8.17.06 kulturnatib

Beaches

Having been in Canada for several weeks now, I no longer experience the comparison reflex. Before arriving here I was well aware that this is a huge country, that it has an extensive and well-maintained road network – for which, incidentally, because of the vagaries of the seasons, much maintenance work is done precisely at the time when most people take to the roads, making such travel sometimes unpleasant; that its supermarkets are well stocked; that its museums and galleries are well established; that people here follow the rules, traffic rules, scrupulously; that the trains arrive on time.

Yet, being simply aware is much different from being in the middle of it. Thus, the reflex, which led to the conclusion – the resignation, really – that there is no comparison. So what? I thought. Life continues, I argued, and it doesn’t have to be and probably is better not being the same.

This I thought or forgot about until I was invited to go to the beach. Beach? Aha, I thought rather triumphantly. Now here is where comparison reflex would be handy.

At first, I had to deal with some culture- or geography-bound prejudice. Upon hearing the word beach’ mentioned for the first time, I was unbelieving. It took a bike trip on a path that meandered along with a river where at some point I saw a group of adults and children congregating and bathing along the riverbank that did look like a beach for me to relent. Granted. The dictionary definition for beach, after all, is, the shore of a body of water, especially when sandy or pebbly. That is certainly what it looked liked.

But then it took an invitation to experience such a beach up close and the reflex got more bounce. This invitation to go swimming in a lake was followed last week by another invitation to go swimming in a river.

This really is neither surprising nor uncommon. Canada is a land of lakes – some two million – and rivers that make up about nine percent of the total land mass. Such bodies of water and their beaches are never far away and there probably is not much more other than these.

Both experiences were much the same. The shore is indeed sandy or pebbly, but they extend only few meters before the waterline and stretch across by not much more. Then it can get mucky or sludgy, perfect home to aquatic plants. In the river, their tendrils tugged at my legs – a most unpleasant experience. The water is cold. Closer to shore it is copper colored while at deeper depths it is a dark ale at full strength. Visibility is a misty shroud that, at sunset, lifts, making for an eerie, forbidding beauty.

And our tropical beaches, of which there are a few along our 32,000-km coastline?
I was going to leave it at that, at that point of triumphal understatement, when I happened upon the most recent issue of the weekly New Scientist. The cover story was titled, “The Other CO2 Problem.”

So far, most of the focus on the global warming and climate change studies that are now just gaining grudging acceptance even with the most conservative personalities in the anti-Kyoto/anti-carbon emission cutbacks camp – tele-evangelist Pat Robertson being the most recent convert – has been on the rising sea levels with the accelerated melting of the polar caps. This will and already is beginning to affect Pacific island countries and territories.

The New Scientist article focuses on the increased acidification of the oceans soaking up carbon dioxide, identifying it as “the other CO2 problem.” Carbonic acid is formed when it dissolves in water, and recent studies show that the oceans have absorbed as much as a third of all the fossil-fuel carbon released into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

In 2003, a paper on nature by Ken Caldeira and Michael Wickett introduced the phrase “ocean acidification” in scientific literature for the first time. In 2005, the UK’s Royal Society published the first comprehensive report on ocean acidification, concluding: “ocean acidification is inevitable without drastic cuts in carbon emissions. Marine ecosystems, especially coral reefs, are likely to be badly affected, with fishing and tourist industries based around the reefs losing billions of dollars each year.”

The article, as expected, makes for very heavy scientific reading with time frames in the hundreds of decades. Yet, James Orr of the Laboratory of Sciences and Climate and Environment in France puts it plainly, “Our children will no longer be able to see the amazingly beautiful things that we can. I tell my son, go see the corals now because soon it will be too late.”

Shouldn’t we be telling ourselves and our children the same?