The Tutukaka Marina SeaBin continues to do its job removing rubbish from the marina. Huanui College in Glenbervie has included an option to join the SeaBin sort in their weekly timetable under Thursday activities! Which is fantastic. An enthusiastic team has been coming out regularly to sort the contents of the bin and then record their findings on a data sheet.

The data sheet is accessible to the SeaBin Project based in Australia and feeds into their international data collection base. You can visit their site https://seabinproject.com/

The SeaBin collections are a great educational tool and awareness raising vehicle to enable people to change their behaviour in favour of less rubbish in the life of the planet!

Ngunguru Primary School is a Finalist in the 2021 Environmental and Sustainability Education section of the Prime Minister’s Education Excellence Awards!!

We’re sharing this because of the recognition Ocean Spirit got from their Environmental Education teacher, Heidi Kappely:

“Kia ora Glenn and Janey, I wanted to share our wonderful news with you since your Hauora Moana Surveys were an integral part of my application in the PM Excellence in Ed. Awards. A great achievement that we are all proud of. 

Prize giving is not until September but in the meantime we will be hosting a film crew and also the Judging Panel.  You are more than welcome to join us for this if you wish.“

Heidi brings a hugely inspiring energy to Ngunguru school with her Environmental Education programme and her Kete Aronui group, who spend one day a week out of the classroom involved in local environmental work. She is a worthy successor to Loren Hope who started the Earth Ed programme at the school a number of years ago.

Learning From not About the Ocean

Mena kei te hauora te moana ka pera ano te hauora o te iwi.
If the Ocean is healthy so too will the people be healthy.

Our next talk will be to Mt Maunganui Underwater Club on Thursday 3rd June. It is one of the largest and oldest dive clubs in New Zealand, with a long and varied history dating back to 1956.

“We live in a time of growing ecological crisis and the science-based evidence points the Finger of Blame clearly in our direction. In recent times more and more attention has been directed towards the state of the planet’s Ocean.

Glenn’s talk will focus on the many and varied ways in which the Ocean supports life on our planet and discuss what the Ocean needs from us in order to return to a state of robust and resilient ecological health.”

We were honoured to be guests of the Protect Our Gulf campaign last week at a fundraising dinner.

Hosted by Te Motu vineyard on Waiheke Island, we dined on absolutely delicious kai with loyal supporters of the campaign, who are making huge efforts to stop Ports of Auckland dredging in the Hauraki Gulf and then dumping the dredgings in the moana south of Aotea Great Barrier Island.. Please visit their FB page Protect Our Gulf to show your support.

Glenn was the speaker for the evening and his descriptions of encounters with octopus and a humpback mother and calf deeply touched everyone’s emotions.

The following day we were joined by a group of people keen to experience our Hauroa Moana community monitoring from Ben and Ari’s beautiful yacht, Rosalie Claire. We motored round to Island Bay – beautiful above water, but underwater the bay is degraded and lonely with virtually no fish or invertebrate life. We were joined by Mark Russell, founder of Kelp Gardeners, a citizen science project on Waiheke to pilot controlling kina populations to reverse the phenomena known as kina barrens.

We still have a long way to go as a species in our relationship with the more-than-human world… but we must take heart that there are increasing numbers of people raising awareness and taking action on behalf of Gaia and all Life on board!

Earth is our home, a complex living being of interdependent relationships, and is 4.6 billion years old!

As we revolve around the sun at 100,000 km/hr, participants enter the liminal space of Deep Time, walking 4.6kms through 4.6 billion years of Earth history.

We were fortunate to run the Deep Time Walk last month during an Attunement with Life retreat at Tauhara Retreat Centre, Taupo.

Walking around Whakaipo Bay, the shores of Lake Taupo provided the perfect setting to trace the evolution of life on Earth.

It was a wonderful experience, that enlightened everyone to the immensity of time that Earth / Gaia has been in existence ‘doing her thing’!

And extremely humbling to experience that us, modern humans, only appear in the last 30cm.

This is only the 2nd Deep Time Walk in Aotearoa NZ. We ran the 1st in Whangarei in 2019.

We are now into our 4th year with Yr 6 at Ngunguru School monitoring the health of the Red Rocks Reef in the Ngunguru Estuary using our Hauora Moana monitoring programme. Thank you for such a great opportunity to work with these kids and their inspiring teachers!

Unfortunately the health of the reef leaves alot to be desired. We work with the kids to show them how it’s our behaviour that is the problem. Papatuanuku has been sustaining Life for 4.6 billion years – she knows what to do – we just need to remember that we’re a part of the wonderful web of life, not apart from it, and as such must act with responsibility and respect for all beings we share this home with.

1 Sentientist Conversations with Jamie Woodhouse :

2 Accidental Gods podcast with Manda Scott :

The Ocean is Alive: Ocean-shaman Glenn Edney speaks of the living waters of the Earth

“What if the Ocean were a living thing, in the way that the earth breathes as Gaia? The Maori say that if the Ocean is healthy, so, too, will the people be healthy. And we are not healthy – nor is the Ocean. But we are intimately linked and Glenn Edney explains how – and what – we can do to heal ourselves and the waters of the Earth.”

EcoSolutions once again gathered a team of dedicated and great fun volunteers to run their waste stations on the Waitangi Treaty Grounds for Waitangi Day 2021.

It was a perfectly beautiful day of sunshine and heat with the waters of Te Moananui a Kiwa lapping their song to the tune of a sea breeze.

The Treaty Grounds aim for a Zero Waste Event – it’s a journey in progress, but each year there’s less and less rubbish to landfill.

The majority of ‘rubbish’ collected was compostable (orange bags below), then there was the recycling (white bags) and finally ….. (next photo…)

… landfill ….

Thank you to everyone who contributed to keeping Papatuanuku clean and hence te moana free from rubbish that day!

Ngunguru Gala kindly offered us a free stall at their annual gala, so we were able to display the rubbish collections from the SeaBin.

There was a reasonable amount of interest and we even sold 2 books!

Our SeaBin sorting team for 2020 has been awesome! The Interact Club at Huanui College, Glenbervie, is our source of volunteer sorters, and each year it changes. Starting in 2019, Pippa Benton led the 1st team and handed on to Alyssa Jolsen for 2020. We’re looking forward to 2021 and will update you with the team once school starts again!