Aqua Terra: Reflections on the World Ocean

Personal, poetic and profound reflections on the natural ocean system.

The literature of the environmental movement is often polemic, but also often includes brilliant examples of quiet observations that have invaded our barriers of rationality and schooled resistance as persuasion, to affect a subtle shifting awareness, innovative thinking, and progressive involvement. Such texts frequently mimic the forms of Nature, meandering like a stream, aggregating like a pond or lake, and descending into the psyche as a repeating current of re-vision and re-dedication.

AQUA/TERRA unfolds as such a riverine passage, from confrontation to connection, revolution to reflection. It begins at the edge, the intersection of land and sea, flows on to examples of oceanic inter-connection, circulates in a gyre of revolutionary proposals, and ends in a pool of reflections where facets of the ocean appear in association with personal feelings and observations.

There is no didactic argument made here. Rather these brief essays and insights relate to an individual understanding of actuality and possibility, asking for reader response with the same spirit with which they are offered: the finding of an individual way, a meeting alongshore or at sea thereafter, a sharing of thoughts and aspirations to unite us in the great encompassing ocean world, world ocean, wherein we all swim together, mindful and generous and connected. AQUA/TERRA asks for one positive outcome from its reading: the transformation of each of the nouns in this thematic passage into verbs: Confront. Connect. Revolve. Reflect. In such connected, determined action lies the nascent power of a global community of Citizens of the Ocean, a force for the future as deep, wide, and dynamic as the ocean itself.