Jenna Hartley is very active in North Carolina

Submerged North Carolina Webinar Series, April 22, 2021

Join Jenna Hartley, North Carolina State University PhD student and Dr. Nancy Foster Scholar, as she details her research project involving the power of young people as community change-agents on the topic of marine debris. Hear how 2,500 North Carolina 4th & 5th graders, across the state from the mountains to the sea, collected thousands of pounds of trash.

Learn how they delivered creative presentations to the public and won over the hearts and minds of their local officials and politicians across the state. Also, get access to the freely-available educational marine debris curriculum used in the project, which was developed by the Duke University Marine Lab Community Science Initiative.

Jenna works for the North Carolina State University’s Environmental Education lab, which focuses broadly on understanding and supporting positive human-nature relationships, particularly among children. They work to do research with and provide educational resources to educators within the state of North Carolina and beyond. Be sure to register for this webinar to hear about and be inspired by the young people today making waves on environmental issues in their local communities. (This research has been supported by a North Carolina Sea Grant.)

Although this is an educator workshop, it is open to anyone interested in learning more about marine debris and how children can become change agents in their families and communities.

To learn more about Jenna’s work, read the research article, “Youth can promote marine debris concern and policy support among local voters and political officials.”

To read more about North Carolina State University’s Environmental Education lab, click here.

To learn more about the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, visit:
https://monitor.noaa.gov

To learn more about the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology, visit: https://archaeology.ncdcr.gov/

Register Here for Webinar

>>> Jenna Hartley is a PhD student in the Parks, Recreation, & Tourism Management department of North Carolina State University and is a Dr. Nancy Foster Scholar. As a classroom science teacher for almost a decade, Jenna is interested in the roles young people play in creating solutions. She examines how students may be environmental change agents in their communities, specifically on the topic of marine debris and plastic pollution. Jenna is also a Fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she has developed K-16 environmental education materials and continues to work with teachers and students across the country.

Submerged NC webinars are part of the National Marine Sanctuaries webinar series and are brought to you by NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary and the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology. You can view archived webinar in the Submerged NC series here.

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The National Marine Sanctuaries Webinar Series provides educators with educational and scientific expertise, resources, and training to support ocean and climate literacy in the classroom. This series currently targets formal and informal educators, students (high school through college), as well as members of the community, including families.

Click here to visit the sanctuaries archived webinar series to catch up on presentations you may have missed. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. The webinar ID is 770-344-755

The Oceans are critical to our survival on Earth

From Pakalolo, The Daily Kos, June 8, 2018

And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came. — John F. Kennedy

in this handout photo from the University of Bergen taken on Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2017, plastic bags are shown inside the stomach of a two-ton whale that was beached in shallow waters off Sotra, an island west of Bergen, some 200 kilometers (125 miles) northwest of Oslo.

Norwegian zoologists have found about 30 plastic bags and other plastic waste in the stomach of a beaked whale that had beached on a southwestern Norway coast. Terje Lislevand of the Bergen University says the visibly sick, 2-ton goose-beaked whale was euthanized. Its intestine “had no food, only some remnants of a squid’s head in addition to a thin fat layer.”

In this handout photo from the University of Bergen taken on Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2017, plastic bags are shown inside the stomach of a two-ton whale that was beached in shallow waters off Sotra, an island west of Bergen, some 200 kilometers (125 miles) northwest of Oslo. Norwegian zoologists have found about 30 plastic bags and other plastic waste in the stomach of a beaked whale that had beached on a southwestern Norway coast. Terje Lislevand of the Bergen University says the visibly sick, 2-ton goose-beaked whale was euthanized. Its intestine “had no food, only some remnants of a squid’s head in addition to a thin fat layer.

Today is World Oceans Day! A day to celebrate the Ocean and raise awareness of the vital importance of our oceans, and the critical role that they play in sustaining a healthy and livable planet. This years theme is “Beat Plastic Pollution” a disastrous problem that UN Secretary General António Guterres warned; “Our world is swamped by harmful plastic waste; every year, more than 8 million tons end up in the oceans, microplastics in our seas now outnumber stars in our galaxy.”

Let’s be honest. Donald Trump doesn’t give one flying fuck about the Oceans. He stated on a visit to Japan in 1990 that he would not eat “fucking raw fish”, but he will wolf down a heavily processed McDonalds Filet of Fish sandwichharvested by fishing trawlers on occasion. That is, when he doesn’t have a Big Mac or fried chicken in his mouth. He clearly enjoys his waterfront properties, that you and I pay the mortgage for when he visits with his entourage. And he will pressure local governments to protect these opulent properties from sea level rise, even though he is one of the most deplorable climate change deniers on Earth.

So, it is no surprise that protecting the Ocean is not on his radar, in fact, he is just as hostile to the oceans as he is towards the climate. Margaret Cooney writes on Trump’s war on the oceans.

In just his first six months in office, President Donald Trump undertook a range of actions that gravely undermined common-sense stewardship of America’s oceans—enough for the Center for American Progress to conclude that he had launched a “War on Oceans.” His attacks included withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change; signing executive orders aimed at reckless expansion of offshore oil drilling; direct attacks on the spectacular wildlife protected within national marine sanctuaries and marine national monuments; and proposing draconian cuts to the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Altogether, these rollbacks amount to an attack on America’s coasts and oceans the size of which has not been seen in decades.

And President Trump’s war on oceans has not stopped there: Since June 2017, this onslaught has continued largely unabated. As citizens and advocates for ocean conservation convene in Washington, D.C., this week for Capitol Hill Ocean Week and the first-ever March for the Ocean, the Trump administration is accelerating its rollbacks of basic safeguards and pollution controls for the marine environment, as well as the sell-off of oceans to special interests.

National Geographic News reports on how the Oceans have protected us and that they will be unable to protect us anymore.

As global temperatures rise, scientists expect the pace of change in the oceans to accelerate, leaving many fishing communities to adapt or transition to new species.

Since 1970, global waters have been a “powerful ally” against global warming, absorbing 93 percent of the carbon dioxide released by human activities. (See “Ocean Warming Faster Now Than in 10,000 Years.”)

“Without this oceanic buffer, global temperature rises would have gone much, much speedier,” Andersen said Monday at the IUCN World Conservation Congress.

To put it bluntly, if the oceans weren’t there to protect us, our lower atmosphere would have already heated up by 36 degrees Celsius, says Dan Laffoley, principal advisor of marine science and conservation for IUCN’s Global Marine and Polar Programme.

Now, as global warming continues apace, the ocean will continue to warm by between 1 to 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, Andersen says. “In an ecological timescale, 2100 is tomorrow.”

Oceans produce most of our oxygen, we are in for a world of hurt if we do not rein in our fossil fuel emissions immediately. Besides plastic waste, acidification, overfishing, pollution, marine heatwaves, emerging pathogens, and the Atlantification and Pacification of the Arctic ocean are all threats to every living creature on earth. Tick Tock!