Let's Row Together

The ocean. Its magnificent healing powers, and the healing it needs from us. Heat and coral, and what this injurious intersection means for a livable climate.

The ocean is my closest friend.

A reliable partner. Always there, waiting for me, welcoming me. A true companion. A good listener too. When I’m at the ocean’s edge, my thoughts coalesce. My friend, the ocean, can be blustery at times, then calm the next day.

Different moods.

Like me.

We’re never far apart since I live near the Atlantic. But when I sense my need to feel waves wash over my feet or to submerge myself under them, I head for Cape Cod. This is where I met the ocean 73 years ago after my parents drove me, their first child, East from my birthplace in Iowa City.

That’s when we settled by the sea.

On beach walks, I observe the ocean’s tidal rhythm which helps me to measure the beat of my own life that day. On these walks, I notice things about myself that don’t register when I am not near the sea. It’s also a time when good memories flow, when I can see myself sailing with dear friends, some of whom have left this Earth. I relive our joyful times when the wind propelled us through the waves with our sails pulled tight, and then filled our sails as they reached out over the sea on a quieter run home.

The ocean comforts me. When I need solace, I know this is where I’ll find it.

At a turn in the road in my Cape Cod village of Hyannis Port, I always stop to breathe in this ocean view.

When President John F. Kennedy, who sailed his wooden Wianno Senior, Victura, out of this harbor, spoke to the America’s Cup Crews in September, 1962, he pondered our human connection to the sea, while reflecting on our commitment to it:

“I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea - whether it is to sail or to watch it - we are going back from whence we came.”

Nearly half a century later, in 2009, Mary Oliver lent her poetic touch to describing how the ocean nourishes us.

Ocean

I am in love with Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is

always grief more than enough,
a heart-load for each of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all the blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.

Injuring what sustains us

Earth has only one ocean. We’ve partitioned it with names and given each of our oceans boundary lines, though they will never be actual boundaries to its currents or maladies. Ocean covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface, yet “more than 90 percent of Earth's warming over the past 50 years has happened in the ocean,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

It is by our human follies – most of all our ceaseless burning of fossil fuels – that we injure, harm, and endanger the ocean and what lives in it.

Like its coral reefs.

As the canary on the ocean’s floor, the coral speaks to us. Now, it’s sounding an alarm. So far, we mostly lament its loss, since globally we haven’t acted in the ways that will actually reduce the ocean’s overly hefty intake of heat.

March was well above the 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) global target for limiting the worst effects of climate change.

Such headlines - these, published this week – herald undeniable consequences that result from our inaction in the face of what we see and feel happening around us.

---

Entering a “new world”

A bit more than two decades ago, I snorkeled in radiantly colorful coral reefs in the Buck Island Reef National Monument in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a place that President Kennedy called “one of the finest marine gardens in the Caribbean Sea.” But its long-protected status (since 1948) has not shielded this treasure from the kinds of devastating losses affecting coral globally.

A 2023 map of Buck Island shows areas of reef erosion alongside fewer areas of reef growth.

This week NOAA announced that the world’s coral reefs may be in the MIDDLE of the “widest global bleaching event ever recorded.” The culprit: extraordinarily high ocean temperatures.

Coral is stressed when waters it lives in are warmed beyond the temperature at which these reefs thrive. In overly heated water, coral spits out algae from its tissue, and then bleaching occurs as the coral loses its color and depletes its energy. When ocean temperature stays too hot for too long, bleached coral dies. When this happens, the animal food chains relying on them collapse.

Bleached coral in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef

What to do?

For this guidance, I turn to my go-to climate reporter Emily Atkin, who in this week’s HEATED Substack spoke with marine biologist Julia Baum who has been researching climate-threatened coral reefs for many years.

”Although coral restoration efforts may be able to save tiny pockets of coral reef in a few select areas, the only real solution for coral reefs now is a rapid phase out of fossil fuels,” Baum told her via e-mail. “This is a collective responsibility. All governments, industries, and institutions must act to halt planetary warming if these enormously valuable ecosystems are to be saved.”

Keep doing what we’re doing, and we know the result: “If we push the climate system to 2 degrees Celsius, we’re talking about 1 percent of reefs surviving,” Kim Cobb, a Georgia Tech climate scientist, told Atkin.

When coral reefs die, the ocean species dependent on them die off too. That’s a huge loss since reefs nurture roughly one-quarter of all ocean animals during part of their life cycle. These losses threaten the global fishing economy, deprive millions of people of essential protein in their diets, and increase the devastating impact of intensifying storms on vulnerable communities, especially at a time when sea levels are rising due to melting of polar ice.

Can renewable energy work?

For this, I turn to Bill McKibben, whose The Crucial Years Substack reached me last night.

“For the last few weeks California has been, for part of every single day, generating more power than it can use from sun and wind and water,” McKibben writes.

“While California has hit 100% renewable energy before, for brief moments on exceptionally sunny days, this is the first time the state has sustained that success over an extended period. As Stanford expert Mark Jacobson noted, there was even a portion of a recent day when wind, water, solar, and geothermal power (often shortened to the catchier "#WindWaterSolar" and #WWS hashtag) combined to reach 109% of the state's electricity demand, with anything unused going to battery storage.”

There is too much changing in our ocean for us to absorb today.

So, next time you set up your beach chair, take an extra long look at the ocean, while considering the tumult happening beneath the surface of this life-force that sustains us. Ponder what all of this means for a livable climate. And when your beach day ends, try to come up with a role that suits you and your lifestyle best, and then join others in one of the myriad grass-roots efforts to reduce our dependence of fossil fuels.

Don’t stay on the sidelines.

Get in the game.

It’s called our future.

A Sunrise Send-off Row for Lisa

On Thursday morning our quad group rowed on the Charles River, with Lisa Laskin bowing a boat. Then, last night, this Cambridge, MA chef extraordinaire flew to Ireland to begin her 12-week certificate course at Ballymaloe Cookery School, where Ireland’s farm-to-table movement began.

As Lisa wrote in her introductory Substack, Magically Delicious: “I’ll live in a wee cottage at the school, cook all manner of things, meet ALL the cows and chickens and pigs, learn a ton, and hopefully return full of tall tales and also probably all of the bread.”

I hope you’ll follow Lisa on Magically Delicious.

No recipes.

Plenty of adventures.