Are we doing enough to save our oceans and beaches?
You take a stroll down the beach, you look up and all you can see is dreadfulness. A turtle starving to death with a plastic bag in his stomach he thought was a jellyfish, fish bobbing in the water trying to survive from an oil spill and seagulls strangled by plastic on the beach. I’m going to explain why oil spills, plastic and overfishing are bad or our seas.
Oil spills are one thing but there is over 706 million each year. Only 5% of them are big spills like the Rena off the Tauranga coast which was New Zealand’s worst marine disaster. When sea otters swim into oil their body temperature drops, they get hypothermia before slowly dying. Oil spills are sadly killing our marine life but plastic is just as disastrous.
Plastic destroys the environment but did you also know that beauty products contain tiny plastic particles called micro beads which go into the ocean when you wash them down the drain. In 2015 one man started a remarkable cleanup effort o Versova Beach in India which was one of the dirtiest beaches in the world. People started to join in and after 85 weeks of cleaning, 5.3 million kilogrammes of rubbish, they had a beach everyone could enjoy.
Another way we can save our marine life is by limiting our fishing because we are losing species as well as entire ecosystems. Fish have been on this planet for about 500 million years and there are over 25,000 known species of fish. Some countries aren’t limiting their fishing so there are barely any fish left for future generations.
What can you and I do to protect our beaches and oceans? We can pick up rubbish off the beach, buy products without microbeads, throw back small fish and not get more than our quota.
And maybe when we grow up we can join “Green Peace” and help clean up after oil spills!
