So I'm shoveling snow, trying to get my aging car out of the snow bank. The blizzard has let up a bit. Our ceiling is leaking. The trees are beautiful. The almost-three-year-old is enthralled. But I stop shoveling because I smell something fishy in the air. Something is off about this storm. Nemo.
Under the Disney fish in the sky is the acidifying Atlantic, with the living things down in the deep so depleted that the government orders the fishing fleets stay docked. There are thousand-mile dead zones where once were bluefin tuna, cod, haddock, hake, halibut, herring, mackerel, pollock, salmon, sea trout, striped bass, sturgeon, and turbot. The evolution of 500 million years, a beautiful storm of sea-life -- vanished. Now the Atlantic's only life is these monstrous fishy storms.
I'm shoveling snow in front of the house where my family lives. All my work these days is shoveling corporate pixels away from our front-door, so that we can come and go freely. In this climate-heating Information Age, I'm spooked by the storm of commercial information that flies down upon us. The information and imagery of products -- the blizzard of Nemo -- covers up the information of extinction. And what if we came to understand climate change beyond information, in a more visceral way. What if we felt the death of the North Atlantic in the sleet hitting our faces.
The owners of the Weather Channel -- who named this climate-change-amped storm after the Disney character Nemo -- are NBC media, the Blackstone hedge fund and Bain Capital. To them, the lifeless abyss that the storm came from is like a black hole in space. They try to cover it up by tripling Star Trek re-runs. Throwing a Disney movie at it. Pitching a whole Times Square into that darkness. The fish are gone? Name the storm that sweeps over the water Nemo, the adorable little fish that keeps multiplying because we can't stop buying it.
This is a cover-up of nature-murder, an interruption of life deeper than the loss of a single species. What is imperiled is the process of Evolution, which is the creation of life. So, this isn't mass murder, it is deep murder. Consumerisms' CO is dumped in the sea, the precipitation/evaporation cycle speeds us, and the warmer moisture-laden air makes these energetic storms, storming the cities, avenging the ecosystem murder. Consumerism gives it a misleading name, trying to continue the profitable flow of poisons. But Earth needs to subdue the murderers of the deep before returning to the making of life.
