A dwarf sperm whale was found stranded on a beach in Sanya, Hainan, in February this year. It was immediately transferred to Haichang Conservation Center for rescue. Wang Miao was part of the team. She was helping hold the whale up straight so it could get an IV with its blowhole above water. But at that moment, it suddenly stopped breathing, and there was nothing she and the team could do to revive it.
The autopsy afterward found a large amount of plastic waste in the whale's stomach, which, according to Wang, kept it from digesting and feeding properly. The whale was also found to be pregnant, making it even weaker, she said.
"Sadly, it wasn't a successful rescue. But it made us face the blunt reality of what plastic waste is doing to marine life," added the 35-year-old diver and founder of the Better Blue NGO.
The United Nations has designated June 8 of every year as World Oceans Day to raise awareness of ocean protection.
"With 90 percent of big fish populations depleted, and 50 percent of coral reefs destroyed, we are taking more from the ocean than can be replenished," writes the UN on its website. "We need to work together to create a new balance with the ocean that no longer depletes its bounty but instead restores its vibrancy and brings it new life."
With the same purpose in mind, Wang founded Better Blue in 2017.
As of December 2022, the organization has recruited 1,011 volunteers from over 20 cities across China. They have contributed more than 9,000 hours of service protecting the ocean, including collecting over 6.5 tons of marine debris.
According to Wang, these volunteers, as well as a majority of Better Blue's management staff, are a very young group. Part of the reason is that Better Blue recruits mostly divers, and scuba diving is a rather young sport in China.
"People won't protect something they don't know. Only when they build a direct connection with the ocean will they be more motivated to protect it and know better how to do it," said Wang.
Another reason, Wang believes, is that young people today tend to have a mindset of being a "global citizen".
"They don't see themselves as residents of a certain city or country, but of the planet. They see all humanity as one and support the idea of coexisting with nature and other creatures. They are the ones taking action when it comes to environmental protection and battling climate change," said Wang.
Coming together
Zhu Mingyang, 24, never learned how to swim and still can't, even though he's now a certified scuba diver. That's why his contact with the sea — like a lot of people — was limited to staying above the surface with the help of a floaty and perhaps occasionally venturing a little further away from the shore before starting to panic and hastily paddling back.
"I felt like an outsider," said Zhu, who is a second-year graduate student at Qingdao University of Technology (QUT).
After he got his scuba diving certificate in Fiji in 2018, Zhu started to observe the ocean from a completely different angle. "You're submerged in it. You become part of it. The creatures you see down there — the sharks, turtles and octopuses — are nothing like the dead jellyfish that you see flushed onshore," he said.
Zhu felt closer to the sea and sought to join Better Blue as a volunteer. He soon established a student association of Better Blue in his senior year at QUT so that he could bring more of his peers together to participate in ocean protection.
Since then, every year from June to October, when the water is warm enough, Zhu goes on weekly dives with a fellow scuba diver student at the shore area around Qingdao to pick up garbage along the seabed.
"After seeing what the ocean was like in Fiji — great visibility and a great ecosystem — I was disappointed when diving here near Qingdao to find garbage, such as construction waste, tires and wine bottles. And that motivated me to keep doing what I was doing to help make the sea better here in Qingdao," said Zhu.
For non-diver students — who make up the majority of the association — Zhu regularly takes them to the beaches to pick up garbage on land. They sometimes team up with volunteers from another local university, Qingdao University, so that they could cover a larger area.
Better Blue now has branches at nine universities in China, including Zhu's association. He thinks that getting college students involved in environmental protection is a smart move.
"Students have more time compared to those who go to work, allowing them to participate in more events and activities," said Zhu. "They are also more open-minded to take in new ideas instead of holding on to old habits. And with their social connections, they can reach more people to share ideas — to their peers and maybe to their future children."
Ocean vision
Growing up in Maoming, a coastal city in Guangdong province, Chen Lei, 24, felt close to the sea at a very young age. He would swim in the water every summer, and both his grandmothers were fisherwomen and would bring home fish for dinner.
That was probably part of the reason why Chen decided to join Better Blue as a volunteer in 2020 and went on to apply to become an intern last year.
Now a first-year graduate student at Macau University of Science and Technology, Chen works in his free time as a program planner at Better Blue, making educational videos and posters to promote marine knowledge. One of the video programs is Blue Knows with each episode introducing an interesting phenomenon in the ocean, such as how fish can hear without ears, how sea cucumbers poop, and what happens after a whale dies.
"I found that people, including many of my friends, know little about environmental protection, let alone ocean protection. I hope by watching our videos they can see the ocean the way divers see it — what the underwater world is like and what kind of amazing creatures live there — so they can be more aware of the importance of ocean protection," said Chen.
As of December 2022, Blue Knows has produced more than 130 videos and garnered 16.2 million views.
Chen learned scuba diving in 2019 and has regularly gone on diving trips with his friends ever since. One of the trips was in the sea near Zhuhai, Guangdong. The diving instructor told them that the area used to be covered with corals, so abundant and colorful that the reef could be seen above the surface by a drone. Chen flew a drone that day but didn't see anything. So they dove down to the area, only to find that the corals were all dead, just their gray skeletons on the seabed remaining.
"We realized how bad the situation was, how fragile the Earth's ecosystem was," Chen said. "Great efforts need to be made to revive the ocean environment to how it used to be."
Chen's target job after graduation is not exactly marine related as he studies supply chain management at school, but he is determined to use whatever spare time and energy he has to help protect the ocean.
"Maybe I can be working a full-time job while also interning at Better Blue, which is what I'm truly passionate about," said Chen.
"I really think that ocean protection is a cool thing to do."
Creating change
For people who live in inland areas, the ocean may seem a faraway place physically and, therefore, mentally — not realizing the impact their daily life choices could have on the ocean. This is also what Liu Xuelian used to believe. But what she saw on a diving trip in Semporna, Malaysia — a strip of floating marine debris stretching miles long — helped make ocean protection an area close to her heart.
"I had seen ocean garbage patches on the news before. But seeing one with my own eyes was different. I couldn't help but notice that the garbage all looked so familiar: It came from the land, from us," she said.
Liu, 31, now an executive at Better Blue, has been part of the organization since the very beginning in 2017.
Specializing in coral protection, Liu's team works with international NGOs like CoralWatch and Reef Check to train divers to become coral bleaching monitors, enabling early warnings to be issued and measures to be taken by scientists to save the corals. They work with Glowing Glowing Gone, a program proposed by the United Nations Environment Programme and The Ocean Agency, to organize public events like photo exhibitions of dying corals to raise public awareness about the plight of our oceans. The team also created ways for individuals to adopt corals or to sponsor an entire tank full of corals.
"Coral adopters would sometimes visit the area and dive down to see the specific coral with their own name tag on it," said Liu. "But for me, it's not one single coral that excites me. It's when I see the entire area flourishing with corals — that things are changing for the better."
As of December 2022, Better Blue has trained more than 140 divers to become professional coral rescuers and monitors, and has grown more than 470 corals in nine research sites on the coastal seabed in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.
This is why when asked how she would interpret the theme of this year's World Oceans Day — Planet Ocean: Tides Are Changing — Liu said: "It's time to pay attention to the ocean. More and more people are already participating in ocean protection. I believe this is where the tide is going in the future."
Reporter: Chen Xue
