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| USGS Geologic History Map, more info here. |
Anytime U.G. the Cat-person traveled anywhere near a beach the smell of the salt air of the ocean brought good memories of her best friend Lee the Dog. He would run on two feet, but he could gallop on all fours. Just like any water loving dog, he would run into the waves every time they found any beach and then run right back up to her and shake out his long blue-grey fur.
Just like any cat, U.G. didn’t like this salt spray and sand mess. She could swim. She liked to fish. But, she would wear fishing waders, and a wind-breaker, especially on a cool day on the beach on the Oregon Coast.
It wasn’t until after U.G.’s telepathic AI-Critter was tamed, their first trip to the beach in 1979, that she understood why the Dog-person from a planet far, far away loved Earth’s oceans so much, — they had nothing like them on the Dog-planet.
The Dog-planet didn’t even have any lakes the size of the Great Lakes of North America, over 80% of the water on the Dog-planet was underground.
Here on Earth, Lee’s mission was to find good food for the Dog-people and if there were sentient inhabitants on the deliciously smelly little blue planet, to make friends and share recipes.
On the planet of the Dog’s, the culinary arts is the highest form of art, and food is the basis for their entire economy. The Dog-people never even imagined pollution and ecosystem destructive industries like human people commit. Much less an entire planet full of people more related to waring primates, than canines.
It was this Dog-logic always searching for food that was running through Lee’s mind as he joyfully leapt in the waves, smelling therefore imagining all the tasty creatures in the sea.
From space in 1977, as his tiny egg shaped craft approached Earth, on the day side of the planet there were a few pale scars of cities, a couple pit mines, and scattered “bumps” on the surface as evidence of humans. On the dark side on a clear night, cities with millions of people glow like thin spider threads of light.
BUT, what caught the Dog people’s attention with their smell’O’scope technology was the surface 70% covered by salt water the same PH as a healthy womb. From the Dog people’s point of view, humans were barely visible from space, but phytoplankton blooms are massive.
Those tiny silicon diatoms a bright rank wave of photosynthesis; micro-algae teeming with plankton. There are so many of these microscopic glowing living-gem like creatures in the world’s seas, by mass tiny diatoms’ unicellular shells make up half of the organic material in the oceans and are the basis of the food chain feeding everything else alive on the planet. — THAT fact is what got their attention from billions of light years away.
In the 80s and 90s, Lee told her several times, “The key to shifting the global warming trend on Earth is this small smelly blue planet’s oceans. The people of Earth need to restore and expand salt water tidal marshes with seagrass, kelp forests, and mandrake forests.”
Since the industrial revolution in the 1800s salt marshes have been devastated because people didn’t understand their importance to the global ecosystem. The 1900s saw further abuse and filling in and paving over of both waterfront-property and the fertile mud of inland tidal marshes turned into farmland.
When Utah Robin Green became President of the United States in 2021. One of the first things she did was restore a small marsh, a pond for ducks in the White House lawn, but it was symbolic in contrast to what she asked all the governors of states with ocean shorelines or great lakes to do.
The United States needs to become a power player in the global Blue Carbon Initiative. Expect increasingly volatile weather. Prepare for storms, don’t be caught “surprised” by climate change. We are moving people to higher ground and building new environmentally sound structures. Not just plopping solar panels on roofs and caulking windows. After storms destroy a waterfront neighborhood we need to repair the wetlands and tidal marshes that buildings should never have been constructed on in the first place and build our homes on the rock of common sense.
