What if You Could Never See the Ocean Again

For the last 6 years, I've lived in an body of water paradise. Hawaii is pretty much as much as ocean equally you lot can get - it is the most isolated island concatenation in the earth, which means we have more bounding main around u.s. than anyone else. At that place is nowhere on this island that I am more than 15 miles from the bounding main. Merely by the time I have published this blog post I won't exist here anymore. Instead, I will be 4,834 miles away, in the centre of a huge city, and the closest bounding main will be more than a two hour drive away (although there is a nearby bay).

I didn't abound up in a religion. Instead, every bit cheesy as it may audio (and nosotros all know I have a hipster-esque fear of being cheesy), my soul is replenished when immersed in nature. Seeing wild creatures living their (often messy, rarely idealistic) lives is a privilege that I find almost spiritual. Equally a scientist who studies whales, I have a very hard time admitting to this. Whale biologists absolutely groan at quotes from people having "spiritual" experiences staring into a whale's eyes and feeling their souls meld.

My experience is a little bit different - I don't experience spiritual connections with wild animals, and I don't expect into their optics and see their souls. Instead, seeing a native Hawaiian animal reminds me of how easily lost these ecosystems are, and make me profoundly grateful to be able to see them as they now are. I will never see a sea moo-cow, or experience the oceans as they once were. This is 1 of the reasons why I accept been waking upward at 3:00 am, feeling like my heart is being squeezed and twisted apart past a pair of fists. Melodramatic, I know.

All of this personal angst really relates to a large debate in sea science education. This debate is about whether it is necessary to show people body of water animals to become them to care about those animals. The statement is that people living far from the ocean never see whales, or dolphins, or body of water slugs, or nudibranchs, and if they don't run across them they can't possibly care near conserving them.

If I motion abroad from the body of water, volition I stop caring about it?

Did I ever care virtually the ocean before I lived most it?

I don't suppose I tin definitively answer the first question. I have simply been abroad from the ocean for about 2 weeks. I wrote the beginning of this post several weeks ago, while I was notwithstanding in Hawaii, simply stopped I wanted to have the experience of living in a identify that was far from the ocean earlier I connected. The city I am currently living in is further from the saltwater than anywhere I have lived for the past 12 years.

Superficially, things are much the same. At that place is still a lot of cute nature, and wildlife, if I look for it (I fifty-fifty saw a heron today!). But in that location is no way to go downward to the shore in the evening and peer through tide pools. The closest I tin can get here is by visiting the tropical fish tank in my role, the Natural History Museum's Sea Showroom, or the animals at the National Zoo.* Seeing an animal in its natural habitat and seeing it in a zoo (fifty-fifty an first-class one) are non the same. In the wild, I can encounter some of the complex interaction between a body of water star and its environment. There is a sense of identify and community. It is like the difference between eating at a French eatery and visiting Ypres.

Even though I recall seeing animals in the wild gives a more nuanced understanding of ocean creatures than seeing them in nature, I also think you lot can get that sense of identify by learning about the ocean. Stories nearly the lives of amazing bounding main creatures are what got me excited nigh the ocean before I lived anywhere near salt h2o. Which besides answers my 2nd question.

I am interested in hearing about other people'southward stories. What experience first got yous interested in the sea?

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*I managed to visit both of these the week before the regime shutdown.

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Source: https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/saltwater-science/can_you_still_love_the/

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