What About The Sea?

Last week I described the affection our family has felt for the sea. From my youngest years the sea has held a powerful attraction. However, not everyone shares that affinity.Our Hebrew forebears saw the sea as an all-powerful enemy. In one of the earliest mythic stories, great storms unleashed the seas, flooding the entire world, and wiping out almost everybody. Later it was the Red Sea that stood between Egypt and freedom. These, our spiritual ancestors, were hill people, and their enemies were the coastal Philistines who had migrated from Crete. Other enemies came from Greece, and finally Rome, at the other end of the Mediterranean. Even early Christians harbored a distaste for the sea, and when they got away from land they were often seasick. The worst punishment that could be imagined was to be lost in the “uttermost parts of the sea.” The last chapter of Revelation paints an ideal image of the new heaven and the new earth God will give the faithful; and to make matters perfect, “the sea was no more!”

But if the sea is a friend, not an enemy, how should it be treated? When Wendy and I finished our mission work in Australia, we returned to the United States on a freighter. It took 29 days to cross the mighty Pacific Ocean. On the way, our ship made a slight detour to keep from colliding with a floating island the size of the state of Maryland. It was made up of trash, and grows larger and more deadly every year. You see, we have been using our oceans both as a giant sewer and as the town dump.

From the dawn of the industrial age we have burned enough fossil fuels—coal, oil, natural gas—to add more than 365 billion tons of carbon to the air we all breathe. Each year we throw up another nine billion tons. The toxic level of the resulting generation of carbon dioxide is now higher than at any time in the last several million years.

What does this have to do with the oceans? Everywhere that the air comes in contact with water, the water become more acidic. As a result, the oceans are 30% more acidic than than they were in 1800, and are becoming 150% more acidic than they have ever been. Even now the acidic condition of the seas has bleached and killed most of the coral reefs and much of the marine life.
Kill the oceans and human existence on the land will be severely threatened!
We are already seeing the effects in which climate change and global warming, the results of human activity, have generated storms and hurricanes spawned from increased ocean temperatures. The scientific community has also demonstrated the direct relationship between the fires gutting much of America’s West Coast and climate change. This raises the specter of a President who claims to know more about the effects of climate change than the world’s scientists. He does not! The survival of the planet is a scientific issue, not a political problem.

If there were no other reason to see that Trump’s reign is terminated, and there are many, the anguish of the world’s oceans should be enough. If you really adore the sea, treat it as you would a human loved one. The next time you visit an ocean, listen, and you might hear its anguished cries.