The Tide connects
By Peter Neill
The sea connects all things. Here in the seven towns embraced by Penobscot Bay, Blue Hill Bay, Eggomoggin Reach, and the Atlantic, we live in a community immersed and shaped by the ocean. We reside here, work here, and play here, in our environment by the sea. We share climate, environment, and quality of life informed by the connection of natural and social systems, by weather, energy, food, water, and health provided.
As that vast marine contribution to our daily welfare is now threatened in myriad ways, we must acknowledge and respond to those challenges with a commitment on which, yes, survival may depend. Essential to our future is information, knowledge of this maritime synergy, in all its forms equitably shared, to bring us together as citizens, co-workers, competitors, and neighbors to provide the tools we need to exchange, govern, meet, and celebrate who we are and how we live creatively together in this special place.
The ocean is a great equalizer. It is peace, conflict, challenge, beauty, and connection. It is a macrocosm of circumstance that requires skill, commitment, respect, and courage to get along successfully. It can be as big as the world, or it can be as focused and impactful on a place as small as the one we share. Community, as on a ship or an island, requires perspective and skill–the engagement of all through awareness, invention, and the willingness to know who we are, where we are, how we work, what we believe, what challenges us, and what gives us joy.
The best passage is when everyone does their part to face the challenges of the rising tide; inexorable, inevitable, and irresistible, that rhythm for living that keeps time and predicts the success of all our days. To do so demands fulsome information: timely, accurate, responsible, comprehensive, equitable, empathetic, and up to the demands of rapid change.
In that spirit, as residents and visitors, friends and neighbors, let’s accept a call to action: to immerse ourselves in the social sea, to build our community anew, nurtured by the ocean and best informed by The Rising Tide that lifts all boats and aspires to meet our need to live creatively and communally, here in our unique coastwise swim!
–Peter Neill is the founder of World Ocean Observatory and is board chair of The Rising Tide.
