The Ocean
While on vacation, we spent, not surprisingly, a ton of time in the water. There were some perfectly lovely rock reefs right off the beach from where we were staying and that was a great way to get my daughter (7½) going on snorkeling.
Here’s the thing: When John Muir started the Sierra Club in 1892, he knew that the best way to get people excited about preserving the wild places of the earth is to get them out seeing, feeling, tasting and touching nature. He took folks from San Francisco to Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy, then when they were back in town, they worked to protect these places. When I was a kid, I skied in New England and hiked in the Adirondacks. I came to appreciate these wonderful places and when I was old enough, I set to work as an environmental activist. I turned pro later, working for 11 years for the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation, and I’ve been writing all the way along.
It’s the same thing with the ocean. Once you get people into the ocean to see the reefs and the fish and the extraordinary beauty and vitality, you’re going to make environmentalists of them. If you are just going to the beach or the lakes to vacation and swim, you’re still going to feel the ineluctable emotional gravity of nature. You become – and maybe it’s trite – part of nature.
In St. Martin, there’s a growing environmental movement. The French government, for their part, have created a marine preserve. Here’s Creole Rock, a sweet little snorkeling and dive destination that’s part of the preserve.
We had several dive and snorkeling trips and saw all sorts of wonders: stingrays and eagle rays, sea turtles, scorpionfish, octopus, eels, barracuda, starfish, snakefish, trumpetfish, even a flying gurnard, plus the more prosaic but still entrancing array of parrotfish, sergeant majors, wrasses, and all the others. The coral formations are also, in many places, stunning.
We went out a couple of times with a great crew from Octopus Diving, our second dive on our second trip climaxing with a full-tilt boogie thunderstorm. This was my first time being 45 feet down and seeing pelting rain and flashing lightning up above. Nobody else seemed too concerned so I was relaxed about it. I was concerned however about my kid up top in the boat. When we surfaced, there was the kid, though, and one of the fabulous pair who run the shop, jumping up and down and hootin’ and hollerin’ in the pounding rain, the boat rockin’ and rollin’. Back on board, I was assured that we had an “anode” to protect us from the lightning. (Phew.)
If you want to know more about the ocean and climate change’s impact, you couldn’t do better than to start with Betsy Kolbert’s article in “The New Yorker” from two years ago, The Darkening Sea. You can also see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change material on the ocean from its Fourth Assessment Report.