A lot of our celebrating anything around here, be it holidays or birthdays, involves getting outside. With a birthday in the house this week, we did an accelerated amount of sailing, hiking and nature gazing, including a day in Monterey with a visit to the Aquarium. If you’re sick of the news, gazing upon undulating Moon Jellyfish and playing Sea Otters provides great relief. As does visiting the puffins.
Amid the amazing kelp forests, deep sea tanks and shorebirds aviary at the aquarium were a dozen Tufted Puffins. These ‘parrots of the sea’ are social birds who, out in the wild, spend most of their time on the open sea and nest on rocky cliffs. As species go, Tufted Puffins aren’t yet endangered, but they are of concern, sensitive to climate change and microplastic pollution. The aquarium population was part of a concerted effort by a network of aquariums and zoos implementing a Species Survival Plan to ensure genetically diverse and biologically viable populations.
The puffins seemed just as interested in us as we were, gazing back as we watched them display and dive, their orange bills flashing.
Saturday morning was about orange wings flashing. We woke up in Santa Cruz and made our way to the Monarch Trail to see how the butterflies were faring. Growing up, no grade school year was complete without a field trip to Natural Bridges to see the overwintering monarchs at the park. Historically, they cluster in great clumps on the Eucalyptus and take to the air once it warms up. The past few years have been hell on the insects — climate, habitat decline, pollution — the usual depressing list has seriously impacted their numbers. There’s an all-hands-on-deck species protection plan for monarchs as well. It may be because of the alarm bells scientists are sounding that monarchs did better this past year. And there they were, fluttering over the eucalyptus in the dappled sunlight like they’ve done every year for many decades.
A cluster of butterflies is called a kaleidoscope. A bunch of otters a raft. A flock of puffins is called a circus!
Hope, beauty, it's all around us, hanging on.
In the middle of the week, I listened to a Daily podcast on the “Metaverse,” a network of ‘simulated digital environments,’ 3D worlds, that the big players in tech are sinking big investments in at the moment. Some day, we’ll all be able to do just about anything in this virtual world without leaving our houses. I was horrified. While we’re getting sold on all the things we can do, places we go, and ways we can look (consume anything and look like a supermodel!), it leaves out the fact that implicit in this all-you-can-eat buffet of virtual consumerism is giving up on the marvelous, physical world.
How will rafts of otters float and kaleidoscopes of butterflies dazzle and circuses of puffins fare in a ‘metaverse’ engineered by white men in t-shirts? How could they? I just don’t see it.
To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now. — Thích Nhất Hạnh
I understand that the actual, real world is as challenging as it is beautiful. And I get that AI/VR can be useful when practicing for surgery or trying out new systems potentially saving on irreversible mistakes and expenses….and in a world where 30 percent of the global population is food insecure,* where “the total number of known threatened animal species has increased from 5,205 to 8,462 since 1996,†” throwing billions of dollars at a virtual world just seems insane. And tragic.
What if all those billions of dollars went into helping solve the climate crisis? Or cleaning up microplastics? Or redistributing food waste?
You won’t need a headset if butterflies and birds are thriving.
*World Health Organization, “UN report: Pandemic year marked by spike in world hunger”
†“IUCN Red List: Species Extinction — The Facts” The International Union for Conservation of Nature https://www.iucn.org/