Away

When Congress approved a bill allowing off shore drilling, they were sure to include the restriction that drilling must happen at least 50 miles off shore.

Recently we have been watching a lot of super hero movies on Family Movie Night. In at least two Batman movies and one Spiderman movie the hero solves the problem of the ticking bomb by throwing it "away" into whatever body of water is handy.

Lately Scientists have let us know about the growing dead zones in the oceans, which are not only deeply uncool of us to perpetrate on our oceanic friends, but also is impacting jobs and food supply for those human communities who have relied on the fish who used to call those now-dead areas home.

I know that the Spiderman movie is make-believe; what concerns me is that the media is portraying and perpetrating this deep-seated idea that what happens under water is not relevant. If our archetypal heroes don't notice what harm they do to our eco-system, we know this reflects our own unconscious assumptions that what happens 50 miles off shore is not worthy of our consideration. Regardless of what we teach in school about the water cycle and "where food comes from" on the deepest level we are are forgetting our dependence on the part of our ecosystem that exists under water.