TO BE AT THE FIRST UNITED NATIONS OCEAN CONFERENCE

As life in the oceans faces an uncertain future, leaders have gathered for the first time to address one of the biggest challenges of modern times

World leaders gather to confront the fact that we could be losing the fight to save our marine environments

My ocean story begins in Komodo National Park, at a dive site called Batu Balong. For three years, I had been in and out of the hospital for multiple surgeries on my right leg following a ski accident. I was crippled, in pain and utterly depressed. As life would have it, I found myself in Indonesia on a liveaboard dive trip. At 25 metres down in ripping current, sharing a reef hook with the dive guide, bug-eyed (both of us), I was convinced the last few terrifying moments of my life were playing out. They weren’t. In fact, that ripping Komodo current straightened my crippled leg and the ocean graciously swallowed years of pain.

I went home and put my land-locked life in storage. I have travelled the world extensively since, learning about the oceans, human impact and climate change.

Attending the first UN Ocean Conference, after three ambiguous years living in hotel rooms and out of a suitcase, felt definitive. I had arrived. Entering the United Nations World Headquarters in New York with my name badge, new camera bag and freshly ironed blouse felt very much like the first day of school.

The UN was closed to the public during the week of the Ocean Conference. Over 8,000 world leaders, delegates, researchers, academics, oil/mineral/gas mining advocates, non-profits and media were running between hundreds of events, making commitments, telling their own version of the story, networking among a cumulative thousands-of-years’-worth of international relationships. The lineup of global characters stood on platforms representing their own agendas, agendas of their countries, or in some surprising cases, the agendas of business looking to industrialise the ocean.

As plenary sessions and side events were in gathering, the maze of hallways and corridors were mostly still. Scattered across benches and laminate cafeteria tables, delegates and aides click-click-clicked away on laptops, hunched over keyboards, fixated on translating the ocean story into countless languages for every country in the world.

As sessions and side events ended, conference room doors opened from historymaking assemblies to the flow of thousands of people, in all shades of humanity. Men and women adorned in symbolic garments from their home nations poured into common areas decked with marine inspired art and underwater photography. Lively eyed, aboriginal Australians in traditional garb and body art conversed with sullen, dark–suited parliament members under a captivating display made from ghost nets.

In those surreal moments, bearing witness to the lush diversity of mankind in all its features, language, culture and richness, it became nearly possible to dim the desperate call of the oceans and believe mankind could prevail.

Within conference rooms and the general assembly hall, familiar faces who have dedicated their lives to the ocean were once again at the podium delivering a message:

• 90% of the fisheries have collapsed

• 8 million tons of plastic debris a year enters the oceans, as well as hundreds of millions of tons of sewage, pharmacological, industrial and agricultural waste

• 300,000 cetaceans a year are killed from ship strikes, plastic ingestion and fishing gear entanglement.

• 90% of coral reefs will be gone by 2050

• 90% of sharks have been killed

• And on and on and on…

The ultimate message?

We are not in a moment of planning for the future. We are in the moment where we must decide between immediate widespread change, or collapse.

The small island developing state (SIDS) of Fiji, with less than 1 million people, or less than 0.01% of the world population, co-hosted the UN Ocean Conference. Their urgent message is that Fiji is experiencing catastrophic loss due to climate change. Fiji and other SIDS represent the heart-wrenching solidarity of the minority, miniscule contributors to pollution, waste, climate change and acidification.Standing alongside Fiji was Palau, with a population of about 20,000 and some of the best pelagic diving in the world, committing 80 percent of their waters as protected. What does it mean to stand up at a global forum and describe the end of your heritage to a world gone blind and apathetic? At what point do we acknowledge the suffering of our fellow species, and our fellow humans, and take personal responsibility?

Imagine: In the last 80 years, this world went from just over one billion humans to nearly eight billion. This population explosion coincides with the invention of plastic, the age of oil, transnational shipping, globalised mono-agricultural systems, technology and the accelerating age of ocean industrialisation.

Yes, the UN Ocean Conference provided the platform by which every country has received the same information. However, 8,000 politicians, delegates, researchers, academics and nonprofits are not going to sway the momentum of eight billion.

Be the change you want to see.

The only real option for influencing policy, government and business for the sake of an ocean that contains abundant life is if we demand it through our choices and actions. We readily elevate ourselves with beliefs of superior intelligence, of evolved emotion and comprehension. But look at what we’ve done.

A hundred Ocean Conferences are not going to impact one iota of ocean unless civil society exchanges complacency for knowledge and compassion. We do not have generations to debate these issues; we have a few short years. The next UN Ocean Conference will be in 2020.