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I’m just a
kid who wants out of my stroller
And even though I know how to crawl
I’d be so much faster I’d keep up with my mother
I think this would be the right move for me.
(From the Disney Playtime album)
he “I Love the Ocean” Movement might as well be singing this
tune from Disney. Now two years old, I Love the Ocean is taking a huge
load off the world around it - Planet Earth, in fact - making a lot of
difference in efforts towards marine and coastal conservation and management.
If the growth of its membership base is any indication, I Love the Ocean
is indeed here to stay. The Movement now has 13,000 members nationwide,
and its ranks keep growing. Students, professionals, entrepreneurs, children
and their parents come to the office of the Coastal
Resource Management Project (CRMP) at CIFC Towers, North Reclamation
Area, Cebu City, where the Movement was planned and where the organization
is now headquartered, to fill out a one-page information sheet.
Copies of the same information sheet are being filled out in Manila, Davao,
Compostela Valley, Gen. Santos City, Siquijor, Dumaguete and Bohol. In
each of these cities and provinces, an organization is taking on the cause
as a “chapter” of the umbrella Movement. In Manila, the Movement
is managed by ABS-CBN’s Bantay Kalikasan Foundation. The host organization
in Davao is the Davao City Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In Dumaguete
and Bohol, the torch is carried by the social action arms of the Roman
Catholic parishes.
While CRMP, an initiative of the Department of Environment and Natural
Resources (DENR) and the United States Agency for International Development,
started the Movement in celebration of the International Year of the Ocean
1998, it has now released the teetering Movement into the world, merely
providing the occasional helping hand when necessary. The Movement has
reached a maturity level that allows CRMP to view and treat it as it does
its institutional partners - government agencies, non-governmental organizations
and the academe. And this faith in the two-year-old is not borne out of
blind belief.
I Love the Ocean has moved from merely being a statement on someone’s
car bumper into an organization with real activities making a real difference.
The group’s Sea Camp, a field-based experiential coastal resource
management appreciation program has graduated about a hundred youths and
“I Love the Ocean” prime movers, each of whom has vowed to initiate
or help undertake activities that would multiply the effects of conservation
efforts in Cebu province. Courses, carrying such titles as Oceaneering
and Navigation, Leadership Skills Development, and Ecology, are conducted
to tug at participants’ heartstrings, enough to push them into wanting
to contribute to the ocean’s cause.
Celebrities have stepped forward to endorse the Movement. Famous artist
Jim Paredes, virtually coordinating the participation of diver-celebrities
in dive events says, “It is not all that difficult for us, artists,
to put in our time for the environment. We fully comprehend that if we
continue the destruction of our marine and coastal environment, everyone,
rich and poor, famous and unknown, young and old, will suffer, and it
will not be a pleasant condition.”
Celebrity events serve as a magnet for fishing communities and the general
public to attend activities aimed at promoting coastal resource management.
Entire villages have come out to witness their favorite movie stars dive
into marine sanctuaries, take debris out of the sea or make their pitch
for the environment. These events make the concept of saving marine and
coastal resources from further destruction seem more real and understandable
to fisherfolk.
Local government units support special events organized by the Movement
by providing accommodation, transportation, and other logistical requirements,
and help in securing private sector donations for I Love the Ocean activities.
Through their involvement in these events, local officials are awakened
to the urgent coastal issues for which they are at least partly responsible.
Of late, local governments have displayed increased interest in coastal
and marine resource management, many of them appropriating funds for CRM
out of their annual municipal budgets.
On its second anniversary, the Movement undertakes its most ambitious
project so far - the establishment of what probably is Asia’s first
mangrovetum and the planting “A Million Mangroves for the Millennium.”
Mario Gasalatan, I Love the Ocean Movement coordinator, says members have
stepped forward to assist in the multi-faceted “A Million Mangroves
for the Millennium” project, from selling 99-centavo tickets to raise
funds to wading in mud to plant mangrove propagules and seedlings.
“In the early 19th century, our country had more than 450,000 hectares
of mangrove areas in the Philippines in the early 19th century, now we
are left with barely one-fourth that (hectarage). This is why we saw the
need to replant our mangrove marshlands in Cebu and promote the same program
to other provinces,” says Commodore Gaudencio Peña, President
of the I Love the Ocean Association of Cebu.
Fueled by the spirit of unity and environmental responsibility, the Cebu
association now conducts regular checks on the one-hectare former fishpond
on which the mangrovetum and mangrove plantation are being established.
Various species of mangroves are now growing on the property and more
are being cultivated to reforest other denuded mangrove areas in Cebu.
Theirs may be a serious and noble cause, but this is one organization
whose members always seem bent on having fun, even when they are wading
in mud and plunging into rubbish-ridden water. No wonder I Love the Ocean
continues to attract the young and young-at-heart, whose infectious eagerness
to do their bit for Mother Earth is sure to keep the Movement’s fire
burning.
Care to do your own bit for the ocean? Click here for more details on
I Love the Ocean membership.
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