Alviston Blog

Jacques Cousteau was my hero. I think that his show, “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,” changed my life. I learned how to scuba dive the year before I went to college and dove in the Monterey and Carmel area many times. The diversity of life below the surface was incredible. It was as if I had entered a different world, where different laws applied.

To scuba dive, something called a buoyancy compensator is worn. By adjusting the buoyancy, a “neutral” point of neither sinking nor rising can be achieved. It feels like flying. Incredible. You can fly through forests of kelp and see animals flying right beside you.

Even though I have spent a lot of time in the ocean, I did not know much about it until recently. I knew little about the critters, because some of them were very tasty. As I have become more interested in how the different ecosystems of the Earth work, I have learned more about how closely we are tied to the oceans. I have always said, “Everything is connected,” but I never realized the complexity of the connections. For instance, I did not know how much oxygen is produced by the ocean or how much CO2 is absorbed by the ocean.

We have always been aware that the weather affects us, but it is a relatively new concept that it also works the other way. Nature operates in “closed-loop” systems. Nothing is wasted; it just cycles. We need to learn from nature and calibrate our energy use and resource use with it. The oceans can absorb CO2, but if it absorbs too much it becomes acidic and this prevents certain types of animals from forming their shells. Some of these small animals form the basis of the ocean’s food chain, and without them, everything up the chain will be affected.

Even though the ocean may seem like a different world, it is not. It is intimately connected to the atmosphere, the land, and to us. Even though we understand a little about how the ocean works, it is still hard to imagine the importance of the ocean. Unfortunately, most of us do not really know much about the ocean at all, or how critical it is to our very existence. Without this understanding, it is very difficult to motivate people to change.

I bet that if everyone got a chance to fly in the ocean and feel the life surrounding you, we would do everything we had to to save it.

–Mark Alvis