The State of the Ocean

I just received a newsletter from an artist friend of mine, one of the several artists I know who are aware of some of the serious issues facing our waters — and doing something about it. In addition to being an artist, she also writes about environmental health issues. In her newsletter, she summed up recent news about the state of our oceans with such craftsmanship that I won't try to paraphrase it, I'll just quote the whole thing below.

The State of the Ocean
by Robi Smith

This past week, the oceans have been in the news, and not for the best reasons. Scientists are coming to understand that our oceans are under even more stress than previously thought, and that mass extinctions are on the horizon. This is bad news for all of us on the planet. The bad and the good news is that we humans are the problem. Bad because there are a heck of a lot of us doing pretty destructive things. Good because we can change those actions for the better. As an optimist, I'm hopeful that by changing our collective paradigms about what is important and how we live/consume, we can turn things around.

Yes, changing paradigms. Totally daunting, overwhelming, and completely doable. How do I know? Because it's already happening. Everything we need to do in order to turn things around is already being done by people just like us. Imagine our world as a place where the "normal" diet is vegan (no animal suffering, abundant wild fish stocks, no fish farms), most people go car-free (widely available and affordable mass transit, high speed rail, and massive networks of bike lanes), single-use plastic packaging is a thing of the past, and governments and businesses support and promote renewable energy sources (no more oil spills, no tar sands). All these actions would drastically reduce pollution and carbon emissions. And all these actions are available to us.

Okay, so what does this have to do with my art? Well, everything really. As I look forward to the paintings I want to produce over the next while, these are the issues I'm going to be grappling with. The ocean remains for me the place where all of my environmental concerns come together, so my paintings will continue to be based under water. Beyond that, you'll just have to wait and see what emerges :)