World Oceans Day Pledge

Yesterday was World Oceans Day, an effort by conservationists to focus global attention on improving our oceans.  Since one of our major focuses this year has been my son's environmental group, Healing Oceans Together, this is a cause that is close to our hearts.

The group is currently concentrating on two projects:  continuing to grow the community-based Craft Coral Reef, and developing a card game to teach people about the coral reefs and to encourage to take actions in their lives that will benefit the coral.

So a couple of H2O members got together to post a photography of their pledge on behalf of World Oceans Day:

So while we are still in fundraising mode, the students remain positive and committed enough to the project to make a public pledge.  We know we will figure out a way to get the money we need to make this project happen!

For more information about the Cards, Coral & Kids campaign, visit our campaign website.

Craft Coral Reef

I haven't been blogging as much recently because I've been so involved with the Healing Oceans Together (H2O) environmental education and awareness group that my son is helping to organize.  (Regular readers of this blog may remember the Great Sea Slug Beauty Contest that H2O ran earlier this year.)

Now the group has moved on from raising awareness about sea slugs to encouraging people to help save the rapidly-disappearing coral reefs.  The first step in the process is that H2O is creating a community-based Craft Coral Reef to exhibit at ChambersArts, an art gallery in downtown Cary.  This artistic version of a coral reef, which will incorporate crochet and knitting, origami, beading, and other crafts, is supposed to remind people of the precious beauty of the coral reefs, educate them about the important role they play in our ocean ecology, and inspire them to take actions to help protect and preserve them.

We've been holding a series of FREE public workshops to get other people crocheting and crafting along with our group and contributing to the growing reef.  So far we've held three public workshops, and the results have been great.

Before launching the project, H2O crocheted some sample creations to show people:

But a few weeks later, after the second public workshop, the Craft Coral Reef had grown to this:

Beautiful--and exciting to see the progress!

For more information on this project, including some photos from the workshops we've held, check out the complete write-up on the Healing Oceans Together blog.  

You can follow that blog if you are really interested.  I'll also post some more photo updates to show you how our community Coral Reef grows.

Finally, next week we are launching another exciting initiative related to our "Save the Corals" campaign.  So stay tuned for that announcement!