The Blue Machine at St. Jude’s

Our Greening Committee at St. Jude’s is looking at water and the influence of the oceans as a second focus, in addition to our parish energy audit. For this study, after considering two other influential books, Why I am a Climate Optimist by Chris Turner and Fire Weather by John Vaillant, we chose The Blue Machine by Helen Czerski. In a talk to St. Jude’s, I aimed to increase our knowledge of the oceans and to persuade climate skeptics to reconsider.  

For me, concern for climate begins with two ideas: awe at the world’s beauty, and concern to protect it. My feelings begin with scripture, in passages like the lines in Psalm 8, “O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth.” Psalm 23 “… He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.” These lines evoke the profound spiritual and psychological comfort and aesthetic pleasure that emanate from the green world. There is also water’s association with baptism, purification and the fruitfulness of “living water.” 

Many notes in The Blue Machine deepened my appreciation of the sea, and concern to protect it. We think of oceans as huge and invulnerable, but Czerski reminds us that if we imagine the earth as a huge inflated balloon, the oceans would be no more than its cellophane skin. Sea creatures vary in size from whales to single-cell beings. Some of the smallest are most important. Take the single-cell diatom, which “generate[s] a huge proportion of the Earth’s oxygen.” The Earth’s largest waterfall occurs underwater between Greenland and Iceland, where Arctic water pours over an underwater cliff into one of the ocean’s deepest bowls.  

Hawaiian canoeists wanted to rediscover how ancient canoeists, without GPS or any technology, sailed 2,600 miles from Hawaii to Tahiti. They thought such navigation skills, studying the stars, the currents and the clouds, had been lost. Then Mau Piailug turned up. He thought he remembered enough to try it. In May 1976, he and his crew, to enormous celebration, completed the crossing. Since then, that long paddle has been done repeatedly.  

Oceans are warming. How do we know? By accident, it was discovered that the sound of an explosion can circumnavigate the whole world underwater. Sound travels much more efficiently underwater than it does in air. Sound travels faster in warmer water. Sound’s faster travel in the seas proves the seas have warmed.  

 What’s the state of the oceans today? How does this affect us? We now know more than ever about the oceans. One significance is, of course, that all our drinking water comes from the sea, recycled as rain. A major issue is that the oceans absorb the sun’s light and energy and thus moderate Earth’s temperature. But oceans are warming. And warmer oceans are producing more and more destructive hurricanes.  

The warmer seas are changing. They force fish that feed millions to change their water habitats. Czerski tells us that over-fishing has decreased the number of sea creatures to 60% of what it was. The seas are filling with discarded plastic. 

The declining state of the seas exhorts our love and concern for them to action. Czerski’s message is perhaps best stated by the people she quotes. Rusty Schweickart, crew member on Apollo 9: “We are not passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are the crew.” Or, as the indigenous people of Hawaii put it, “A canoe is an island and an island is a canoe.”