Kids pail full of beach trash. Photo Credit: Jeffrey Dubinsky
Restoring a healthy ocean is possible, if we have the political will to grow the solutions faster than the problems
When I was 15 my mother took my sister and me to Key West, Florida, for my sister’s 18th birthday. Crossing the two- lane overseas highway I looked out at the clear blue, turquoise and aquamarine waters and felt I’d come home to a place I’d never been before.
Until then I’d thought I was born a generation too soon to explore other worlds. But that week, getting hold of a face mask and snorkel and swimming out into multihued gardens of living rock, fan and branching corals, shoaling fish, sea turtles and a small hammerhead shark cruising past me with predatory grace, I realized there was a whole other alien world right off the seawall. Today we send probes to Mars, Pluto and Jupiter’s moon Europa and what’s the first thing we look for as a sign of life? Water. Yet we’re living on a blue water planet that’s little explored yet highly vulnerable to our human behaviors.
