Friday, December 19, 2014

My Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah Gift to You: Hope for the Future of the Sea! by Tina Erwin


Dear Friends,
     This is the last blog that will come out using the RSS feed from this Light Times blog. I have migrated my blog to my newly revamped website: http://tinaerwin.com/wp/light-times-blog/
     If you want to read the blog below with the photographs that go with it, then go ahead and go to the new website, now.
     If you would like to continue to receive these blogs automatically, please send your email to:  Tina@TinaErwin.com  Then you will be added to an automatic mailing list if you are not already on it.  Thank you!
 
     This is supposed to be the season of hope, but all too often it is, at the least, the season of stress and at the worst, the season of depression, grief and despair. But it doesn't have to be. If we look around us, we are going to see innumerable acts of kindness, gentle faces with easy smiles and catch a look at a proud parent, or the delighted smiles of a happy grandparent. Perhaps we expect these things. This season is not only for children.
         What we don’t expect is to see something that gives us hope for tomorrow. Despite the commercialism of this time of year, there are ways that we can give back, not merely to each other, but to the Earth itself. Christ’s message was not merely that of resurrection and life everlasting, it was the hope of the inherent goodness of each person, and their desire to make the world a better place for all of us. Hanukkah is about continuing to see the light in the darkness and hoping for brighter times.
         If we look around us, we see how we, as the human species, have contaminated the planet. My focus is how we have polluted the oceans on levels that should sicken all of us. This does not mean that we have consciously dumped plastic in among the sea life. Tsunamis, earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes, shipwrecks and the thoughtless acts of the ships that ply the sea have washed and/or dumped tons of plastics and other debris in the sea.
         The world is not flat as was previously thought and by the same token, we have to change our belief that we have no real way to clean up the sickening level of plastic in the oceans of the world. There is a way.
         This is really a story of how one person can make a difference and absolutely change the world. That one person is a Boyan Slat from Delft, Holland, and to quote him: “While diving in Greece, I became frustrated when coming across more plastic bags than fish and wondered: ‘why can’t we clean this up?” This young man, at the age of 19 years old, figured out a way to clean the plastic out of the 5 massive islands of swirling plastic on this planet.
          But the plastic does not just congregate among these five islands he calls ‘gyres;’ they are all over the world and the concept of cleaning them up looked like an impossibly daunting task. Everyone said it couldn’t be done.
         But it can be done.
         Boyan came up with a concept of “The Ocean Cleanup Array” and to quote his website: “the Ocean Cleanup Array concept is likely a feasible and viable method to remove almost half the plastic from the North Pacific Garbage patch in 10 years, while being an estimated 7900 times faster and 33 times cheaper than conventional methods.”
         So my humble offering to all you is the hope that we can clean this up.  Please check out this uplifting story on his website: http://www.theoceancleanup.com/ 
            Participate in some way.  Believe that the future can be better than it currently is and that we can each be part of it.
            Love to all of you!  Tina