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Oceans are awesome, in both senses of the word. They are incredibly enormous. Their depths will crush you faster than Judith Collins crushes boy racer cars (but without wasting tax dollars).

Waves lapping at the shores will change landscapes more tirelessly and repetitively than Bill English’s lies about Labour mismanaging the economy. Oceans not only incubated early life on Earth for billions of years but also made the atmosphere hospitable as ancient oceanic cells converted carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight into oxygen one blob at a time. Life in our oceans plays an integral role in biochemical cycles, and in the diets and the economies of developed and developing nations.
   After millions of years, the oceans have biology down. Watch the fluid pulse of a jellyfish. Some are deadly to touch, others just strange. You’ll find social creatures form interspecies relationships or you can watch the anti-social behaviour of an orca ravaging a seal or a shark. Schools of fish swim around in such mathematical conformity it’s as if they are programmed by a simple algorithm. Other creatures are amazingly intelligent: you would be hard pressed to find a dolphin stupid enough to vote for National solely for the reason that it was “about time for a change.” Translucent, neon, glowing, camouflaged, complex, boring, giant, graceful, stealthy, clumsy, vegetarian, carnivorous, docile, A.D.D. You name it, the ocean’s got it. 
   Ten years ago the Census of Marine Life set out to do exactly that. They concluded there are about 230 000 species of any kind of life in our oceans. But that “most ocean organisms still remain nameless and their numbers unknown ... the ocean is simply so vast that after 10 years of hard work, we still have only snapshots ... of what the sea contains.” What a happy coincidence that this report was released in 2010, the United Nations International Year of Biodiversity, a “celebration of life on Earth and the value of biodiversity for our lives.”
   Well, there’s good news for our taxonomist friends, they will achieve their goal in the future, simply because there will be fewer denizens of the deep to encounter. This is also the bad news. Due to over-fishing, bottom trawling, and pollution, things are about to look more and more biblical. Existing dead zones will merge into bigger dead zones. Oceans will become corrosive and mass extinctions will ruin millions of years of evolution. Plagues of jellyfish ... Old Testament shit. 
   Some scientists attribute this nightmare to human greed. I prefer this explanation: human indifference is the greatest threat to the world’s oceans. First, because it’s not wrong not to care about something if you don’t know it’s happening. For most of us oceans are a totally different world from ours, even though the two affect each other so much. Second, because indifference entails a lack of empathy once you are aware of a problem or suffering. And it’s clear that there is simply not enough empathy to go around.