"NOT ONLY CAN WE ALL MAKE A DIFFERENCE - WE ALL HAVE TO."

-- Roz Savage

MESSAGES

THE HEART OF THE MONSTER

Our environmental challenges are like a many-headed sea monster - we can keep cutting off the heads of plastic pollution, deforestation, coral reef destruction, climate change, and so on, but they will just keep sprouting back. What we have to do is to get to the heart of the monster, and that heart is the fact that we have forgotten that we are a part of nature. When we damage the web of life, we hurt ourselves.

EVERY ACTION COUNTS

You might feel that anything you do, as one of 7.5 billion people alive today, is too small to make a difference. But every action counts. One oarstroke didn't get me very far, but you take 5 million oarstrokes and you end up crossing three oceans. Every single oarstroke was necessary. And so is the participation of every single one of us. 

A NEW NARRATIVE

Humanity is currently enacting a narrative that nature is ours to abuse and exploit and pollute as we see fit, forgetting that we are a part of it. We need a new narrative, where instead of hubris we have humility. Instead of rapacious destruction we have respect and stewardship. Instead of disconnection, we have deep connection - to nature, to each other, to ourselves, and to our future.

CHART A BETTER COURSE

It is time to transition from the ego system to the eco system, striving together for a better future in which humans can thrive while also allowing the natural world to heal. Let’s chart a better course and stop drifting, start rowing towards the future that we want.

A POSITIVE VISION

I believe in the power of holding a vision that can draw us forward into the future we want. So let’s create that vision – a vision of thriving reefs, oceans teeming with life, an ecosystem restored to balance, beaches once again covered with shells and seaweed, not drifts of plastic and algal sludge. We may or may not be too late to save the oceans, but as the novelist Raymond Williams said, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”

THE POWER OF NATURE

On dry land we can imagine that we have got nature nicely under control, as we live in our comfortable houses, insulated and isolated from the elements. But there is nothing like thirty-foot waves, when you’re in a twenty-three foot rowboat, to remind you where human beings stand in the scheme of things. Nature is unbelievably powerful, and we need her a lot more than she needs us.