Action Optimist
Adventure beach cleaning with Optimists - people and boats.
Environmental plastic is killing the oceans. Our coastlines and seas, so essential for the sustainability of life itself, have been polluted at all depths by the waste of modern life. Awareness has grown massively and the problem is now being tackled by beach cleaning groups and environmental campaigners. But the remote wild coastlines where the debris has been sweeping in from the sea for decades present a real challenge. Hard to access, these windward shores and bays provide - or should provide - an undisturbed haven for wildlife, and yet they are now amongst the most polluted. It is easy to feel overwhelmed. But the determination to solve these problems has been growing too. We can't wait for governments or councils to act- they don't have the skills or equipment needed anyway. Those of us who love the wild places have simply got to work together and get on with it.
To tackle a clean up job of this magnitude, we need Optimists - people who rise to a challenge, whose minds habitually jump to solutions and who are ready for any adventure.
Optimists are also the main class of junior sailing dinhy, raced by children all around the world. Heavy duty polypropylene training Optimist dinghies are often owned by sailing clubs for their beginners. They tow easily, are virtually indestructible and work perfectly as small marine skips for transporting debris back to harbour safely. Able and experienced and now environmentally aware, young sailors are primed to become ocean advocates. They are ready to scale it up!
Although Action Optimist grew from an idea involving dinghies, it’s not just for junior sailors. Action Optimist is about inspiring environmental clean up action amongst the entire outdoor community. Use whatever you have- your skills and imagination, a paddleboard, a canoe, a dinghy, a rucksack, bike paniers... Every positive action helps. Every adventure counts. Slipping around on seaweed and hauling ropes off rocks with your mates actually turns out to be pretty good fun - and it certainly beats sitting around worrying about the state of our poor planet!
Action Optimist aims also to promote citizen science - surveying and logging historical coastal debris with existing national data bases is essential if we are to effectively campaign to turn off the flood of waste into our oceans.
"We used to say "take only photos, leave only footprints" when we went off on our adventures. That is no longer enough.
We can all help to to reverse the damage of the last 50 years by helping to remove the debris from our beaches and coastlines".