Water is life
“Water is life” proclaim the advertising slogans.
It’s ironic then that one brand of bottled water, Hayat (which means life in Turkish), together with all other bottled waters, should be responsible for so much pollution.
A couple of years a I took a series of photos of marine litter for a photography competition on this subject. Ultimately it is, of course, the human race which is responsible for marine (and terrestrial) pollution. You have only to walk along any of the beaches on the island of Cyprus to see that this is a problem. Rubbish thrown into the sea at sea from small fishing boats to huge liners or container ships ends up being carried with the currents on to the shore, to add to the accumulation of all the rubbish already dumped by so many care-less people visiting the beaches.
On a beautiful, sunny, autumn day I was the only person on this beach, which stretches for miles and would be so beautiful if it weren’t for all the rubbish – plastic bottles and bags by the thousand, fishing line, shoes, pens, food containers, medicine bottles, glass, piping and a dead dog – to name but a few, polluted the beach of Akdeniz, one of the few remaining beaches where caretta caretta turtles come to breed.
In the rock pools where only seaweeds drifting in the current or small fish darting in the shallows should be seen, also drifted swathes of plastic.
“Message in a bottle” – it was sadly only too obvious that bottles were the message …. It took me less than 15 minutes on a small stretch of beach to collect enough bottle tops to spell out this message:
At the end of my walk I was appalled and depressed by the mess. It’s no wonder people don’t want to use the beaches. It’s all very well putting up noticeboards encouraging people to keep our environment clean but where were the rubbish bins? Children and adults too, need to be educated to take their rubbish home with them. It’s not difficult to do. Perhaps if we lived in Singapore we would all think differently – littering of any sort there is a punishable offence ….
David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II series really brought home to thousands of people the damage we are doing to our seas, galvanising people into action – organising beach litter clean-up days, refusing to use plastic bags, re-using water bottles, rejecting plastic packaging on fruit and vegetables, refusing straws in drinks in their local bars, etc. Please do your bit to help the planet. We only have one life.
The question is not what you look at, but what you see - Thoreau 