Words are poor things in those first few moments back on land. That s the sum of it, though Barthes was never thinking of bless through night encounters with shrimps. An unusual conjunction, this, of happiness in relation to ecological awareness. Usually it doesn t work this way. Nature writers lament the loss of natural beauty through human destructiveness.
Ecological awareness tends to bring about a general gloominess of outlook.
It s hard to remain happy, with Greenpeace predicting that coral bleaching might well destroy The Great Barrier Reef within 20 or 50 or 200 years. It seems part of the human condition, this tendency to care about people and places and things that can and almost certainly will be lost. Yet the optimist, though sharing the pessimist s knowledge of ultimate loss, may still put ecological gloom to one side. The broader generosity of the universe is nowhere more manifest than in the sight of thousands of nesting birds. Or gently sifting sand through your fingers and knowing it is composed of billions of skeletons of the tiny algae, the forams, which sustain the reef.