Upside Down, Folks

I’m the oldest of 4 siblings by years- I feel grateful for the unique, meaningful experience of watching my family grow up as an oldest child, helping raise them and care for them in a way I wouldn’t have been able to if not for such a wide age gap. Before the youngest was born, the older two (ages 3 and 5) used to hang their heads off the couch - they called it “Upside Down, Folks.” They’d say it over and over again in a lilting rhythm, as if impersonating someone older and wiser, giggling more and more with each repeat. They were fascinated with the way things looked, and they'd giggle for long stretches of time. That’s all it took- they’d hang their heads upside down and were transported to another world where they’d delight in pretending to hop over a whirring ceiling fan on the floor, and nothing was the same.

Some games fade when childhood ends, but as an adult, it’s easy to conceptualize the allure (or terrifying concept) of a backwards, alternate, co-existent reality. Perhaps you’ve already discovered this yourself, but you needn’t hang your head off of a couch to see what I mean- you needn’t even pretend.

Our farms and forests are being destroyed, overworked, and abandoned. Areas of our planet are now getting smacked so often by flooding that they haven’t the time to recover before the next disaster hits.

Famine, flood, and disease of proportions immense enough to make us question reality. Dorothy, we aren’t in the Holocene anymore.

We did, in fact, start the fire.

Let's give ourselves another chance. There's an oft-forgotten world that already exists (and, in fact, is 70% of the planet we’ve wrongly come to consider our own). A world worth saving and knowing- a world to which we can commit with our most resolute of hearts. An intelligent, powerful, and mysterious world that harbors infinite secrets and commands the most honest respect. A world underwater where balance reigns supreme. A world that holds the power to change and improve the 30% of land that we’ve handled so wretchedly to date.

2200 feet of kelp line is going into the water this season. That’s us. There are many things about 2020 we wouldn’t have believed if you'd told us, but knowing that we're closing out this year with 2200 feet of kelp feels good.

Why? BECAUSE NOW IS THE TIME. Kelp is real- it’s there, living and breathing and helping us in the vast waterworld beyond the ever-shortening attention spans of our day to day lives. Safe from fires. Floods are moot. We can get there. We can see it, nurture it, foster it, and access it.

There’s static - messages don’t get through these days with the media circus. But let this message be clear: we can work together to combat global climate change the natural way. “Coastal ecosystems sequester away surprisingly large amounts of carbon – they can sequester up to 20 times more carbon per acre than land forests.” Sea life gives us more than half of the air we breathe.

Be a part of the solution.