David Levy – New Year Message from the Chairman – Jan 15
Well, the pebble is cast and now we await any ripple effect. Over a hundred and thirty letters to the Embassies of all coastal countries enclosing copies of Deborah Wright’s Conserving the Great Blue, with pdf versions available for further distribution.
Many people I know think that I am a Don Quixote figure tilting at windmills, but I hold in my mind the fact that all great concepts and world movements started with a single idea.
Will we have to wait for the collapse of global fish and mammalian stocks before sanity registers in those who make policy? I tend to think that this will be the human condition.
Then it will be a matter of whether things can recover or, like the cod banks of Newfoundland, it will be too late.
What remains a complete mystery to me is the failure and total inability of most of the publicly known conservation groups to work together. To take a single issue and pressure boldly for real time change, not just for sticking plaster solutions.
Governments do not respect us . . . . and our behaviour is the reason why. Instead, governments should fear collective action. However so long as we remain dormant, then they will ignore the things they need to do.
2015 is the year by when many targets should have been delivered. Back in 2012/13 excuses as to why targets were unlikely to be met were being given by DEFRA. Those who sat at the table with them failed to elicit accountability.
So we are left, as is so commonly the case with unreal targets, legislation that is unenforceable and the weakest solutions.
Marinet is trying to change the paradigm. We are scaling the walls, often with little assistance, but we represent the truth.
Somebody has to.
Happy New Year.
