East Plains United Church, Burlington.
Hamilton/Burlington KAIROS and Greening Sacred Spaces/Environment Hamilton
presented 'Signs of Hope in the Carbon Crisis: An Evening with Alanna Mitchell.'
Alanna Mitchell, author of Sea Sick: the hidden crisis of global ocean change is an environmental journalist who has travelled the world talking to scientists about the oceans.
All life—whether on land or in the sea— depends on the oceans for two things:
— Oxygen. Most of Earth’s oxygen is produced by phytoplankton in the sea. These humble, one-celled organisms, rather than the spectacular rain forests, are the true lungs of the planet.
— Climate control. Our climate is regulated by the ocean’s currents, winds, and water-cycle activity.
Alanna Mitchell shared about how she joined the crews of leading scientists in nine of the global ocean’s hotspots to see firsthand what is really happening around the world.
She talked about the impact of coral reef bleaching, the puzzle of the oxygen-less dead zones such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico, and the devastating implications of the changing Ph balance of the sea.
Alanna delved into the traumatic experience of coming to terms with how sick our oceans are. Encased in a minuscule vessel with one other passenger (lying head to toe side by side), at the bottom of the Ocean, having an 'accident' where she ended up wetting the vessel and then having to clean it up, she had an epiphany.
If you foul your nest, you have to clean it up. And so it goes with the Earth, our home. Hope, that mysterious force that keeps us going when all the odds are against us, preparing ourselves for the unexpected, flooded down on her and she says, 'the transformation to hope happened because I wanted to hope."
She talked about the impact of coral reef bleaching, the puzzle of the oxygen-less dead zones such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico, and the devastating implications of the changing Ph balance of the sea.
Alanna delved into the traumatic experience of coming to terms with how sick our oceans are. Encased in a minuscule vessel with one other passenger (lying head to toe side by side), at the bottom of the Ocean, having an 'accident' where she ended up wetting the vessel and then having to clean it up, she had an epiphany.
If you foul your nest, you have to clean it up. And so it goes with the Earth, our home. Hope, that mysterious force that keeps us going when all the odds are against us, preparing ourselves for the unexpected, flooded down on her and she says, 'the transformation to hope happened because I wanted to hope."
About her book:
Sea Sick is the first book to examine the current state of the world’s oceans —the great unexamined ecological crisis of the planet—and the fact that we are altering everything about them; temperature, salinity, acidity, ice cover, volume, circulation, and, of course, the life within them.
http://www.cookeagency.ca/books/mitchell-a_seasick.htm
http://www.cookeagency.ca/books/mitchell-a_seasick.htm
We had an audience of 100 people.
