Friday, October 15, 2010

blog action day 2010

Blog Action Day 2010: Water from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

ok, i'm going to see if can get a little bit of a jump on this year's Blog Action Day. it occurred to me that the rest of the global internet community will be well into this event by the time daylight comes to the Pacific coast of the US, so i better post this early so it can join the rest of the international operation.
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for those of you who don't know, Blog Action Day is an annual occasion (for 2010, on Friday, October 15) of global internet activism, where bloggers around the world cooperate together to highlight a particular issue. the idea is that if many bloggers all make posts about the same issue at the same time it will garner greater public attention, and thereby awareness, for the issue of concern--and thereby hopefully have a greater chance of motivating a response to fix it.

the issue chosen for this year's Blog Action Day is water. water is one of the most fundamental components necessary for life on Earth, yet increasingly is being put under stress, with more of it becoming less usable and less accessible with each passing year. i won't go into details regarding the global water crisis, since you can get the necessary details at the following:

my contribution Blog Action Day in this post will to concentrate on water in the coastal regions of the planet. for those of you involved in the endurance sports community, particularly those of you living in coastal areas, this is something of which you are no doubt already intimately aware. you are as aware of it as much as any of the other members of the aquatic recreational community, including swimmers, surfers, boaters, etc. some of you may belong to multiple groups, and hence have even more exposure to shoreline waters.

regardless of the group, however, we share the same waters and we share the same recognition that the state of the waters along our coastlines is something with an immediate impact on our lives and something which we can monitor within our daily consciousness. to borrow the academic term for this, it is something salient to us.

i am sure that each of you has encountered days when you realized that our coastlines are not as clean as they could be nor are as clean as they should be--ans in some situations nor as clean as they need to be. it may have been via a news report, a public warning, a friend's mishap, or even your own personal experience. regardless, it involved something that threatened the health of the water and in so doing threatened the health of you and others around you.

those kinds of experiences are not unique to you nor your community. they are becoming increasingly commonplace. whether as a result of development, industry, waste, consumption, or overuse, coastal waters are becoming increasingly damaged, sometimes to an extent harmful to life--not just marine life or littoral life, but all life, including our own. this is true not just for those of us in Southern California or the Pacific Coast of the US, but for coastal waters around the world.

in which case, they should be taken as an alert to all of us to recognize the deteriorating condition of our shorelines and to start taking action to fix them. just as the problems facing our coastal waters impact more than just us as individuals, so too the solutions for our coastal waters involve more than just us alone. if we want to fix them, then we need to work together in a collective effort that produces a clearly significant long-term solution.

thankfully, we are not alone, and there are already collective efforts being undertaken. you can see their findings and follow what they're doing at the following links (apologies for the ones specific to California, but these are groups of which i am most aware, being in Los Angeles):

i'm not going to say much more than this, since i don't want to belabor the point and come across as preachy. but definitely take a look at the above links, and take some time to check out Blog Action Day. and if you feel sufficiently concerned, feel free to support these organizations--or similar organizations in your coastal region if you are not from Southern California--in their efforts to improve the health of our shoreline waters.

it's not just about you, it's about everyone and everything else.

1 comment:

Dave Lucas said...

Ha-ha! Love your Facebook photo! Thanks for joining us for Blog Action Day! Take a look at my post if you have time!