We believe in the ethos: you protect what you love

 

The I AM WATER mission is to help people fall in love with the ocean.

 
 

Much of today's ocean degradation is fundamentally due to human disconnect. Many people feel very little, or no connection to the ocean, behaving in ways that negatively affect the well being of this precious resource.

We feel especially passionate about working with underserved / low income coastal communities where, despite living walking distance to the shoreline young people have never seen the world just beneath the waves.

 Want to support our work? Please consider making a donation!

 

Watch as a group of Grade 7 Students experience their ocean for the first time:

 
A coelacanth for your Sunday, ocean lovers! Just another excuse to marvel at how much there is to learn about and protect in our seas. One of these fish was spotted just over a week ago off South Africa's coast in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park by scientists working on the African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme (@acep_za), using a camera called an ROV to dive down deep enough to find them. This prehistoric-looking fish was once thought to be extinct, but now we know there are 33 individuals (of the West Indian Ocean coelacanth) that swim the submarine canyons off the SA coast.
“I dream of the realization of the unity of Africa, whereby its leaders combine in their efforts to solve the problems of this continent. I dream of our vast deserts, of our forests, of all our great wildernesses.” ~ words to reflect on by Nelson Mandela this Africa Day, which commemorates the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now the African Union (AU) __________ Photo: @petermarshallphoto
💙 South Africa has gazetted 20 new Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) 💙 The notices were released yesterday, and this increases the country's ocean protection from 0.4% to 5%! The network was designed over many, many years of scientific planning and research, is the result of much collaboration, and most of the new MPAs are to protect deeper waters offshore. For more on the science behind these MPAs, and to explore them, click on the link in our bio 🌍 __________ Photo & video: @petermarshallphoto. @hanliprinsloo swims through the kelp forest in our local MPA. We spend all our time teaching Grade 7s in the Table Mountain National Park MPA, one of SA's existing parks. Our own experience has taught us that it is so valuable to have sanctuary spaces to allow children to explore and play in an ecosystem that they will inherit, and to let them see first-hand what creating a few refuges can do to help our oceans recover. MPAs are about our shared future, and our responsibility to manage our oceans wisely for our children. We strongly believe that we cannot expect, nor is it fair, to raise a generation of ocean custodians without doing what we can to ensure they fall in love with the sheer wonder of our planet first 💦And part of that big, holistic picture lies in protecting some ocean spaces for the benefit of both people and nature 🐳
Today is World Turtle Day! And we're celebrating sea turtles - the 7 different species that we find in our global oceans: the Kemp's Ridley (Critically Endangered), the flatback, the leatherback (the deepest diver), the loggerhead (the largest), the green (Endangered), the hawksbill (Critically Endangered) and the olive ridley (the tiniest in SA's oceans). The latter 5 species are all found in South Africa's waters. So how can you help bring these creatures off the Endangered list? There's a lot, but here's a start: don't buy those tortoiseshell souvenirs, know your seafood and be a responsible consumer, reduce your plastic use (!) and support marine protected areas (MPAs), some of which protect turtle nesting grounds and beaches. __________ Photos: @petermarshallphoto and @iamwater_oceantravel guest Jenny meet an Endangered green turtle in the coastal waters of Madagascar
Today is the @unitednations International Day for Biological Diversity 💦🌿🐠🐳🐧🐙🦈🦀🐡🌍 . For this year's theme, UN Secretary General @antonioguterres says this: "From individual species through entire ecosystems, biological diversity is vital for human health and well-being. The quality of the water we drink, the food we eat and the air we breathe all depend on keeping the natural world in good health" And we're celebrating the startling diversity of life right here on our doorstep, the amazing (and often overlooked) plants and animals that our learners and coaches get to see on our Ocean Guardians workshops 💙 Scroll to see what keeps our blue hearts beating strong!
Throwing it back to sunnier times on this cold, rainy Cape Town day ... 🌧
Waving GOODBYE to the weekend and wending our way back into the brand new week ... How was your break? Find some time to get outdoors? And what's ahead for the week that's coming? We hope you're diving in, holding onto that kelp to pull yourself along if necessary! ___________ Photo: @petermarshallphoto
"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilisation itself" ~ Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire __________ Photo: @petermarshallphoto
Today is Endangered Species Day, a reminder of how, in spite of all the boundless ocean optimism, there are countless species at risk of extinction as a result of our actions. We could have posted any number of photos of beautiful, threatened species today - but instead, here's a reminder that as much as we're behind the biodiversity loss we see around us, we're smack-bang at the centre of the solutions too. Of all the amazing species on this planet, only one holds the future of such diversity in their hands. So get outside today and marvel at what we have left to protect, celebrate it and put it first - like coach Azie here, swimming around her blue and kelp-forested backyard in Cape Town that she so passionately defends.