On Monday evening, while my dad was here, we watched two of the four segments of The Blue Planet, a documentary put together by David Attenborough. We have it on DVD, and with the S-video connection to our 57” widescreen television, it was a pretty awesome thing to watch. The photography of the whales, the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean (first found in 1979, since then a new species there has been discovered every ten days), the bioluminescent animals that live so far deep that not even red light penetrates the weight of the water, the Ridley’s turtles coming onto the beach to lay their eggs . . . very impressive and humbling. It is so difficult for me to believe that people could see something like that and not understand how important it is to live in harmony with the environment, sharing the world with all the other species that occupy it.
A couple of the things I learned (well, re-learned since I’ve already seen this once) are that more humans have been in space than have gone down to the ocean floor (where this team went to film), and there are more species of animals in the water than there are on all the land in the world.
Posted by elizabeth at January 9, 2003 10:24 PM