Lesson 4:Swimming Silently

The Sea-Turtle Clan
This afternoon, the elders gathered for Meeting. I’m only
12, but Grandmother brought me along. She wants me to
understand the way the world works. “More children should
attend Meeting,” she said. “They’ll be elders someday, too.”
“Besides,” she added in a sing-song voice, “They’re serving
kelp cakes.” She knows I adore seaweed cakes, but I don’t need
to be coaxed. I like Meeting. It’s held at the top of the village,
just beneath the shell dome. I like to watch the light make
patterns on the shell and see all the underwater creatures go
swimming by.
Meeting follows the same routine. First, there are speeches
about our clan’s history. Today one of the elders talked about
how the Sea Turtle Clan came into being:
“Long ago, Earth and its creatures struggled to
survive amid the pollution that covered both land and sea.
Then, a small group of people began to study the sea turtle.
They realized the turtle had survived natural disasters over
millions of years. It was a great keeper of Earth’s history — but
now it was dying at the hands of humans.”
“For years, the turtles cried for help, but no one
listened. Bulldozers destroyed turtle nesting grounds to erect
extravagant homes. Plastics dumped into the oceans filled the
turtles’ bellies. They grew sick from chemicals and pollution.
People killed nesting turtles on beaches. They harvested so
many of their eggs that entire generations would never hatch.”
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