What You Can Do to Save Marine Life From Home
For a lot of people who care about the environment, marine preservation is viewed as something of a hands-on activity. Whether through local recycling efforts, beach or river clean-ups, or even boating and scuba diving exhibitions, there are a lot of activities through which you can make a difference. During the COVID-19 pandemic however, a lot of these in-person options have either disappeared temporarily or simply begun to seem risky.
For this reason, we expect some of you may be looking for ways to contribute to saving marine life from home. And as it so happens, there are a lot of things you can do! Some are quite casual and some are significantly more involved, but the following efforts can all help you play a role.
Watch Your Waste
The easiest way you can contribute to saving marine life from home is simply to be mindful of your own waste. The issue of plastic in the ocean is one that can’t possibly be overstated, either in its scope or its negative impact. This is one of the main reasons it’s always important to recycle plastic and dispose of waste responsibly. But particularly now — when you’re limited at home and when so many of us are actually consuming more plastic through takeout and deliveries — it’s a great time to be particularly diligent in your efforts.
Consume Seafood Responsibly
Responsible seafood consumption can be surprisingly complicated. This is because seafood guides can be flat-out confusing! Brands and stores will often pitch relatively unproven sustainability, or in some cases may just not be able to tell you much about the subject. With proper research into scientific sources and guides though, you can ensure that whatever seafood you may be buying or ordering during the pandemic is responsibly sourced. This is a more beneficial effort than it might seem to be, also. You aren’t just not eating unsustainably sourced seafood; you’re also supporting someone’s effort to farm the oceans in a safe, humane, and sustainable manner.
Research Organizations to Support
If you want to use your time during the pandemic not only for safe practices, but to get more focused on marine conservation in general, it’s a great time to do some research. Read relevant books and journals, research organizations working to safe marine life, and figure out if there are any programs or efforts you might want to get involved with. That way, when life gets a little more normal and you feel you can take a more active role, you’ll have some direction.
Seek a Degree
Building on the notion of focusing on ways you can help in the future, you can also use your extra time at home to start pursuing a degree that can help you to take a more active role in marine conservation moving forward. Clearly this is a more involved idea, and one for someone prepared for more of a commitment. At the same time though, pursuing an online sustainability degree is something you can do affordably and largely on your own time. And even so, it can lead to real jobs and leadership roles in conservation. For those who are particularly serious about marine life, it’s definitely an option worth considering.
Stay on Top of the News
On a more day-to-day level, we’d also note that it’s important to stay on top of the news regarding marine life and marine sustainability in general. Orca Conservancy has recently commented on whale watching licensing for instance, identifying a good example of an issue that more passive observers might have missed. If you want to be more active in preserving marine life, it is well worth your while to try to spot and follow issues like these. A good start would be to follow relevant service organizations and government officials and entities online. That way you can be sure you’re up to date on what’s happening, and aware of any needs or opportunities for important activism in the near future.
Hopefully this has given you a few actionable ideas for how to help marine life from home! It’s not quite as easy to make a difference as it can be during ordinary times, but there’s still plenty you can do to help.
Exclusively written for ORCACONSERVANCY.org | By: Rhona Jaleigh
