What can you do as a visitor to the coast?

Julian Caldecott  says, “The most important thing is to remember where you are.  The coast is special, and especially vulnerable.  Every road and hotel room replaced part of its ecology, and every carload of visitors affects what is left, by making sewage and litter, by eating drinking and walking the dog, and by spending money at holiday rates.  These all have local impacts and can affect local livelihoods dramatically.  The solutions that local people are trying to reach deserve support.  Every tourist is a bundle of global experience, just as every local person is a bundle of local experience.  Visitors should get into the habit of talking a lot, and listening a lot, and questioning the arrangements that their tour companies and hotels have made on their behalf.”  And when it comes to taking care of Earth’s oceans on a global scale, he continues, 

“People will have to accept that policing international waters, and studying, monitoring and managing the life they contain, is going to cost money on a scale that can only really come from tax revenues. The trick is to make sure that taxes adequate to pay for policing the oceans are paid by those who use them, and in proportion to the benefits that they obtain.  Get informed and stay informed, and exercise your rights as a chooser of competing products in the marketplace.  The Marine Stewardship Council certifies certain products in the market as having been produced by sustainable fisheries.  Buy them, and never buy the rest.  This can make a difference.”

Caldecott is a United Nations Environment Programme biologist where he focuses on “environmental disaster management.”  Reading his book on a recent flight from San Francisco to Mexico City got me thinking about oceans in a way I hadn’t before.  Often I read about global environmental crises and get the sense that the problems are too vast and overwhelming for me to engage with on a very meaningful level.  What can I really do about cleaning up the world’s oceans?  Well, a lot as it turns out.  Caldecott’s book explains the problems in a style that non-specialists can appreciate; he provides an unvarnished, but not hysterical picture of the situation, and he offers plenty of success stories and suggestions for things we can all do to help “turn the tide” when it comes to global water issues. (pun intended.)

Buy it here

- Christina Heyniger