This is the ocean as I used to know it.
And I find that since I've been in the Gulf a couple of times, I really kind of am traumatized because, whenever I look at the ocean now, no matter where I am, even where I know none of the oil has gone, I sort of see slicks. And I'm finding that I'm very much haunted by it.
But what I want to talk to you about today is a lot of things that try to put all of this in context, not just about the oil eruption, but what it means and why it has happened.
First, just a little bit about me.
I'm basically just a guy that likes to go fishing ever since I was a little kid.
And because I did, I wound up studying sea birds to try to stay in the coastal habitats that I so loved. And now I mainly write books about how the ocean is changing. And the ocean is certainly changing very rapidly. Now we saw this kind of graphic earlier on. That we really live on a hard marble that has just a slight bit of wetness to it. It's like you dipped a marble in water. And the same thing with the atmosphere. If you took all the atmosphere and rolled it up in a ball, you would get that little sphere of gas on the right. So we live on the most fragile, little soap bubble you can imagine, a very sacred soap bubble, but one that is very, very easy to effect.
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