I remember hearing about the phenomenon known as ocean acidification in a brief radio report when I was, in fact, on a beach vacation. The report said that because of increasing atmospheric carbon, the ocean’s PH may be decreasing, and this change may negatively affect any organism that lives in the sea and has a shell. I pictured the ocean, the creature’s larger home, slowly eating away the creature’s shell, its boundary, its smaller home. As if the air suddenly turned corrosive and left all of us thin-skinned. The image, however imaginary, stuck with me.
I learned nothing more about ocean acidification Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent New Yorker piece, “The Darkening Sea,” (abstract available here) appeared in 2006. Turns out ocean acidification is, not surprisingly, more complicated than a 60-second radio segment could show.
It’s not that the more acid (or actually, less alkaline) ocean diminishes shells directly. Calcyifying organisms–everything from the tiny pterapod to corals and molluscs–need a certain amount of carbonate present to make and re-make shells. As the oceans absorb more carbon dioxide, the theory goes, carbonate decreases, so the creatures don’t have the raw materials they need to keep building shell. Shells are vulnerable to thinning or complete dissolution.
Think of all the shapes a pervasive change might take. There’s the so-called domino effect, in which one event touches off others sequentially. There’s the mass uprising. There’s the paradigm shift, in which one discovery changes the terms of all subsequent developments. There’s the long, slow war, lost battle by battle until the end. And then there’s something like ocean acidification, in which a global, peripheral change (more C02 in the atmosphere, and hence in the oceans) disrupts a vital process (shell-making, and hence the organism’s ability to survive).
This shape of change feels familiar. Imagine a relationship going bad; the sudden absence of anything–trust, time, affection, whatever–with which it might be rebuilt. Or, on a more positive note, imagine a defensive person’s defenses worn down in a climate where there’s nothing with which to re-erect them.
Writing, thinking about writing, trying to be a better writer, on some level involves (at least for me) a barrier of sorts between writing life and the rest of life. Life as experienced must be separate from life as written in order to become fodder for life as written. I’m not talking about self-mythologizing. I only mean that writing can be, and has been for a long time, all-consuming in that everything I read, everyone I talk to, everything I do I inevitably view in reference to whatever my writing projects are at the time. If something is uninteresting to me from a writing perspective, it is consigned to the paler land of things that can’t be written or don’t pertain to writing. I’m also not talking about simple obsession, the kind a person could have with, say, wine or bicycles or America’s Next Top Model. I’m talking about a condition in which only what’s written feels both real and important.
But lately the necessary barrier between life and writing is vulnerable to dissolution. Currents caress my thinning shell. I am not writing and have no desire to do so. Most forms of entertainment are especially appealing. I am not worried about whether it’s a phase. Things not intended to be entertaining are especially unappealing. I think it’s going to be a fun summer.