Resurgence & Ecologist magazine Issue 345 • July/August 2024
Ocean glories

The July/August issue sets out to really inspire people to think about ‘Ocean Glories’ and the marvels that we lose when we don’t take better care of our oceans. We celebrate why we love the ocean and marine life and share stories about people who are taking positive action to halt its destruction.

From the excerpt from ethologist Jonathan Balcombe’s wonderful book What a Fish Knows to ocean writer and regular contributor Melissa Hobson talking to marine scientists, this is a theme designed to get us all geared up for action, and the Making Waves feature in this issue has some suggestions for where to start.

With so many doing so much – yet it is still not enough. It feels as if we are in the last chance saloon, and still most people are not listening. What will it take?

In March 1968, the Senegalese forestry engineer and environmentalist Baba Dioum, shared the following wisdom in a paper presented at the triennial meeting of the General Assembly of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature: “In the end, we will conserve only what we love, [and] we will love only what we understand.”

If we don’t understand anything else, we surely by now understand that our ocean is dying, as are the creatures that live in the sea, that they need our help, and that the time to step up and act is now.

Highlights

Movement Power: Brendan Montague
The rights of nature: Becca Blease
United we can thrive: Caroline Lucas
The mysterious root people: Paul Evans
Celebrating a cultural tipping point: Helen Moore

Featured articles

Movement power

Brendan Montague introduces a new series published at The Ecologist online that explores a hybrid model of activism and campaigning. This powerful model is "an organic whole, a concept taken from the systems theory and biology, that is more than the sum of its parts."
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We Feed The UK

Coordinated by The Gaia Foundation, an innovative nationwide storytelling initiative pairs photographers, poets and food producers to show the potential of food systems to tackle climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and social injustice.
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Still so much we just don't know

We have only mapped a small portion of the ocean, which means we still know little about this ecosystem. Melissa Hobson shares the big questions marine scientists are currently asking and reports on endeavours to understand the mysteries of the ocean.
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Making Waves

From melting ice caps to rising sea levels, the ocean acts as a 'buffer', so we don't see the full impact of climate change. Susan Clark highlights organisations you can get involved with to help raise awareness and challenge the ocean-damaging 'business as usual' paradigm.
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The meaning of love

To love Nature is to love life, writes Satish Kumar, who offers us a very personal manifesto and promise of love. "All our flourishing and thriving is mutual. We are all related. We are made of one another."
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Celebrating a cultural tipping point

Poet Helen Moore shares how the recently launched ECOPOETIKON online platform is building a network of solidarity, and transcending Eurocentrism and the western literary canon to highlight the less privileged voices of ecopoets from across the globe.
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Picture Credits

Cover image: What Remains Is Fading Quickly by Beatriz Chachamovits; Movement power: Photo © Tito Texidor III/Unsplash; We Feed The UK: Photo © Andy Pilsbury; Still so much we just don't know, Free diver by Kim Vaudin; Making Waves: Plankton by Beatrice Forshall from The Book of Vanishing Species; The meaning of love: Prakriti Series (Nature), 2022 by Shampa Sircar Da; Celebrating a cultural tipping point: We're In This Together by Sharon Whitham

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