Musicians and activists Beatie Wolfe and Brian Eno, on their latest album, Liminal, have expressed hope for a tortured and exhausted world in their piece Ringing Ocean.
Whenever I listened to the piece (regardless of the unrelated visualizer) I had to think of joyful and delightful life in the ocean, with sprawling whales and little noises of myriads of smaller animals.
No doubt, their entire environment is being destroyed. What are humans doing when preventing the loss of their basis of life?
Recently, attempts were made to rescue a confused young humpback, stranded on several sandbanks in German waters of the Baltic Sea. This attracted the monthlong, disproportionate attention of a public generally more or less ignorant of the destruction of their natural resources.
When the animal finally died, and was washed up at Danish shores, authorities promised to examine the cadaver which was grotesquely bloated due to putrefaction gases and about to even explode. They are certainly looking for large amounts of digested plastic and fishing nets.
When one considers the vast distances that humpback whales travel from the coasts off the Americas, where they mate, give birth and bring up their offspring, to the Arctic to feed on plankton and small fish, one cannot help but find the futile attempts of uninformed Germans—including a government minister in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania—both naïve and utterly embarrassing. Feigning interest in and concern for the environment by solving irrelevant problems is generally regarded as greenwashing.
A few words on Earth Overshoot Day. It “marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year.” In 2025 it was July 24. In the United States, it was already on March 14 this year; in Germany, for 2026 it was May 10. It’s interesting to see apparently exemplarily progressive countries like Finland, Canada, Denmark lists early in the year together with the supposedly culprits, Kuwait, Bahrain, the U.S.
31 May, 2026 @ 10:55 UTC+2.
Last modified May 31, 2026.