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Oceans

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't! – The Tempest, William Shakespeare

Here is how to think of the environment. Imagine you live in a neighborhood and one day you notice that it has become a haven of run down yards, broken down houses, and trash littering the street. That being said, it is home and you cannot live anywhere else, even though your place leaves a lot to be desired. You cannot control your neighbors. In fact, some of them seem to love living in a garbage dump and others just do not care. If something is not done soon, the place will become unlivable. Some of your neighbors claim that the problem is so overwhelming that you cannot make a dent in it. So, why try? You can try to clean up your place but that is not going to change property values and your neighbors’ trash is already blowing into your yard. Instead of wasting your time and money, just enjoy yourself until the roof caves in. Hopefully things will stay together long enough that you will be able to be carried out of your home feet first and it all be someone else’s problem. So what do you do?

That is the situation we are currently in when it comes to our environment. Global warming is altering weather patterns and heating up the earth like an easy bake oven. After years of denial, the conservative position is China and India are so huge that there is nothing we can do to stop it, the damage is already done, so sit back and party on. Then there is the pollution and environmental damage. All of the problems seem overwhelming. This is particularly true of our oceans, where all life on earth originated. If you have not noticed lately, our water has more chemicals in it than a privy at a Grateful Dead concert. How bad are things?

There is, in the north Pacific ocean, literally, a floating island of garbage – plastic bags, glass bottles, packing material, bits of rubber, clothing, and mostly microscopic particles of plastics, etc. – larger than the state of Texas, a giant dead spot that scientists have no clue of how to combat. All of this miscellaneous junk just floating around or sitting on the ocean floor is as welcome as a frat rat at a lesbian poetry reading. Plastics, which take decades to break down, choke fish and sea creatures, which mistake them for food. The toxins released poison the animals and us. Add to this, oil spills and run off, 36 percent of which comes from our drains and waste. Untreated sewage leads to eutrophication and diseases. What Jimmy Buffett boat drink would be complete without a little fertilizer and pesticides, which lead to algal blooms and dead spots. Toxic chemicals and over fishing alter fragile food chains. And how could we forget our old friend global warming, which affect ocean currents and weather patterns. (In colder areas of the globe, ocean currents act like heat conveyer belts.) The coral reefs are dying. Killed off by radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests and from dumped waste. Small islands in the Pacific are disappearing as water levels rise. It is enough to make you throw up your hands in despair.

We have pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity with their backgrounds in science and research… No? Well did they at least graduate college? No… Okay, take a science course? No… How about walk by a science class room and the window happened to be open? Okay. – who do not believe anything is wrong, that humanity is not big enough to effect the earth and mother nature will correct itself, and it might, but in that correction, she might send us the way of the dinosaur. (For my far right Christians readers, those bones the devil planted to trick us into believing that the earth is more than 6 thousand years old.) For centuries people rightly believed that the oceans were so large that any pollutant or waste we pumped into it would be dispersed and diluted to harmlessness. However, the evidence to the contrary is mounting and you do not have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that there is a crisis in our oceans.

Modern cinematic technology has transformed nature documentaries into works of art. The images are gorgeous. The colors pop off the screen. Filmmakers have the time and techniques to capture moments previously never seen on film before. In turn, something amazing has happened; Americans have fallen in love with these slices of the wild kingdom. In 2005, ma and pa middle class plunked down their hard earned cash, $77,437,223 of it to be exact, to see March of the Penguins. Although the gay flightless fowl had to hide in their closets, even the global warming deniers were all a twitter about the moral lessons we could learn from our black and white brethren. Outside of Michael Moore, no documentary had ever made that kind of coinage. If a film cracked the $10 million line, it was considered a miracle. Since then movie goers have gotten one breathtaking experience after another. David Attenborough has given us The Blue Planet, The Life of Birds, The Living Planet, and The Life of Mammals. There has also been Winged Migration, Life in the Undergrowth, and Disney’s Earth, which took home over $32 million at the box office. The nice thing is the stars work for bird seed, bugs and the occasional raw antelope burger.

Well, Mouse is back with Oceans and it is Disney nature at its best. The French filmmakers Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud have captured an underwater world previously unimagined by the public. There are times the creatures pictured look like something out of a Buck Rogers story, or a sci-fi novel. It is truly a foreign and exotic world, an adventure that Captain Nemo or the Sub-Marnier would be proud of. For most films it does not matter if you see them on your small television or on the silver screen. That is not the case here. Whether it is whales or animals found miles deep on the ocean floor, it is important to see it on as grand a canvas as possible.

With three-quarters of the earth covered in water, children need to see the adventures that happen there. If we are going to save our oceans, and more importantly ourselves, it might come from watching spectacular snapshots of life like this. It is difficult to be hard hearted or claim there is nothing we can do after watching a documentary like this. We are in a brave new world, but the real question is what kind of creatures are we.

Verdict: Home Run