This her TED talk, Edith Widder reveals a bio-luminescent rich under water world. A place where self-produced light is essential to survival and 90% of animals make blue light, the farthest reaching, and therefore most popular wavelength of light. There is so much we have not yet discovered, and yet they can all be gone in one lifetime.
I enjoy visits to the underwater world tremendously. Every vacation's top priority has been snorkeling and diving. The under water creatures puts on such an incredible display of colour and dance in their symphony of life. My heart breaks for BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill that is mass murdering these beautiful creatures and entire ecosystems. News coverage have been focusing on "compensat[ing] people for their losses and understand[ing] the damage wrought" when with our limited knowledge of only 3% of ocean life, we cannot begin to comprehend the damage wrought, let alone trying to compensate for mass murdering entire ecosystems. And while our attention has been drawn away by the Gulf of Mexico spill, oil pipelines in Dalian, China bursted and spilled enough oil to rival the Exxon Valdez.
As long as we depend on and harvest oil, these leakages will continue to happen. As much as oil executives lay out promises of better containment technologies and maybe even insure against damages, we stand to lose too much in a spill. All the gold in the world cannot compensate for lost ecosystems, the Earth's most valuable asset to the good life.
We are way beyond the canary in the coal mine at this stage. The ocean, as vast and impenetrable it is to land dwelling humans is our final frontier. And we have already lost 35% of corals in the last 15 years, with predicted escalating loss rates due to global warming. If we want to preserve the good life before we hit tipping point, the only reasonable go-forward plan is to use the precautionary, or what I call the "better never than oops," principle. That is, each and every person needs to employ all possible resources to restrain from activities, even low risk activities, that involve species murder, environmental degradation, or plausible ecosystem alteration. This includes boycotting products that contribute to said activities and choosing ones that don't. Only when we all take responsibility for our shared planet can we begin to reverse the cycle and restore the beautiful symphony of life.
