Home / Blog / Message from Oceana’s Vice President in Belize

December 16, 2024

Message from Oceana’s Vice President in Belize

 

My fellow Belizeans,

This year Oceana commemorated its 15-year anniversary in Belize. As I prepared these notes, I asked the internet to create an image of what Belize’s marine habitats would look like if trawling, offshore oil development and gillnet use had been allowed over the last 15 years. The image generated shows a dystopian underwater scene depicting devastating destruction. Barely visible through murky, polluted water one can make out rocks that were once coral reefs, bleached and broken. There is oil slick on everything and industrial debris is everywhere; dead marine life is entangled in ghost nets. The remnants of destroyed ecosystems make for a dark and somber scene and immediately evokes a sense of loss. The reason why that’s not the scene offshore is because of you.

Every time you’ve needed to stand up and be counted, you did just that… that kind of perseverance and persistence has made the difference. The dictionary defines persistence as “firm or obstinate resistance in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.” Perseverance is defined as “the continued effort to do or achieve something even if it’s difficult and takes a long time.” The difference in those definitions may be subtle but the impact has been huge, not just in the legislated policies that protect everything offshore but in the fact that those policies came to be because your message was clear.

That 60% of our population depend daily on the health and integrity of our coastal and marine ecosystems, and that 100% of us feel a connection to the Caribbean Sea in our heart and soul, should guide every single decision we make. It’s why Oceana continues to advocate that natural resource management should be collective, transparent decisions because all of us will be impacted. Climate change is already throwing its weight around, showing us how bad things can be. Science tells us that were it not for oceans and seas we’d already be burnt to a crisp. As I look to the future, I can only hope that you will always be inspired, determined and dedicated to keep your tenacity, to fight for the future you deserve, to defeat the bad actors who see you as obstacles and to ensure that Belize always deserves its reputation as global conservation leader.

We already know what to do. We will either get rid of plastic, or we won’t. We will either act like we are part of the ecosystem or we won’t. We will either make the choices we need to before it’s too late or we won’t. Faced with these choices, I choose to believe that our interdependence to our precious Belize and interconnectivity to each other will mean working together so that we can do more than survive. It will mean we thrive together.

With love,

Janelle