Mar

Notes from Iowa: We Are Gambling with Life Itself – Part 2

This is the continuation of Part 1:

My memories of Los Angeles’ beaches – Venice, Santa Monica, Redondo – are of brown water, parking lots within striking distance of waves, and large metal trash bins strangely reminiscent of oil barrels. Today, we have far more to worry about than just murky water.

The oceans are facing at least a quintuple assault:

Rising temperatures due to climate change — certainly not helped by the premeditated extinction of the Red Cars and their peers across the nation;

Acidification of the oceans, again due to elevated and exacerbating carbon emissions;

The increasing presence of plastic — I’ve read reports of supermarket bags and Barbie dolls appearing on once pristine beaches of unpopulated islands, to mention nothing of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a mass of trash twice the size of Texas that swirls in the waters midway between North America and Asia; in the long run, this plastic will break down to particles so small that they will be eaten by zooplankton, providing them with a fatal last meal, and thus threatening a foundation of the global food chain;

Other threats include chemical pollution, from pharmaceutical, medical and agricultural sources, as well as petroleum and human waste — we deliberately dump this stuff into the home of blue whales, dolphins, orca, salmon, seaweed, coral;

And, of course, there’s overfishing, when a human population forty times larger than when Christ lived demands ever more sushi, ceviche, lobster bisque and crab cakes from critically disappearing marine communities.

Let me not mention open-pit mining. Let me not mention deforestation.

Let me not mention genetically modified seeds appearing in wild spaces. Let me not mention nuclear waste. Oops. My mind simply can’t keep these things in neat little boxes. Just as my father’s childhood has everything to do with my presence here at the University of Iowa, so do the disappearance of frogs, the rise of the automobile, and the assault on the oceans have everything to do with my life, and with playwriting.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare describes theatre as “hold[ing] as ’twere the mirror up to nature.” While theatre has many functions, providing social commentary and an opportunity for introspection is a central one. I am a playwright. I love nature. I love life. I feel broken by the constant war we wage on our home. I feel broken by my own complicity in this war. Thus, I write plays about global warming. I write plays about rivers. I write plays about globalization. I write plays about the ocean. I write plays about life. Click Here