Can a selfish attitude be the answer to a cleaner ocean?
I’m alright Jack!
We recently shared a fantastic beach cleaning charity over in the Isle of Man (see our facebook post) which over the last ten years has grown and grown to today in one session they filled 180 bags of rubbish of the beaches, unbelievable and terrible in equal measures.
It got me thinking, this is a world issue, we have heard stories of plastic being put into the ocean and literally travelling thousands of miles, its too big to face as a whole but hold on, here's the Isle of Man saying ‘lets just focus on our own beaches’. Effectively let us look after our own doorstep, thats not saying they don't want to clean everywhere it is just more realistic in their goals, the 'I'm alright Jack' attitude which so often is negative but in this context may be absolutely brilliant!
So, what do I mean? Well most countries have some access to the sea, for sure the UK being an island has too many beaches to count, we looked into exactly how many but could not find an accurate number, still, there's a lot. But, and its a big but, there's a lot of us on this island, when I was born there was about 60 million, nowadays its closer to 66million, and thats a lot of hands, well 132 million to be precise!
Another issue about us is were quite well spread out, alright I know its a South East concentration but we tend to live around the coastline so there is a pretty good amount of people around every bay so lets just think if we took the ‘I’m alright Jack’ approach and simply looked after our own? Well for one we would pull a lot of rubbish off our beaches, nice, another point is we would all spend more time at the beach, sound pleasant, and on top of all this if everyone took the same attitude we would cover all of our beaches. If other countries followed suit then this selfish attitude starts to make a lot of sense.
So the next time your walking on a beach, perhaps its your favourite one be selfish, take a bag with you and lets start looking after ourselves, in the long term this world appears smaller and smaller every day and what we do here has impacts across the world, whether its dumping plastic bottles or picking them up its us that can make a difference.
Well done the Isle of Man, for me I’m going to be totally selfish and start looking after myself, or at least looking after my own beach, why don’t you try it?
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