Ocean Spirit is devoted to fostering in humanity a deeper and more harmonious relationship with our Ocean Planet home – the only one we have.
It is not our right to interfere in the lives of other species
But when our paths cross
It is our duty to behave in such a way
That we do no harm.
Let’s look after her!
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June 12th
Introducing our local school on the Tutukaka Coast – Ngunguru Primary. They are showing great leadership – going Single use plastic free this month.. scroll down..read on
view from Ngunguru School
“This month at school we are celebrating Single use plastic free June! This is to inspire the wider community to participate in the international Plastic Free July. We are concentrating on “CHOOSE TO REFUSE” single use plastics, these are items that are used for minutes, then thrown away and are then around forever.
Our target items are:
1. Straws
2. Plastic Bags
3. Gladwrap
4. Takeaway containers and coffee cups
5. Plastic Bottles
Please send in your photos of your children “choosing to refuse” plastics, or even picking up plastic to lhope@ngunguru.school.nz
The families who send in the most pics will win an awesome plastic free prize at the end of June 🙂
Together we can do it, Plastic Free Tutukaka Coast!
Remember, plastic never breaks down, it just breaks up.”
https://www.facebook.com/coastalkaitiaki/
June 7th
Since 2015, when we founded Ocean Spirit, we’ve been working on a variety of projects and initiatives all with the underlying theme:
The need for greater harmony between humans and all other life
who share our big, beautiful blue home.
We are loving the journey Ocean Spirit is taking us on – giving presentations, writing articles and books, running workshops, working with schools and creating videos that inform and educate on serious ecological issues. Because these issues are human generated – we are responsible – which also means we have the power to respond and take action!
An example of this is our relationship with plastic. In only six decades we have gone from plastic free to global ecological catastrophe – we are literally drowning in plastic. But everywhere there is a huge groundswell of grassroots response to ‘stem the tide’. We’ve been playing our part through education and advocacy; working with businesses to help them transition away from single use plastic; coordinating with community groups to organize clean-ups and of course, just getting out there and Picking-It-Up ourselves (see our Just-Pick-It-Up Facebook page).
Currently we’re working with three home schooled girls who are testing whether ‘compostable’ coffee cups and lids really do compost in a home compost bin (check out their initial results here).
But for Ocean Spirit to be as effective as possible in this vital work for the planet, it needs to become self-supporting to give us the freedom to devote more time and energy to being a catalyst for the change our planet so desperately needs.
At the beginning of this year we were introduced to Patreon – a web portal putting ‘Doers’ and ‘Donors’ together in a mutually beneficial and on-going relationship – People supporting People and sharing a creative journey. It gives us a greater sense of working together with like-minded people like you and gives you the opportunity to share in our passion for living in harmony with this beautiful planet we call home.
It’s built on the original concept of ‘Patron of the Arts’ and is a way of supporting projects, work and action that you’d love to see happening in the world, but aren’t necessarily in a position to do yourself.
We gave the concept a lot of thought and decided that it is the perfect way to enable our Ocean Spirit work to continue to grow and be supported.
So at the beginning of June we launched our presence on Patreon.
Focusing on 3 themes – Exploration, Education, Conservation – we are cultivating positive action:
- Running workshops and talks in schools
- Presenting and running workshops at conferences
- Working with businesses at a local level on plastic-free alternatives
- Consulting on ecological issues from an holistic perspective
- Writing books
- Publishing articles
- Teaching
- Making informative and educational videos
Supporting positive action
To find out more about our work and supporting us as a Patron:
Click here to go to our Patreon page.
We’d love to have you onboard!
If you think our work is worthwhile, then please consider sharing this on your networks.
FaceBook: Ocean-Spirit
glenn@oceanspirit.org janey@oceanspirit.org
Monday 1st May
Woolleys Bay, Northland, NZ – join us on our favourite local beach checking for rubbish after ‘cyclone’ Debbie passed through. https://youtu.be/Rjp3fSGwIqU
Thursday 27th April
The Great Coffee Cup Challenge – three home schooled girls from Kaeo, Northland NZ are running a science project on the compostability of ‘compostable’ coffee cups and lids…… Follow their progress with us: https://youtu.be/oWfvgoNMl4E
Friday 7th April
This is our favourite beach on the Tutukaka Coast – it’s also our local! We love it and try to visit every week for our own health!! as well as the health of the beach.
