The activities of Mundus maris asbl and its partners to celebrate World Environment Day (5 June) and World Ocean Day 2022 (8 June) started already in May with raising awareness in two classes at the Colegio Bilingüe Báltico in the Veracruz Province, Mexico. The UN motto for this year ‘Revitalization: Collective Action for the Ocean’ is particularly stimulating and timely in the light of several major reports published in the last few months and painting a gloomy picture of greater negative impact of human action on the ocean than expected. Having said this, the research also shows that much worse can be prevented by determined collective action, e.g. weaning us faster from fossil fuels and delivering the deal in the World Trade Organization (WTO) to finally phase out harmful fisheries subsidies.

In Mexico, we supported a broad alliance composed of Limpiemos Veracruz, Kayam, Decididos, Ecosendero, OPEVER and Colegio Bilingue Báltico in the municipality of Alvarado in Veracruz Province. Maria Soledad Logozzo coordinated the different contributions on site by the partners to this initiative. They started out with producing an attractive series of informative slides to illustrate to two classes of secondary school students why it is so important to care for the ocean. The students were all eyes and ears and followed the presentations attentively.

 

The students were then invited to test their newly acquired knowledge with a quiz provided by Mundus maris in collaboration with students at the Belgrano University in Buenos Aires (Spanish version here). This was part of a wider initiative to draw the attention of citizens across all generations about the threats widespread plastic pollution, particularly micro-plastic was posing to marine life in the ocean and the lagoon bordering town. The campaigners also explained that such environmental pollution was negatively impacting public health. That was a good preparation to pass to action on the ground for a beach cleaning drive announced widely through the poster below for 28 May 2022.

And come they did from the youngest to the grandfather generation. And unfortunately, in a short time in the tropical sweaty climate, they collected really substantial amounts of garbage from the beach.

 

 

 

 

 

Special arrangements had been made to ensure that the garbage was properly picked up and disposed off to honour the clean-up effort. The hope is that more people realise that preventing the pollution is the way to go. A big thanks to the volunteers of the awareness campaign and particularly those facing down the garbage on the beach.