Tuesday, June 11, 2013

News at Eleven: In place of storybook romance,

they returned with reports of missing whales and seabirds soaked in oil, of corals dead as stone, and shorelines blanketed in algal slime, but I was reluctant to draw apocalyptic conclusions.

Surely the sea was eternal, going on forever, its vast prodigious bulk 71% of the earth's surface, not to be contained within the frame of history or chained to the oars of death and time. So it had been in the creation myths constructed in the languages of both art and science--the Sumerian goddess Nammu giving birth to heaven and earth, Homer's "Ocean, who is the source of all," Christendom emerging with Noah from the Flood, evolutionary theory evolving from the primordial, undifferentiated flux.

from TomDispatch.com: Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, The Ocean as Desert: The (Less Than) Eternal Sea

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