Boulder Weekly: Blue Colorado
- wallacejnichols
- June 14, 2012
BY ELIZABETH MILLER
No, really, take a breath in. And then another. And then one more. At least one of those three breaths was supplied by the ocean.
About half of the air we breathe comes from phytoplankton in the ocean.
Just in case you weren’t convinced that what’s in our water matters, think about that — all our waterways are connected, and our water and our air are connected. And think about the plastic bottles that you’ve tossed in the trash ending up in the ocean, where they collect in gyres and slowly break down to microparticles that can no longer be separated from the phytoplankton around them. That stuff making the air we breathe? It’s fighting for real estate with plastic we threw away. And then the plastic gets eaten by the little fish, which are eaten by bigger fish, which are eaten by us. The mercury and the PCBs all those organisms up the food chain have eaten — that ends up in us.
That’s stressful, right? So just think about the ocean. The waves, the lapping water, the endless blue. Feeling calmer? More creative? There’s some science on that connection, too.
The whale tale will lead you to the rest of the article!
