Intertidal Moment

One of the true joys in my life has been visits to the ocean shore. Standing on the beach and watching the waves roll in covering the sand and then fade away, is full of endless wonder to me. It is in that intertidal zone, the interface of the land and sea, that transitional edge of the land into the oceanic realm that I find fascinating.

I now see myself, (and the rest of the planet), in an intertidal moment. We are transiting from the old way of our lives, set in motion after the World War II, into an uncertain future full of dangers and challenges. The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 to 2023 was a door-stop to the old era. The images are still with me, the empty cities devoid of all traffic, the overcrowded hospitals, masks, vaccines, isolation and the furious babble of political deniers. The pandemic has given us the opportunity to reevaluate the next future steps that we must make in order to survive and thrive in the next 50 years. The problem is that we are being told that our lives and the way we live are in considerable danger. If recent TV and movies are any indication, the full-blown horrors of our dystopian future are not very far away. Zombies, civil war, pandemics, infertility, famine, ecological collapse, economic and political chaos, global warfare, climate change, asteroids and even volcanic eruption will destroy us all.

I think we’re tougher than we look. After all, we survived millennia of continual pulses of an ecology-breaking ice age that shaped us in ways we are now only just beginning to understand. We also out-survived all of those huge ice age mammals and developed a massive global civilization, from scratch, in just 10,000 years. Not bad for small, hairy, mid-brained creatures. The proof is in the pudding, (as my mother used to say, and I didn’t understand it then, much less now), and we will continue to advance and hopefully make the future better. However, we must kiss our old lives goodbye, now. Do we need to transition from energy production that pollutes our atmosphere and pumps mind-numbing amounts of climate changing CO2 into the air we breathe? Yes, and right now. Do we need to stop depleting and mindlessly exploiting our very limited natural resources on the land and in the ocean? Yes, and right now. Do we need to take better care of our human population, adjusting for famine, homelessness, health, equality and education? Yes, and right now. We are in that intertidal moment, we must decide which of the many ways to go, for better or worse.

(Me on the intertidal beach at Seaside, Oregon, it is one of my favorite places. In fact, the whole Oregon coast is amazing, especially for someone like me who basically lives in a desert.)