OCEAN Archives - Page 4 of 16 -

What is the Earth Worth to You?

By Simone Lipscomb | September 29, 2013

A few days ago I visited a high school classroom where I presented a program on recycling. The teacher sponsors recycling for the high school but when I asked the students how many recycled in their home nobody raised a hand. I was shocked. Usually there are at least a few recyclers.

After completing the presentation I followed up with this question: What would it take for you to care enough to take action? Blank faces stared back at me. I asked again and one student said somebody would have to pay him.

It felt like the air was kicked out of me. These past few months of wondering what was the root of the problem of our planet and it comes down to my worst suspicions: Greed. Is it true that people are unwilling to take action, even something as basic and simple as recycling, unless there is something in it for them?

What they can’t see the payoff for being a good steward is having a healthy life, a healthier planet. A future.

In a blog post from Bill Moyers dated yesterday he wrote that top climate scientists recently reported that the time for us to act to correct the downward spiral of environmental health of the planet is very small. The study stated that unless we make major changes within a decade it’s basically an accelerating scenario of a planet unable to support life as we know it. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) warns, in this report, of an alarming escalation of climate impacts (droughts, floods, storms) but also shows that preventing climate chaos is still a possibility.

If my suspicions about human nature are true, as the high school class modeled, the majority of citizens think only in terms of monetary gain, not planetary stewardship. Somehow people must began to see that their direct actions of caring for the planet is the only way we have a viable future. Why are humans unable to remove the blinders that keep them from seeing the truth about what’s happening on the planet? What will it take to create the shift in consciousness necessary to make a positive difference? Do they care?

Recycling is so easy. I can’t imagine why people will not make the effort. Every time I see an aluminum can being tossed in the garbage I think…. 95% of the energy it takes to make an aluminum can can be saved by recycling that one. Or paper….28% of landfill waste is paper and cardboard…recyclable. According to a report I read last week, almost 33% of food in the USA is thrown in the garbage. One-third! Can you imagine?? That’s enough food to insure almost everyone in the country had a meal but instead it goes to the dump. Plastics account for 13% of landfill waste….all recyclable and yet filling our landfills with trash that will be around for hundreds of years….or worse…our oceans.

Imagine explorers visiting our planet after humans have driven our species to extinction…finding plastic bottles littering beaches, roadways. Can you imagine the conclusions these explorers might come to by what they see left behind? When they see how we treated the very ‘thing’ that sustains life for us.

How do we get people to care?

How do we get people to invest in their future by caring for the planet?

What will it take to create a shift in consciousness?

I can only do what feels right for me and pray that enough of us will care, will love our planet and our children…and future children…to be responsible, caring stewards. I wonder if we could start by taking 5 minutes a day to sit in stillness, in quiet, and ask what we can do to make a positive difference. I wonder….can we give the earth just 5 minutes of our day to listen?

A Healthy Dose of Nature

By Simone Lipscomb | August 27, 2013

Sometimes a bit of nature helps me find balance, especially when I have sudden and unexpected emotions pop up. Things have been going well for weeks with my heart opening with feelings of it delightfully expanding in unconditional love and all the good stuff. Then for some reason, around lunch time, it was like poof! And I felt off balance.

It’s normal to have ups and downs. Being human and living life guarantees emotional tides. But when they bounce in and jump out, like my orange boy cat trying to scare me, I don’t get it.

It was like a dark cloud hanging over me. But I went on with my day–shopping at the natural food store in Pensacola, planting veggie seeds in the garden, potting plants for the courtyard fence and I still felt weird. So I decided to head south.

Our sea turtle team has a nest very close to hatching so I drove down to the beach for sunset with my camera and tripod and visited with folks and took photographs. At one point I sat on the damp sand near the water’s edge and just allowed the motion of the waves to cleanse the cloud from around me. I sang a while to the sea and by the time I left, was feeling better. Still a bit ‘off’ but lighter.

No matter what I’m going through, a healthy dose of nature seems to make everything better.

What Magic!

By Simone Lipscomb | August 25, 2013

Today was the last of the 2013 Sea Turtle patrol walks for me. My Sunday morning strolls looking for mother sea turtle tracks and picking up trash are done for this nesting season. And what a beautiful day it was!

Storms were just offshore and provided a glorious display of nature’s power. There is something about a storm out over the Gulf….they key word being ‘out’ as in offshore and not over the beach.

It’s difficult to believe that another nesting season is starting to end. Of course we still have nests that will be hatching throughout September but as far as the females nesting…out team walks will be done at the end of this month.

I enjoy the Sunday morning walks…those sunrise excursions where the elements and I are one. Where wind and sea and sun and clouds affect me so deeply, so powerfully. I will miss this time alone on the shore.

It’s rather amazing how something so simple as a walk along the beach at sunrise can set the intention for the entire week. How it can open a person to the wonder of nature and the wild elements of it..birds, waves, sun, lightning, sand, salt, dolphins, sharks, rays, jellyfish, fish, seaweed, turtles, shells….what magic. What a treasure. May we honor it as such.

A Lightness of Being

By Simone Lipscomb | July 21, 2013

Sunday mornings, prior to sunrise, find me traversing an empty beach lot to the dune line. A short climb over ever-growing dunes and a quick walk across flat, sugar-white sand beach and voila! Wrack line. My target for the 1.5 mile search eastward.

I walk toward the rising sun. I’m looking for sea turtle tracks but this time of solitude at sunrise gives me space to be with the ocean, to open myself to the day and what life presents. Sounds great, right?

