reefs. I got lost in the calculus equations of ocean currents, but when policymakers and oceanographers convened to talk about the crisis of coastal cities during rising seas, this San Pedran felt very much at home.
A strong sense of urgency united many of the OSM meetings. Town halls addressed the shortage of governmental funding for ocean research, the crisis of coastal cities, the need for increased racial and gender diversity in the sciences, and the imperative to tell the story of climate change. As a journalist, I am acutely aware that we live in a time when the basic facts of life have been called into question by ideologues and politicians who exploit fear, bias, and uncertainty. In New Orleans, I saw scientists also engaged in the battle to protect and advance knowledge.
Back home in San Pedro, I woke up the morning after my return from New Orleans and rode my bike over to the warehouse housing AltaSea, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the local emergent “blue economy.” At a panel about “surf sustainability,” five representatives of various environmental activist organizations and enterprises spoke with great passion about “the global commons” and “coral resilience.” “The ocean as a body needs to have rights,” said Bodhi Patil, the 21-year-old climate solutionist, articulating the water ethic. “She deserves it.” It was as “stoked” a discussion as anything I witnessed at OSM, and it was a bike ride away. These are the types of bodies I hope to highlight over the next months, the peninsula people who define the life aquatic here in our own backyard.
Evelyn McDonnell is the author or editor of eight books, a nationally recognized award-winning journalist, and a professor at Loyola Marymount University. This is the first in her new series Bodies of Water for Random Lengths.