World Bank Says ‘Save the Oceans’
The World Bank has stepped in to help save the oceans. It is setting out to raise $1.5 billion from governments, the private sector and other groups to manage protected areas and reform fishing and other marine agreements.
Announcing a new Global Partnership for Oceans in Singapore, World Bank president Robert Zoellick said that governments, non-governmental organizations and United Nations bodies had signed up to a more coordinated approach to ocean conservation.
“The world’s oceans are in danger, and the enormity of the challenge is bigger than one country or organization,” Zoellick said. “We need coordinated global action to restore our oceans to health. Together we’ll build on the excellent work already being done to address the threats to oceans, identify workable solutions, and scale them up,”
Here’s a video from the new Global Partnership for Oceans. It lays out some of the issues, and shows how we all need to work together to turn things around for the oceans. One thing, though: The pitch that’s made for life in the ocean is oriented entirely around why this is important to us humans – that we’re depleting our food resources and poisoning ourselves – but not that saving the oceans is important for its own sake, for the lives and the wellbeing of all life in the oceans.
No doubt, the World Bank believes that the only way to spur action is to appeal to our survival and economic interests. But we should also look forward to a day when we understand not only, as a wise community leader in Papa says in the video, “The ocean is a part of us,” but, at a deeper level, that we ourselves are simply part of the oceans and the Earth.
Photo at top by Dan Century