The first of the readings this week, although incredibly content and numerically heavy, really seemed to open my eyes about a reality we know, but don’t think of: water outnumbers us by an immeasurable amount.
It’s specifically the way it’s enumerated and compared within the Ocean Reader introduction: “The largest of the regions is the Pacific Ocean, which is an expanse of 64 million square miles (about 165 million square kilo- meters [km]). It is difficult to grasp such enormous dimensions. By contrast, the landmass of Asia, the largest continent, is only about 17 million square miles (44 million square km), while North America covers just 9.5 million (24.6 million square km), of which the United States represents less than half, with 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million square km)” (Roorda, 2). Obviously, the fact that the Earth is 70 percent water is considered a common place fact, but it’s never really actualized how greatly that stretches across the physical space unit its existence becomes contrasted to something we recognize. It returns us to this conversation from class prior, that human beings consistently need to label based on comparison and recognizing it because of what it is not.
This disconnect of disregarding water, and treating as some sort of minute thing compared to our landmasses, only for it to be larger than even our largest areas, really puts it into perspective how disproportionately human beings seem to recognize the world around them. It’s so common to hold this assumption that because we can identify ourselves as sentient, it places us above everything else in this ecological food chain. The decision making and this labeling of important versus not becomes ours to choose, ours to define in spite of never recognizing its capacity because of our typical definition models. Despite being so commonly terracentric in our speech, so selfish in the way we acknowledge the world around us and never considering how our speech, our action, even our momentary thought has lasting effect, the water really has all the power.
Glad to see the data sinking in, pardon the pun, and your growing awareness of how humans have shaped stories about the ocean coming into a bit of a paradigm shift. Good post!
Hi Kenzy! I felt so overwhelmed by the sheer amount amount of water covering the surface of the earth being quantified and put before me. You are absolutely right, that “the water has all the power,” which does not remove our responsibility for causing harm to the Ocean, but rather recognizing that the Ocean has the power to turn our understanding of the world on its head.