In running through an edit the other day for a magazine feature, I happened to stumble upon a file titled “Lost Mermaid” In it were some large scan images of Hannah Fraser performing as a mermaid which I had shot in the Maldives quite some time ago.

The scans had apparently been put in a  back file and forgotten. When I had run across them eventually, I had finished my post production work, sent them out into the netherworld of global editorial submission, and once again sort of forgotten them.

Flicking through thousands of images deftly , when I opened that Lost Mermaid folder I simply stopped in my tracks and went “Wow”.

On the face of it, a pretty girl putting on a mermaid suit and floating around in the Laccadive Sea (Far side of the world, mid ocean) could be construed as a silly thing to deem of any real value or significance.

But the reality is that in process, this artist inspires each of us to don our own suit of many colors and step out into the void. The world needs that from us, especially right now as it groans under the weight of vast change and challenge.

Here is a good example, sent along by Eric Skaar. A beautiful mind.

Here is another, sent along by Dr Ed Brenegar. A TedX talk by the wonderful CEO of Random Kid,  sixteen year old Talia Leman.

Earlier this week, I got to sit in an hours long conversation with my friend George Orbelian, who among many things heads up the San Francisco Global Trade Council and Project Kaisei. As sunshine magnified by a big bay window, warmed away the chill of a wintery afternoon in Ocean Beach SF, I listened intently as we examined a number of quite vast issues, ones that would appear to be out of reach for any “normal” person in our culture.

After we had looked at “the Japan Problem” and George had presented some rather intriguing information about the Nuclear Plants and Tsunami damage and I had thrown my POV’s worth of data on the pile, George looked at me and quite earnestly said something that hit me with more force than any bitch slap ever could: “What are we going to do?”

And I thought about the mermaid.  There are always solutions, but often they come via something that is so lateral, “the powers that be”, due to the way socio- political organizations function, would never consider that maybe the answer was in the examination of a different process and a shift in Philosophy.

Japan changes everything. In this dire time, is presented a remarkable opportunity to change our world for the better and establish something very remarkably sustainable: clean energy, more secure nuclear power generating stations and the creation of a waste recycling system utilizing fuel with a fraction of the safety issues of Uranium and Plutonium. Ever hear about Thorium?

Here is a very simplified view of the potential of Thorium as an energy source in the generation process.

But as my friends in Japan have already pointed out, you cannot build nuclear bombs if your plants run on Thorium. Ever think about what that means strategically? To have all your fissionable material breeders spread all over the countryside generating electricity as well as material to build bombs?

So as my time with George came to an end we looked at the hard line items in Japan and our World, which due to some Geologically time based activity, is likely going to see more incidences like the quake off of Japan that killed so many.  It also created the scenario for catastrophic failure that will in all likelihood cause the reactors to need to become entombed like Chernobyl, thereby causing a loss of the land, adjacent ocean, and vast environmental  resources and health.

As I watched the video of the Tsunami coming ashore and the roiling black waters that I knew contained bodies being crushed by the weight of water and debris, I thought laterally. You could limit some of this further by  a number of actions. But the greater damage and threat to life, that of environmental nuclear disaster, energy dependence and the war expense that implies, that catastrophic flood, can be prevented entirely.

You just need to understand the significance of mermaids.