Founder’s Statement
Ocean Aid is an organization whose mission is to promote awareness of the vital importance of restoring and preserving the health of the world’s oceans and saving their endangered inhabitants, and to offer ways that all of us can assist in doing so. It consists of a group of ocean advocates dedicated to the proposition that our seas are our planet’s chief life-support system – responsible for generating approximately 70 percent of its oxygen –and need programs to protect them similar to the initiatives launched to save the rainforest.
Having been brought up in a fishing family, and having spent summers during my youth aboard my father’s fishing boat, I well know what it’s like to depend on the sea for one’s livelihood. So it is with total respect for those hard-working seafarers who, like my own family, provide us with such essential and healthful staples of our diet that I have launched this campaign. I want to make sure that these resources continue to be available for future generations.
But what, exactly, will that entail? For one thing, finding ways of curtailing the various forms of pollution that now pose a major threat to the viability of the marine environment – not just those due to corporate carelessness, such as the Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010, but those that are the cumulative results of indifference by individuals. That means that while we must ceaselessly campaign for renewable sources of energy and an end to practices like deep-water drilling, we also must initiate simple, practical measures for altering personal attitudes and behavior that have resulted in equally damaging, if less dramatic, ecological catastrophes, such as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” that has literally choked a large section of that great ocean with plastic.
It will also call for refraining – at least, for the time being – from eating fish that are declining faster than they can recover. Knowing which species these are isn’t difficult. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Endangered Seafood Guide is a comprehensive and convenient source of information on which ones shouldn’t currently be caught – or bought. The Audubon Society also provides a list of its own, and Whole Foods Markets offers its customers a color-coded guide to allow them to make informed purchasing decisions.
During those summers when I accompanied my father in his boat the sea was literally brimming with fish. In some places, they were so plentiful that their presence was often announced by turbulent, foamy areas of mid-ocean “chop” from which they could be seen leaping in the air. Sadly, such abundance has all but ceased to exist. My hope is that both by making responsible choices and taking actions aimed at keeping the ocean from becoming a dumping ground, we can restore this incredible ecosystem to its former glory.
– Anthony Zolezzi
