so we had two readings that touched upon the same issue- focusing on the ocean instead of focusing on the land itself. The article the Ocean Reader brought up a very fair point about how the ocean as a whole was (and still is) something we used in many different ways

“It serves as an introduction to the multifaceted Ocean, which is an enormous and very complicated system. Humans interact with that system in many ways. They relentlessly hunt
sea creatures, taking 90 million tons of fish from it annually. They use it as a highway, with 100,000 ships at sea right now. They study it, find inspiration in it, play on it, and fight over it.” (3)

Now personally, when someone puts it like that, it really kind of shows the impact the ocean has. We were afraid of it for a very long time (our overconsumption and our use of the ocean today is pretty modern) before recently. Even now, we take it for granted, because all we see out of it is something to exploit, to use and to discard. We take the life from it and then pretend like it didn’t have life in it. It’s as the other article says at the very beginning- “Without conscious choice, writers have embedded a terrestrial bias… Dry land is presumed the norm.” (7 Vast Oceans)

We need the ocean more than it needs us, really- and we need to treat it way better. Without the ocean, would things be as advanced as they would? A better appreciation of the ocean would definitely change things, but I think that can only really happen when we shift our focus towards it. Granted, we need to care more about the planet in general, but that also includes the ocean.