Working Backwards to Save the Sea

By Renee Bonorchis

One theory is that human beings are psychologically incapable of caring about an event they’ve been told will be catastrophic but will happen far in the future. Without the tangible and the immediate, most of humanity muddles along and doesn’t fret about the future because the brain is wired to help us survive in the moment and can’t compute distant consequences.

That’s deeply unhelpful in the age of climate change and especially when it comes to protecting the health of the ocean, which is literally and figuratively the lungs of our world. As Dr Judy Mann-Lang, executive for strategic projects at Cape Town’s Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation points out, the ocean produces almost every second breath we take. It provides more oxygen than all of the world’s trees combined.