Of the Titanic, the Bounty, and Other Shipwrecks

The metaphor of the ship has always been extremely powerful in the global narrative about the common fate of planet Earth. The famous image of the Blue Marble was instrumental in the construction of the imaginary of the planet as a spaceship roaming in the universe. The ship evokes the idea of both finiteness and unity. In many languages "to be in the same boat" means to share the same destiny, thereby, to collaborate in order to operate the ship. The corollary of that metaphor is the existence of the open ocean, that is, of a risky space in which the ship and its crew are navigating. I will discuss about what these metaphors say - and hide - about the ecological crisis, or the the collapse of modern civilization using the key concept of this issue