This week we visited after the storm had passed through and picked up a bag of rubbish.. Amongst many plastic items, we were interested to see quite a few colourful plastic clothes pegs – where’s the washing..? Also a light stick full of toxic chemicals used by the fishing industry to attract fish to their nets at night.
Woolleys is now a cleaner beach for our visit! That feels great!
Tuesday 14th March
Bright Stars Childcare Centre in Whangarei kindly invited us to come and talk to the children about plastic pollution in the Ocean!
Even though aged from 2 – 5 yrs, they were surprisingly attentive and crowded round our pile of plastic picked up from Woolleys Beach on the Tutukaka Coast at the weekend!
Thank you Brenda and Bright Stars for inviting us to come and share our plastic journey with you all!
Friday 10th March
Goodfor – New Zealand’s first zero packaging store just opened in Auckland and we visited them in their first week to interview James Denton whose brilliant idea it is!
Thursday 2nd March
A big THANK YOU to everyone who came to our Seaweek talks and the wonderful trip out to the Poor Knights Marine Reserve last week.
We thoroughly enjoyed meeting and chatting with everyone who came to make them so successful.
We are planning to post an edited version of 
the talks, Healing the Ocean Saving Ourselves, here and onto our FB pages – Ocean-Spirit and Just-pick-it-up
NZAEE Seaweek 2017 http://seaweek.org.nz/
New Zealand’s annual national week about the sea is hosted by the NZ Association for Environmental Education (NZAEE) and focuses on learning from the sea. It’s about exciting and inspiring all New Zealanders to renew their connections with the sea! it’s a time for all of us to get to know our Ocean, its habitats, characteristics and inhabitants better.
Living in New Zealand means that everyone is affected by the influence of the sea. Even high up in the Central Plateau or low down on the Canterbury Plains, its presence is felt through our maritime climate. Now look at the bigger picture. Her unseen influences reach into the remotest village in the Himalaya. Every 2nd breath we take is thanks to the phytoplankton at the Ocean’s surface, who produce half of the oxygen in the atmosphere. The Ocean is the primary life support system for our planet. So, whether you live on the coast or inland, a healthy sea matters.
NZ Seaweek not only gives us the opportunity to celebrate the things we love about the Ocean, but even more importantly to honour the critically important role she plays in our survival.
The Ocean is the main player in the short and long term carbon cycles, as well as the source of nutrients essential for life such as sulphur and phosphorous.
You might be surprised to know that Ocean plants sequester 20 times more carbon than land plants. Knowing this makes us think differently about the beautiful Matapouri and Ngunguru estuaries and their precious mangroves. Most of us are aware of their role as fish nurseries, but as the most efficient carbon sinks on the planet, they are without doubt our community’s biggest contribution to mitigating the effects of climate change.
There are many individuals and organisations working behind scenes to keep our seas healthy and there are opportunities for all of us to do our bit – like thinking more consciously about our use of plastics and just picking up any on the beach; about the way we fish and the run-off from our land use.
The Ocean – something really worth celebrating! Thank you NZ Seaweek!
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Ocean Spirit gave a series of talks and hosted a day trip to the Poor Knights Marine Reserve during New Zealand Seaweek .
Celebrating SeaWeek at the Poor Knights Marine Reserve.
New Zealand Seaweek www.seaweek.org is about inspiring and exciting all New Zealanders to renew their connections with the sea.
Seaweek gives us the opportunity to not only celebrate what we love about the ocean, but even more importantly to recognise and honour the vital role it plays in our very survival. As the primary life support system for our planet, a healthy ocean matters to everyone.
Yukon Dive’s Pacific Hideaway provided the perfect platform for Auckland based engineering and urban development consultancies, Urban Solutions Project Management and 4Sight Consulting, to celebrate Seaweek at the Poor Knights Marine Reserve.
