The big question seems to always focus around the meaning of love. When most people think of love they think about loving one another, but sometimes forget that loving the environment and our oceans is just as important. Our oceans is one of the things that keeps us humans alive. We need the oceans just as much as the oceans need us to protect it.
I started Loving Our Oceans Now so that I could start to build a mindset shift about how we perceive the oceans. Shifting it from a place of profit, or a big garbage can to a place of love and compassion. I grew up loving the ocean with all my heart, but unfortunately not by an ocean. I have been blessed to be able to travel all over the world, which continues to heighten my passion to protect it. Ever since I was little I loved dolphins and always focused my career choices on something that had to do with the ocean. Protecting the ocean doesn’t just mean going to a protest, or meeting with the government, it could simply be telling your friends and family to stop throwing garbage on the ground, especially if it can be recycled.
Education is extremely important around these issues, for a long time I wanted to be a dolphin trainer, after the first time I went swimming with dolphins, when I was around 6 or 7 years old. Now that I look back on it I think about how wondrous a job like that would look like for someone so young and unknowing about how horrifying captivity really is. If younger kids were educated about how humans exploit the oceans for their own benefit, it would lead to a future world not dominated by a billion dollar captivity industry (wrote a neat essay on this if anyone is interested in it).
As we see every day, plastic amounts in the ocean get larger and larger and more and more mammal young (dolphins, whales, etc.) are ripped away from their mothers. At this point in time we have arrived in the Japan Dolphin Drive season, in which the capture pods of multiple species of dolphins are slaughtered for food or trainers from aquariums all over the world go there to pick and choose their new dolphins for shows. Although there is much more to that than I have mentioned it shows the damage we are doing to animals for our own gain.
The conversation that I would really like to start is igniting love into everyone’s heart for anything that is living, no matter the being. For example, the ideology that sharks are man-eating monsters, when in reality many of their species are endangered or vulnerable, 100 million sharks are killed yearly in comparison to the 6 human fatalities that occur yearly, WORLDWIDE. It is time to shift our mind from seeing them as predators in the sea, while making them our prey.
Change your heart and you will be able to see how others will change how they feel too. Allowing love to enter your heart, with regard to the ocean, will allow to ocean to feel more special each and every day.
STAND UP FOR WHAT YOU BELIEVE IN!
Author, Founder, Sarika Ganguli
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