"Only One Ocean", the 24 minute computerized slide and sound presentation, by coastal artist, Judith Vidaver, has travelled extensively these past months but will remain mostly at home this summer, where it will show every Thursday evening at the Mendocino Art Center at 8 p.m., June through August.
"Only One Ocean" opens with these startling statistics: "Water covers over 71% of the Earth's surface, circulating, recirculating, changeable in every way but its amount. 362 million cubic miles of water is all there ever was and all there will ever be. Nearly all the water - 97% - makes up the Earth's sea."
"Only One Ocean", full of dazzling images and breathtaking beauty, narrated with eloquent irony by Marco McClean, and edited by Brooks Mencher, winner of a national Lincoln Steffers award for investigative journalism, dramatically illustrates the fact that though there are many seas, there is only one ocean, a liquid mantle sloshing around and over the planet, a dynamic process made up of a delicately balanced interacting physical, chemical and biological phenomena.
The ocean is the key component in Earth's life support system. The Interior Department reports that without plankton ..."those drifting, floating, microscopic plants and animals - all ocean life, from the smallest shrimp to the largest whale, would perish. If too many plankton die, the oxygen content of the atmosphere would plummet and Earth would become another dead planet." Plankton supply up to 50% of the Earth's oxygen.
Viewers will learn that the ocean abundantly blesses us with over 30% of our protein. Around six billion pounds of commercial fish are landed each year in the United States alone. We consume over 14 pounds of fish and shellfish per person per year. And yet, mankind is using the ocean as a sewer. We flush over 2 trillion gallons of sewage into the ocean every year. Over 5 trillion gallons of poisonous waste water is discharged by factories around the nation.
Pollution has caused the closing of 42% of all shellfish beds in the United States. Only 1% of California's shellfish beds remain open.
"Only One Ocean" is not all bad news. It brings good news as well. It describes alternatives to trashing the ocean as well as lively shots promoting the concept of Ocean Sanctuary, which had its birth in Mendocino.
Local Mendocino and Fort Bragg residents, Sammy and Gerri Morse and Judith Vidaver, will present the show and open it up to the audience for discussion afterwards. Funds for "Only One Ocean" were raised by the Sierra Club Coastal Committee's "Ocean Aid Boogie" and the "Ocean Sanctuary Gong Show (Give Offshore Oil the Gong)."
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2004
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited