Sea community

As a community member of Puerto Rico and the world the sea is a critical aspect of my every day life and there is a huge need to protect it.  In Puerto Rico, being an island, we are surrounded completely by the ocean so this means that we have an even bigger responsibility to take care of it. As we learned the sea holds many keys to the survival of our species providing us: oxygen, food, transportation, recreation and many secrets that are yet to be revealed. Most people are unaware of the seas significance and/or they do not understand it so it’s the duty of those of us that know better to inform, give an example and work so we can help this vast habitat that sustains us.

Personally I’m a person that loves the sea because I can eat fish and shellfish, surf on it, get tranquility, inspiration, use it as transportation, and appreciate its immensity and biodiversity. I’ve always tried to know more about the ocean and this is one of the main reasons that have made me take care of it. If every person would take the time to see how we owe all that we have to the sea, including ourselves, because the theory of evolution states that we came from the sea, then respect towards it will grow and many contamination problems could be avoided (Brooker, 2011). But there are many people in Puerto Rico and all over the world that fail to recognize its value and do not give its deserved appreciation creating a dilemma of killing what gives us life.  

If Puerto Rico and many other countries continue behaving toward the ocean like we do then we will continue to see the repercussions. Already we can see how humans are causing biodiversity lost. Three aspects that cause the deterioration of the sea are: waste dumping, resource exploitation and climate change. As community members in an island is it our moral duty to do something about this. We can start by a simple act of not throwing garbage and cleaning the beaches so the trash does not degrade and contribute to the accumulation of chemical pollutants affecting sea life. Its clear that the biggest problem is the lack of consciousness so there needs to be a big effort to create it, like the documentary said “We can’t protect what we don’t understand” so the best way to make a change is to help people understand the ocean and how they may damage it without knowing.

As human’s numbers grow exponentially it is necessary that people in a community, be it in Puerto Rico or in any other place in the world we learn to take care of the ocean before it is too late. Already we have begun to deteriorate the seas health and we cannot continue through this road. It would be very dreadful that we learn about how much we need the sea the hard way. We must do our best to take care of the ocean and try to make other people do it as well. After all we are tied to the sea, it is where we came from, what sustains us, and the biggest constituent of our planet.

1.  Brooker, R. J. (2011). Cellular Respiration. Biology (2nd ed., pp. 150-154). New York:      McGraw-Hill.