Like many Kiwis, Urban Solutions’ director Lorenzo Canal loves the ocean and Seaweek offered a great opportunity for him to organise a company day out, or a ‘skive-dive’ as he likes to call it. “The perfect way to connect the two companies outside the work place.” For most of them it was a totally new experience that opened their eyes not only to the beauty of the underwater world, but also to the effectiveness of marine reserves. “It’s great to see that they really work. There just needs to be more of them.”
Heading out from Tutukaka Harbour, excitement rippled through the boat when skipper Bruce Macdonald spotted dolphins. Lorenzo was one of the first on the bow as four common dolphins streaked up to the boat to bow ride. Leaning forward to capture the moment, it suddenly became a very expensive one as his iphone slipped from his hands into the water. Well, accidents happen, and as amusing as it was at the time, it’s a salient reminder of the ‘trash’ our modern society is polluting the ocean with.
Seaweek is also an opportunity to highlight the current threats to the health of the ocean. They read as a long and depressing list. But the good news is that there are many opportunities for us all to do our bit. Glenn and Janey were on board to share their perspective on the ocean and discuss ideas and actions we can all take in our daily lives. “It can be as simple as thinking more consciously about our use of plastic for instance, or fishing with greater awareness about the consequences of the methods we use and the number of fish we take.”
“This is really about changing our behaviour and creating a new normal. It used to be normal to smoke on airplanes, now it’s illegal. We’d like to see this applied to single use plastic items. There really aren’t any excuses now that a mulitude of sustainable alternatives are available.”
Thursday 2nd March 2017
12.30pm May Bain Room, Whangarei Central Library
7.30pm Oceans Resort, Tutukaka Marina
Friday 3rd March – A Day Trip to the Poor Knights Marine Reserve
January 2017
Tutukaka Coast Plastic Free!
Glenn and Janey live on the stunningly beautiful Tutukaka Coast in Northland, New Zealand. Many call it paradise.
But there is a problem in paradise which is shared with the rest of our planet and it’s one that will only get worse unless we all do something about it:
Plastic, or more precisely – single use plastic.
Our pervasive use of plastic packaging and single use plastic items such as plastic straws, shopping bags, take-away coffee cup lids, water bottles and fast food containers is creating a crisis in our piece of paradise.
The Ocean is fast becoming a plastic soup, where in some places pieces of plastic outweigh surface plankton by six to one. An even more sinister side to this plastic horror story is the ability of marine plastic to act as a “chemical sponge” absorbing man-made chemicals, such as PCBs and DDT, creating toxic time-bombs that are ingested by all types of marine life, including the fish on our plates.
Plastic in the Ocean is a serial killer. Fish, whales, turtles and birds ingest the plastic, die and decompose releasing the plastic to float towards its next victim.
As a coastal community we are on the front line of this worldwide catastrophe and can’t allow this dangerous cycle to continue indefinitely.
Our wish for the New Year is to see the Tutukaka Coast Plastic Free.
It’s a wish shared by many in our community and by many other communities across the globe. Hundreds of similar initiatives are already taking place – all of which grew from grassroots community beginnings.
With so many sustainable alternatives available it is time is to eliminate single-use plastic items from our lives.
Wherever you live, by joining together to support each other and your local businesses, you have the power to make your own local environment Plastic Free!
You can follow the Tutukaka Coast Plastic Free Initiative in the following places:
Facebook pages Tutukaka Coast
Just-Pick-It-Up
Ocean-Spirit
Watch the launch video: Youtube
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November 2016
Glenn had the privilege of talking with Tim Lynch from Greenplanetfm.com about the living Ocean on his radio show this week (link below). Tim is a tireless worker for benefit of our beautiful Ocean home.
http://ourpl.net/ge413fb
July 2016
‘ON THE BRINK’ with JEFF WEFFERSON COMIN’ ATCHA 7 DAYS A WEEK
Listen to an interview with Glenn on Sound Cloud, an internet radio station in the USA.
This show is the first in an on-going series of dialogues between Jeff and Glenn. This one focuses on the nature of water.
