World Ocean Day 2020 - Objective 30X30

WE ARE ONE PLANET, WITH ONE OCEAN, AND ONE RACE – HUMAN!
Can We Unite to Save it All?

Today is World Ocean Day.  A day to reflect, celebrate, protect, and preserve our Earth’s life support system.  The ocean serves as the lungs of our planet and provide us with more than half the world’s oxygen. The ocean stores 50 times more carbon dioxide than our entire atmosphere. The ocean covers 70% of the Earth’s surface and regulates our climate and weather patterns from the equator to the poles for life as we know it. There is no substitute for this vast ecosystem!

As a SCUBA diver you are taught to never take for granted your life support system.  Proper maintenance and care are critical to help ensure your survival while underwater. The human race is failing our ocean, our planet, and our future existence by taking our one life support system for granted. Years of chronic over-fishing practices, pollution and habitat destruction have consumed our healthy ocean leaving approximately one-third of marine mammal, sharks and reef-forming corals threatened with extinction. The carbon dioxide emitted from our factories and vehicles have made the ocean more acidic. The changing climate is increasing the water temperature and decreasing oxygen in vast areas of the ocean, making them less habitable.

Scientist recommend conserving 30% of land and 30% of ocean by 2030 - referred to as 30x30!  Today only 15% of our lands and 7% of our ocean are protected globally. Please visit and educate yourself at www.campaignfornature.org and take action this World Ocean Day. We need leaders and elected officials that will take speedy action in the right direction. It is about working together state by state, nation by nation to align globally and create a sustainable future for our children and grandchildren.

Yes, these ARE unprecedented times and Mother Earth is SCREAMING at the top of her lungs to get our attention!  Are you listening?  Nature and people will share the same fate if we do not! Our natural world is disappearing at an alarming rate. From 2001 to 2017, the United States alone lost more than a football field’s worth of natural area to development every 30 seconds! Three-fourths of the planet’s lands and two-thirds of its marine environments are considered “severely altered” by human activity. When humans change the environment like this, we degrade natural animal habitats and squeeze their living space. Proximity to these animals increases our risk of contracting pathogens these animals carry as they jump species to species - like coronavirus. The cost of nature’s deterioration is also falling disproportionately on economically disadvantaged communities and communities of color. Sadly, all the chaos of 2020 has been self-inflicted, and we cannot sit back and be observers any longer - it is time to wake up and take action!

The natural world is being consumed by human greed.  Existence of humanity on Earth is threatened by humans – our life support system is in dire need of an overhaul.  Until we learn to work together as one race, for our one ocean and our one planet, our so-called “progress” is our ultimate demise.

I want to see my grandson enjoy the ocean and lands as much as I have. I certainly do not want him asking “why didn’t grandma’s generation do more while there was still time?” 

There is time - 30X30 is the objective!