Maybe many governments appear still convinced of the strange and harmful fallacy of human superiority, but that isn't the only story to be found in these tumultuous times. A 2023 treaty adopted by U.N. member states, called Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, shows a path toward the beyond. We can recognize our planet as the inextricably interconnected, nested, grand experiment we know as Life, something far beyond human conceptions of jurisdiction. The treaty establishes frameworks for creating marine protected areas in international waters and mandating environmental assessments for proposed activities on the seas outside national claims. Foundation support for deep sea explorations connect diverse specialists in a garden of thought as distinct as the unexpected abyssal coral garden pictured below. (Click here to see full Mongabay article by Liz Kimbrough.) Scientists work well beyond the political, and political movements might want to take notes.

Writers and other artists also embrace transnational exploration. In Wild Dark Shore, fiction based on subantarctic Macquarie Island, Charlotte McConaghy attracts millions of readers with the irresistibility of another 'thriller' and yet, also invites these millions into necessary conversations around today's compounding climate catastrophes. Climate fiction has earned a reputation as having done a "disservice" (Karen Russell) with a focus on post-apocalypse that might lead readers toward hopeless resignation. McConaghy's earlier books wouldn't escape that judgement, but in this contemporary story, her characters personalize heart-rending losses from both wildfire and flooding. Some wrestle with choosing whether to have children, while a budding botanist is challenged with untenable seed-rescuing decisions. Sometimes, we might best follow the world's young people beyond the wisdom of experience into a reawakened experience of curiosity.

A different kind of reading experience, on the other hand, offers a different kind of thrill. A guest post by Irish marine ecologist Alexander McMaster on the Dark Mountain Project's substack leads readers not only into dark oceans but deep into a time when those oceans and their creatures lived where now we find Egyptian desert.

"The whales at Wadi al-Hitan lay in the depths of the prehistoric Tethys Sea which receded and exposed them as the land masses of our planet shifted and the seas remade themselves on timescales that rewrite our ideas of what it means to be fluid. The energy with which the whales swam persists, whispering up clouds of bioluminescence, skimming the dark gyres and braiding the sea with stars."

And at this time (in the northern hemisphere) when our planet approaches the annual extreme we know as winter solstice, we can explore how we understand the extreme concept we know as human separateness, or perhaps more relevantly, how we misunderstand it.

"The ocean is a space full of liminality, where the boundary between spaces and bodies are uncertain, where dinoflagellates and radiolarians drift among molecules of water, diatoms and faeces, whales and fishes. It is a smooth aqueous body in which the self is dissolved into many selves joined through the continuity of lines of becoming, made up of heterogenous elements that are always about to change state."

 May your deep readings surface the stories that keep you swimming through seas and through sands.