Tips for Keeping the Big-Blue Green

Submitted by Adam St.Gelais, M.S., NSU Oceanographic Center

Seventy percent of our beloved planet is covered in water. We rely on the ocean in many regards and healthy ocean equates to a healthy planet. For example, more than 50% of the earth’s oxygen, the oxygen you and I breathe, is produced in the ocean (thank you phytoplankton!). That being said, knowing about issues facing the ocean and how we can protect it can be understandably difficult for many of us who may not interact with, or even live anywhere near the ocean! So, here is some basic advice to assist your ocean conservation efforts: when it comes to thinking about what you can do in your day to day life to help the ocean it helps to think really big. And by big, I mean the interconnectivity of everything on Earth. Whoa. That’s big.

The simple take home message is this: Everything ends out in the ocean. That’s right, everything. Given a long enough time period, the ocean is pretty much downstream from everywhere. This means that every cigarette butt, every plastic bottle, every chemical and fertilizer that gets dropped or spread on the ground, whether it is dropped in the parking lot on Ft. Lauderdale beach or in a field in Minnesota, it will eventually get washed into a stream or puddle or river or storm drain that eventually leads out to sea!

We throw away so many things, many of them plastic which does not biodegrade, that eventually find their way to the ocean. So much so, that there is literally an island of plastic and trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that is bigger than Texas – the great Pacific garbage patch. That is a lot of trash. To learn more, check out the Ocean Conservancy web site (www.oceanconservancy.org ) and the voyage of the Plastiki, a sailboat making a voyage around the world to raise awareness about trash in our ocean made entirely of plastic bottles (http://www.theplastiki.com). The first step to taking action is often simply arming yourself with the right knowledge for you to alter your every day actions!

If you would like to get involved further, the graduate students at the Oceanographic Center in conjunction with the Ocean Conservancy is hosting a beach clean-up at John U. Lloyd State Park in Dania beach from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. on Sept. 25. If you would like to volunteer, you can sign up at the Ocean Conservancy website (www.oceanconservancy.org ). Hope to see you on Sept. 25!

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Tips for Keeping the Big-Blue Green