TDML: Love the Ocean, Protect the Ocean

I’ve always love being near the sea.

When I was a child, my parents drove by the sea everyday to get to their little shop at the airfreight center, with my siblings and me in tow. The business didn’t last long, but I loved every ride along that road that ran parallel to the beach.

The sea taught the 4 year-old me what “beauty” was before I fully grasped the meaning of that word.

The sea was beautiful, and infinitely bigger than the small me could ever imagine. I understood instinctively that it could swallow me whole and wipe me from the surface of the earth, so I was afraid of it. I can’t swim after all.

At the same time, I can’t help loving it.

Sometimes we stopped by the beach. Those times were the best. I love the strong breeze, the soothing rhythm of the waves that sounded so much like breathing. I love the vastness of the sea and the wonderfully distinct smell that only she exudes.

When the tide is high, sometimes mom picked up a dead palm leaf from the ground for me to dangle in the water. Dangling the leaf in the seawater allowed me to interact with it from a safe place.

I didn’t know it then – I regarded the sea with reverence, and I still do decades later.

When I got older, I learnt that there’s the sea, and there’s the ocean.

I saw the Indian Ocean standing on Kuta beach, on a trip to Bali. It was my first seeing an ocean, and I realized that waves really do crash. The first time I heard the thundering of the waves, my heart soared. “That’s how a wave sounds like!” I thought.

Then I saw the Pacific Ocean from Bondi Beach. It was my first time at the beach in cool weather. Kuta Beach was beautiful, but Bondi Beach was breathtaking.

Running a fever and being clad in two sweatshirts did nothing to dampen the experience. It was a gorgeous Spring day and Bondi Beach was insanely beautiful. The coolness of the breeze balanced perfectly with the warmth of the sun. The deep blue of the Pacific Ocean made me want to cry.

It was perfect.

I was lucky. I saw the Pacific Ocean again, this time from the other side, at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. This time, it was a cold, breezy and foggy day, but still beautiful in a melancholic, haunting way. The waves were huge, bigger than I’ve ever seen.

A year later, I watched the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean from Wildwood Crest, in New Jersey. Anth and I huddled in the cold, observing the sky go through a million shades of blue, purple, red, orange and yellow over a calm and beautiful ocean.

I love and cherish every one of these encounters with the ocean.

Five different locations. One world ocean. One fate.

I’ve noticed lately, that the sea didn’t smell as strongly as before. Maybe it’s a result of the natural ebb and flow of oceanic activities, but I can’t help wondering if it’s a result of our careless actions.

The ocean is still beautiful on the surface, but we’ve been systematically and blindly assaulting it, disturbing its balance.

Our excessive carbon emission has resulted in global warming, causing the ocean to warm and acidify. As a result, the corals are bleaching and plankton dying. We’ve over-fished two-thirds of the world’s seafood, pushing the Pacific bluefin tuna and sharks closer and closer to extinction.

To make things worse, we’ve polluted the ocean with tonnes of oil, plastic and nutrients from fertilizers and wastewater – the last resulting in hundreds of dead zones.

The ocean creates more than 50% of our oxygen, regulates our climate, plays a vital role in the water cycle and provides us with food. Nature gave us the most beautiful things with the most generous, balanced and intelligent systems, and we’ve gone ahead and messed it up.

It troubles me to think about the kind of ocean we’re leaving to the next generation. The dark side of me can’t help wondering if the ocean can only recuperate and regenerate with humanity gone.

Maybe we didn’t know, or think about the consequences of our action decades ago, but we’re experiencing the consequences now. We know what we did that brought us to this situation. That means we can do something to help protect the ocean, and save humanity.

Things we can do:

1. Lower our carbon footprint and reduce our energy consumption.
2. Reduce our plastic usage and avoid single-use plastic.
3. Choose sustainable seafood options, or consume lesser seafood.
4. Share our knowledge about how our actions affect the ocean.
5. Protect the ocean and the beaches – don’t litter at the beach, and dispose trash properly at all times to prevent them from ending up in the ocean.
6. Use fertilizer only when necessary and at the recommended amount.
7. Support causes and organizations that take care of the ocean.

I know I’ve spoiled the mood of the trip down memory lane (that’s what TDML stands for) by talking about how we’ve harmed the ocean. But it’s precisely because of how beautiful and important the ocean is, that we need to keep talking about these terrible realities.

If we don’t protect the ocean now, we may not have a future to look forward to. Let’s do it together.

Do you have a fond memory of a day at the beach? Please share it with me. Together, we can keep reminding each other about what we need to do to protect the ocean, so that future generations can have fond memories of days at the beach too.