Adora Maris

Intro music…

Welcome to World Ocean Radio.

Wave and wind sounds…

I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.

Today marks the 800th edition of World Ocean Radio, an audio feature and podcast that is heard across the US through more than 70 syndicated stations, in Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Australia, through Internet Radio on both coasts of Africa, and on social media platforms to include Facebook and Linked In worldwide. We began broadcasting in 2009 on WERU 89.9 FM, Community Radio in Blue Hill, Maine, USA: we thank the WERU management and trustees for their initial confidence in our project, and to all of you, Citizens of the Ocean around the world, thanks for listening.

From the first edition, our central focus has been “adora maris,” translated from the Latin as “worship of the sea,” reflecting cultural reverence of for the ocean as evinced since the first crude craft was launched from shore, a dug-out tree trunk, or skins on a cut brush frame, or logs tied together as rafts to make trans-oceanic passage. All ancient civilizations have such endeavor deep in their history, for coastwise fishing, trade, navigation, and exploration for opportunity beyond the horizon. The Chinese, Greeks, Norwegians, Phoenicians, and many others were immersed in relation with the sea, incorporating sea creatures and sea stories into their rituals and religions, their art and humanistic endeavors, their sense of beauty, psyche, imagination, and the future. Our constant reprisal here that “the sea connects all things” is not an aspiration, but rather an assertion of an historical reality that has served civilization forever and will carry us on still into the future.

We love what we need most, whether human connection, food, energy, community, or simply just the water – from the water cycle supplied by the ocean and circulated worldwide to keep us hydrated and vital, as an individual, a family, or a nation state. We sustain what we love, as best we can, but with a need and urgency that can so devastatingly reveal its essential loss when it is no longer sustainable.
The paradox is multi-faceted: the consequence of the commodification of the land extended to the commodification of the sea, with finite outcomes of pollution, exhaustion, and accelerating decline; the uncompromising consumption of fresh water to the point when the wells run dry, the rivers become flows of dust and dry, the developed coastal cities suck the aquifer dry. Dry, dry, dry, no life there, no soul, no hope, nothing to worship or adore.

I am a believer. I do not accept the defeat inherent in what we experience today. I am convinced that we have, beyond just need, the will to sustain life, not deplete it, to restore life to the biodiversity and natural systems that have supported us for centuries. But to do so we must wipe away the desiccating dust of disinterest and defeat to reveal the courage and political will that has characterized human endeavor for all time. We must restore the essence of the ocean, the water, as a source of renewal and optimism, the emotional understanding of incontrovertible need matched to the physical necessities of living safely and peacefully and successfully alone and among each other.

I have shared now 800 variants of this theme with listeners all over the world: the identification of hydraulic society, through its many ebbs and flows, as a future stream that will water our gardens, feed our families, power our work and reward, and organize a society united by the recognition and provision of mutual need, by the spiritual values, the new structures, and the dramatic actions that must be taken, more than enough, in time.

I am asking for a “pro-volution,” not a revolution or evolution, but rather a collective realization by “all citizens of the ocean” worldwide, forward and through to a new way of living, a new way to sustain and honor life, indeed, to understand and embrace the way that the ocean will save civilization and a state of adora maris, worship of the sea that connects all things, will endure.

We will discuss these things, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio

Outro music…