Today like most all other days I opted to carry my heavy camera, heavy super-wide angle lens and my carbon fiber tripod…not so heavy but after 3 miles it all starts to feel rather burdensome. I can’t help it though. Try as I might to leave the sturdy gear at home, the artist in me wants to see dawn through my lens. The environmentalist in me wants to pick up trash on the walk back. So a heavy trash day, like today, leaves me exhausted.

As I trudged back west picking up trash, the wind was blowing strongly against me. Lots of plastic in various forms littered the beach and so I was constantly bending over while trying to keep tripod and camera cases from falling off my tired shoulders. It was very frustrating….the trash, the soft sand and the heavy gear. I felt so weighed down.

Truthfully though, all of the stuff I was carrying was light compared to the inner burdens that were weighing me down. I struggled with my anger over trashy humans who throw garbage off of fishing boats, with tourists who leave plastic bottles, plastic caps, fireworks, plastic bags, and cigarette butts behind. After a mile and a half of gathering up the wastes humans left behind I felt weighed down with anger, frustration, feelings of hopelessness for our collective future and the health of our planet. And any other heavy emotion lingering about seems to pop up when I am tired. So hello my little friends….good to see you remember me. (Not!) Weary walking, this day. Very weary walking.

I was so exhausted toward the end of my walk I tried to push past trash rather than stop and put it in the already-heavy bag. But I couldn’t. I wanted to weep with fatigue and dehydration yet my love for the planet strengthened me to stop and collect the bits of garbage. I had to deal with it. I don’t want to do this! I’m tired, I silently whined. I wondered how long it would take the ghost crabs and other scavengers to pick my bones clean if I collapsed. And yes, I have a vivid imagination with a flair for the dramatic. Don’t artists always suffer for their work?

In spiritual studies, which are really studies in healing inner wounds, psychic debris and ego-driven living so our highest self can shine forth, I have sometimes wished for amnesia. Once a personality flaw is unearthed and brought to consciousness it won’t go away or get fixed by ignoring it. I thought of this as I picked up plastic garbage from the beach. Try as I might to walk past it I just couldn’t. My commitment to wildlife is to pick up this 1.5 mile stretch of beach every Sunday morning. Like my commitment to personal growth and healing leads me to keep working on myself no matter how tired or weighed down I feel. Oh, happy day. Right?

When I reached my car the feeling of letting everything go was amazing. The struggle had been great this day. Strong wind, soft sand, lots of trash…heavy gear. But the payoff…oh, the payoff. Feeling my heart and mind connect through my art. Knowing that the trash I collected will not harm innocent creatures…hoping that something I do will make a positive difference for the planet…this and singing to the sea gave me an incredible lightness of being.

The struggles? I still think it’s all worth it. Just look at this beautiful planet. Look at the sea!! And if you dare, look into my ever-lightening heart.

Welcome to the World Baby Turtles

By Simone Lipscomb | July 19, 2013

It was a glorious afternoon. I arrived at the nest we had been watching at 4.30pm and listened with the stethoscope. One 20 second cascade of sand was heard with some crawling sounds. Over an hour later…same. And on it went for hours. Checking only once an hour and thinking the turtles were resting…but that moon might just enliven them….a girl can hope, right?

In the meanwhile one of our team members refined the trench two had dug the day before. The trench helps the turtles from wandering to porch lights, condo lights and acts as a guide for their long crawl to the beach…which is especially long since the beaches were renourished, refurbished…whatever they call it. It is a very long crawl for such tiny tots. In crowded, light-polluted areas it gives the newborns their best chance at making it to open water.

The especially loooong crawl to the water....the trench helps with the light pollution experienced on our beaches. — The especially loooong crawl to the water….the trench helps with the light pollution experienced on our beaches.

Even though my shift was officially over at 9pm I had an intuitive hunch to stay around a while. At 10pm one of our folks checked and heard very active babies. They had awakened and were busy crawling up in their nest. When I last listened at 11pm it was a constant cascade of sand…so much so that I couldn’t believe we had not had some change in the surface. Just after listening I looked and saw a very small lip of sand had formed…no greater than 1.5 inches on one side of the nest. When a friend and fellow turtle-lover joined us from her home on the beach I asked her to re-check the nest at 11.20pm. In just a few moments she was excitedly saying….hurry!! They are coming!!

Because the sand was perfectly dry and fluffy, there wasn’t a big crater until they boiled. And boil they did…..delightful loggerhead hatchlings.

I squatted just outside the nest and watched as these little darlings used the steep incline as a slide. It was perfectly beautiful, perfectly precious. I sang Happy Birthday, Happy Trails and wished them well….my usual softly-delivered welcome-to-the-world-angels speech.

Hatchling from 2012. We cannot use any lights/flashes, etc when a hatching is happening. This one was from an excavation early evening last year.

While other humans were in front of TV’s or in bars or perhaps doing some job they hate in a place they like less, a sacred gift was bestowed on all who braved the late hour to witness one of nature’s miracles. I would not trade those hours for anything I know.

During the middle of the hatching, when there was a momentary lull in the action, I checked the nest and one baby was very still under a lip of sand. After all the others had vacated and were happily (hopefully) swimming in the sea, I kept tabs on the sleepy baby. A cascade here and there as well as crawling sounds were still happening and soon another baby slid down the sand slide to begin her march to the beach. There was one active baby that ‘swam’ up in the sandy nest that actually crawled over to the resting sibling and nudged her awake. Then together they took their miraculous journey to the saltwater…the journey that reverberates with healing metaphors that offer wisdom to all who are open to the teachings.

Arriving home near 3am I found myself once again feeling in sync with nature, with the cycles of life and the hope that is always birthed with a sea turtle nest exploding into life.