There is no denying that artificial borders constructed by society divide nations and people both geographically and culturally. However there is one defining aspect that serves as a symbol of unity between people regardless of their background, and that is the Ocean. Water is never truly stable in nature; constantly moving and providing for different forms of life both inside and outside of the sea in terms of habitat and food source. While this is something that may seem obvious to the majority of the population, it is something that caught my attention and after reading “A poetics of planetary water: The blue humanities after John Gillis” By Steve Mentz, it was evident that not too many people legitimately understand the tremendous spiritual and biological impact ALL forms of H2O has on our planet .
We as humans often times enforce limitations on others through walls, barriers, and creating chasms between ourselves due to different viewpoints. It is because of these boundaries that one does not respect or consider each and every aspect of water as referenced by Mentz, “To surge over boundaries and encircle the globe requires us to embrace not only each bay and basin but also comparatively smaller bodies of fresh water, including both solid ice and water vapor” (139). It is only after I read this section that I began to look at all different forms of water (i.e. clouds, glaciers, snow, vapor) and this information opened a new viewpoint for me that I never considered, that of which is the ability to interpret various forms of water differently or just blatantly not being able to certainly define the structure of said forms which Mentz mentions when discussing cloud shapes or lack thereof. Water is abundant in the wild and within ourselves and in places where water is scarce, just the tiny bit of water droplets attracts organisms and although this may seem apparent, people should indeed take notice of the various forms of water as Mentz said, its the main reason we are alive both through connections of the spiritual and the physical.
Omar, you make a really good point about water’s versatility and necessity to our society. We tend to forget how integral it is to our society in nearly every aspect, whether for us or for the ecosystems around us. I feel like because of its abundance, we tend to forget how relevant it is, and deem it unimportant, treating it the way we treat anything in nature that we don’t directly recognize as imminent: we abuse it. Its variety of existences that we allow to dissipate, like glaciers melting at a rapid rate or the entire lack of thought around ice and water vapors as a form of water, actualizes how one-tracked our minds continue to be, and how aids and abets to the destruction of something we really depend on despite our behavior. It reflects in nature the same way consistently, where we allow ourselves to disregard its potential endangerment because we’re so focused on the things that we consider more essential to us, on the limitations you mentioned we set.