If you can’t afford your own private submarine, or are afraid of diving, there’s always Google: Google has already taken their street view maps to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and many other places in many lands. Now they are venturing out into that other seventy percent of the earth, the sea.
You’re weightless. You drift over a technicolor landscape of sponges and soft corals. Beams of sunlight filter through glinting swarms of jellyfish and waiting barracuda. You gaze down upon the whorled shell of a leatherback turtle. Trumpet fish tilt towards the lips of an invisible Lois Armstrong as ten thousand blue tang shimmer in the hull of a sunken ship.
No, it isn’t possible to describe this underwater dreamscape. Finding Nemo captures a hint of this cartoonishly real world, as do the films of Jacques Cousteau and David Attenbourgh. But unless you’ve been there, it’s like explaining stars to a blind person or Bach to someone who was born deaf. I’m a fair-weather diver and when I found that I was no longer using my SCUBA gear I decided to give it to away to a friend who lives in Egypt.
But a recent experience snorkeling in the north Atlantic reminded me just how much I miss the sea. I can’t afford a submarine so I was happy to hear that Google is expanding their street view maps to cover parts of the Great Barrier Reef, Hawaii and the Philippines.
Could Bahrain’s new artificial reef be next?
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Author: Brian Nitz
Brian remembers when a single tear dredged up a nation's guilt. The tear belonged to an Italian-American actor known as Iron-Eyes Cody, the guilt was displaced from centuries of Native American mistreatment and redirected into a new environmental awareness. A 10-year-old Brian wondered, 'What are they... No, what are we doing to this country?' From a family of engineers, farmers and tinkerers Brian's father was a physics teacher. He remembers the day his father drove up to watch a coal power plant's new scrubbers turn smoke from dirty grey-back to steamy white. Surely technology would solve every problem. But then he noticed that breathing was difficult when the wind blew a certain way. While sailing, he often saw a yellow-brown line on the horizon. The stars were beginning to disappear. Gas mileage peaked when Reagan was still president. Solar panels installed in the 1970s were torn from roofs as they were no longer cost-effective to maintain. Racism, public policy and low oil prices transformed suburban life and cities began to sprawl out and absorb farmland. Brian only began to understand the root causes of "doughnut cities" when he moved to Ireland in 2001 and watched history repeat itself. Brian doesn't...
