I mentioned in a recent post about a wonderful exhibition that we visited with some friends. I had read about it on a blog and was amazed, and delighted, that it was coming to a place near us as we live in a quiet rural area. It looked amazing in the photos but it was of course nothing compared to seeing it in real life. It is always hard to get a sense of scale in photos of places and things you have never seen, that is not a criticism but an observation. I therefore had no idea what to expect when we walked through the door of the host venue. It was one of those wow moments, we had all been chatting amongst our wee group and as we stepped over that threshold we all stopped talking and stood completely still.
Suspended from the high ceiling and slowly rotating round was a scale replica of our beautiful planet. A very blue planet, the BBC series with this name was apt. We read about the percentage of our planet that is water (around 70%) and that is very hard to visualise, the imagery of this exhibition made it very obvious. There is a lot of sea.
I remember investigating sea voyages of long ago with Cameron, of reading about trips that would take years, of those earlier sailors vying, during the age of exploration, to be first to circumnavigate the world. It is hard to imagine the shear scale of those early attempts and later achievements when they are written on the pages of a book, looking up at this slowly revolving globe it was so much easier to. The distances are unbelievable in some parts of the ocean, those journeys seemed all the more remarkable as I stood there and soaked it all in.
I am grateful to Cameron who spent hours as a younger child reading atlases and maps like other children would read books, he taught me so much about the countries that fill the landmass of our planet. I could work out where most of them are. We could see how remote the island their dad spent two years of his childhood living on, and why it took six months to get there by boat from the UK.
As I stood there near that entrance, later in a raised viewing gallery and wandering around the building watching that globe slowly revolving, it pulled you in and made you stop and pause. It is hard when our lives revolve around such a very very small part of the whole to think about the impact our actions have on the planet. Whilst what I was viewing was a work of art, a replica, it drew you into its beauty and majesty in ways that are impossible in every day life in our small corners of the world. It made me stop and think about my actions and the impact they could be having on the whole planet we live on.
I have always tried to tread lightly, to, as a family, live mindful of our impact but sometimes that can get a little when we get swept along by possibilities. It is also all too easy to become disillusioned when we feel like we are doing our best and we still read about wildfires, flash flooding and drought taking place on the doorstep. The impact of which ripples out to effect agriculture, water supplies, not to mention the ecosystems themselves. We hear about industries, companies, corporations who are held up as examples of malpractice, who should be doing more. Those industries, companies and corporations are run by humans, humans who make decisions that effect their lives as much as anyone else's, humans who are feeling the impact as everyone else is, or are they? Am I being naive to think that we really are all in this together and if you are incredibly wealthy or living in a place which is experiencing little climatic change (if such a place still exists) then does it feel like business as normal to you?
I very much hope that our beautiful blue planet continues to be habitable for many generations to come.