All The World Is Blue
Water was here before us. It formed when hydrogen met oxygen, carried the first life, and decided where people settled — until we learned to move it, and began treating the planet as a warehouse.
A dam wall seen from below, the water leaving clear. Raft beds running to the horizon on the Chinese coast. A telegraph pole in a Californian valley marked 1925, 1955, 1977, the ground dropping away beneath it. An octopus at fifteen metres, reaching for the camera. Scientists, filmed where they work, describe an ocean that has absorbed most of our excess heat and a third of our carbon, and the limit it is now reaching. Alongside them a drawn city rises, floods and is rebuilt, and a bird carries one mouthful of water to a forest fire.
Companion to All The World Is Green, All The World Is Blue follows the evidence to the edge of what can still be repaired. It finds its answer in that bird: not because one mouthful is enough, but because it is what can be done.
