As I Live and Breath

We’re half way through these short reflections on the Seven Principles of Ocean Literacy. This week we thank the ocean for life and breath. In addition, I suggest, since I am authorized as a minister for the ocean, that the ocean is like God, really old and ever new. 

Principle #4 reads: “The Ocean made the Earth habitable.” 

But wait!  Lower on the same page it reads, “Principle #4: The Ocean makes the Earth habitable.”

Make up your mind, great ocean scientists and educators!  Are you saying the the Ocean made, or that it makes, the Earth habitable?

I imagine they would say, “Both.” 

All the other 6 principles are written in the present tense.  The ocean “has, is, shapes, supports, etc.”  Maybe it’s just bad proofreading.  Or perhaps the framers are being intentionally ambiguous.  The ocean acted in the past, but is it still acting?

The question reminds me of my Christian denomination’s catch phrase, “God is still speaking.”  Sounds like “ocean is still acting.”  Not just in the past, but now. 

This might not seem like a big deal or difference, but when we in the United Church of Christ affirmed “Never place a period where God has placed a comma, God is Still Speaking,” a huge controversy ensued.  When we developed ads that showed some churches turning folks away, but UCC congregations welcoming everyone, all the major TV networks refused to air them.  “Too political,” they said. 

Some conservative denominations squealed as well, countering with their own ads that read “Never place a comma where God has placed a period.  God has Spoken!”  The theological difference might seem subtle, but the sore spot seemed to be, “Is God an active open presence and possibility today, or were all God’s rules and norms set in the past?  Do we look for God’s guidance only in the past?” 

While the nervous TV executives saw only sexual politics, the UCC message was much broader.  The UCC’s Science and Technology Working Committee, of which I was a member, encouraged ads like “God loves quantum mechanics.  And regular mechanics too,” and “Our faith is 2000 years old.  Our thinking is not.”  We wrote position papers supporting the teaching of evolution in public schools.  We used the present tense, literally and theologically.

The confusion about the wording of Principle #4 could simply be sloppy editing.  Or is there still a hint of confusion or caution in how to describe time – did the ocean make Earth habitable in the past or present?  I can’t believe these educators and scientists worry about creationists refusing to use these principles in classrooms.  But I am glad this confusion has reminded me to affirm the “bothness” of the conflicting statements. Yes!  Both!  God, and the ocean, acted then and act today to make Earth habitable.

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This 4th principle could be called the “As I Live and Breathe” principle, because its framers recommend teaching this principle in two main points, “oxygen production” and “origins of life.”  The subpoints of this principle are:

1. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere originally came from the activities of photosynthetic organisms in the ocean. This accumulation of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere was necessary for life to develop and be sustained on land.
2. The first life is thought to have started in the ocean. The earliest evidence of life is found in the ocean.
3. The ocean provided and continues to provide water, oxygen and nutrients, and moderates the climate needed for life to exist on Earth ( Essential Principles 1,3, and 5).

(Now the framers use both past and present tense, not either/or: “provided and continues to provide…”)

Breathe: For very four breaths we take, no matter how near the ocean we live, three of those breaths come from the ocean.  So much plant plankton grows in the ocean, creating oxygen, that we breath ocean oxygen everywhere, even inland, in Kansas.  Of course we should keep planting trees -  we need all the oxygen we can get. But if we want to keep breathing, we need healthy oceans, and oceans not so acidic as climate change is making them.  We need to breathe!  Otherwise, life on earth is not so habitable.

Live:  Life itself began in the ocean.

All life. Plants, amoebas, worms, muskrats, humans - we all share an ancestry in the sea. I remember my shock as a child when I went to New York’s Natural History Museum and followed the floor arrows to the various “branches” of the tree of life, the first amoebas, the split between vertebrate and invertebrate, and as we walked up the great chain of being I couldn’t find humans! We were not the culmination of this great progress. Hominids were tucked away in a little corner next to muskrats as I recalled, one small part of the mammal section, vastly overshadowed by the worm section. Humbling.

But if life began in the sea, how did it move onto land? In recent decades scientists have actually found the link between ocean animals and us land mammals. Not on some gentle sandy beach did our ancestors emerge from the sea, but in the Arctic, which once was a tropical ocean. There fossils of Tiktaalik have been found. Tiktaalik is the name paleontologist Neil Shubin gave to the first “fish with hands,” the animals that 375 million years ago first made the move from ocean to land.

In his book “Your Inner Fish” (and the PBS series that grew out of it) this paleontologist and anatomy professor examines fossils and DNA to show how we can actually see our ancestry in the ocean simply by looking at our our hands, heads and genome; they look like, and function much like our ancestor fish.

A simple example of this ancestry is the fluid inside our bodies – blood, sweat, tears, even amniotic fluid – all the same salinity as the sea, as the ocean that Tiktaalik swam in and left to venture onto land. We have oceans surging and coursing inside our bodies. They gave us life in the past, and they save us today.

As we live and lived, as we breathe and breathed, we can’t do it, couldn’t do it, without the ocean.

Thank you ocean.

Copyright © 2017 Deborah Streeter