Mohammad Arju

The real challenge for ‘Ocean Literacy for all’

As UNESCO prepares for a global Ocean Literacy roadmap, the real challenge is getting the message right for diverse communities and cultures around the Planet.

The narrative of ‘Ocean Literacy’ is currently available and promoted by some organizations from the global north, with all its concepts, principles, and framework improvised using Eurocentric narratives and philosophies of education exclusive to some parts of southwestern Europe northern America.

Now, as the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO and its Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe based in Venice, Italy has started to facilitate a roadmap building process for the ‘Ocean Literacy for all’ campaign, it should prioritize making this campaign about assisting the conceptualizing and preparatory process of local Ocean Literacy programs around the globe.

It is evident that the question is not about disciplines of science that contributed to the Ocean Literacy concepts, principles, and frameworks developed, for example, by COSEE members http://www.cosee.net/. Scientists and educators in the United States are certainly the fine people to do that, to interpret the sciences and construct a new narrative to mainstream Ocean conservation into education in the global north.

The challenge is, the narrative should not be universal, and it does not need to be.

Let us explain. It will be problematic if not unnecessary to make this principle ‘the earth has one big ocean with many features is a must-have one for Ocean Literacy. Because people in many non-European societies easily relate to the global ‘interconnectivity of the ocean. For example, people can best relate to the ‘interconnectivity of Ocean Basins without rendering them into ‘one’ in many places. There are places where the ‘seven seas’ approach is culturally more helpful for the people to acknowledge the interconnectivity and act accordingly. And there are places where this ‘oneness’ is inherent in the culture. It’s nothing new to ‘learn.’

For more than 210 million people in Bengali Linguo-cultural regions in Asia, the narrative of the Severn Seas connects people to the Global Ocean as a unique, interconnected water body. So do they need to memorize/follow a new ‘principle’ of ‘one Ocean’? Or is it more reasonable that they build the sustainability approach upon this cultural strength? Bengali or Bangla is the seventh most spoken native language in the world by population. And, even in the last century, famous poets like Jibananda Das (pictured here) connected the audience with the notion of the global Ocean without necessarily building a narrative of singularity.

Like that, people in different Oceanscapes around the planet have different worldviews and associated narratives for linking our well-being to that of the Ocean.

So, it’s nearly impossible to have a ‘universal’ narrative or template message for all nations. And that’s not a challenge. That’s an opportunity to build upon local strengths and improvise messages that make sense to communities around the planet.

Besides, the limitations of formal education need to be taken into consideration. We have generations who already have passed through it without exposure to Ocean Literacy, ages who have critical roles as decision-makers in the society and state. Also, there is a massive gap in education and general Literacy among regions. In many regions, Ocean Literacy campaigns or programs will not be able to reach out to most of the people if strategies equally accommodating informal and public education sectors are not prioritized in the roadmap.

I will make some points about what any global or multi-national roadmap on Ocean Literacy should include for avoiding making it another ‘parachuting’ campaign. These issues need to be considered for getting the message across the north-south divide. These considerations are essential for preventing undermining and alienating local communities by telling them ‘Ocean Literacy’ is a new thing they need to learn. And, finally, these considerations are essential for effective use of resources by building on local strengths; the very shortlist will look like this.

The program development process for the campaign and preparation of the contents should be bottom-up.
The main focus should be facilitating local communities and other stakeholders in different Ocean basins to develop their concepts and principles of Ocean Literacy rooted in their society and culture and build the framework according to their institutional requirements. Also, the content should be prepared in the communities, translating from a ‘universal’ one must be avoided.
As the sectoral target of the campaign, informal education sectors, public education, outreach, youth work, for instance, should be given equal importance.

UPDATE 1: With a small group of conservation educators and experts, back in June 2018, I have started contributing to developing a local Ocean Literacy for the Bay of Bengal basin. Now we have many colleagues joining us. Keep an eye on the program’s website for updates http://bayofbengalliteracy.net

UPDATE 2: National Marine Educators Association in the U.S. has awarded me an Expanding Audience Scholarship for 2019. With other members of NMEA, I will prepare a framework to build local Ocean Literacy programs for informal education. The main focus of such a framework should be facilitating local communities and other stakeholders in different Ocean basins (particularly in the underrepresented countries) to come up with their narratives and principles of Ocean Literacy rooted in their society and culture.

People and conservation in the south, first impressions

No matter what they are up to; hurricane evacuees waiting at the gas station, shrimpers struggling to feed their families, mothers working hard to keep children in school, billionaire retiree anglers feeling under the hot and humid weather, salespersons greeting 25 people in an hour, or for instance my colleagues who are knee-deep into their work, people here on the South Atlantic Bight seems to be always in a better mood with a big smile. Though I am based in Skidaway Island, but trying to make it to other coastal cities and barrier Islands as much as possible. Some say, ‘southern hospitality’ is a myth, and I see, not only my colleagues or acquaintances, down here people generally are inherently cautious about being unwelcoming or unhelpful.

For me, this Island is remote in a sense that the only grocery is more than two miles away from my place, and in this late summer, we don’t have any neighbors on this jungle-campus of the University of Georgia on Skidaway river except the deer, raccoons, squirrel, mockingbirds, owls and chirping cicadas. Of course, we have the water birds who are year-round residents of the maritime forest and salt marsh, and the tidal visitors in afternoon; the pelicans and Atlantic bottlenose dolphins. I remember, when Mona was driving me down here from Atlanta airport, it was late in the afternoon when we crossed the river to the Island, driving through the huge loblolly pines with ‘deer Xing’ road signs, I thought it is going to be the best of the both worlds, and it has been exactly turned out to be so. Mona, Dr. Mona Behl is my community mentor at the host organization.

I don’t know what draws me, but being near Ocean or streams make me kind of feel ‘home’. Living this close to the Ocean, a tidal river, the bluff, the marsh, and all those ambient sounds always remind me the backyard of our home on the Island of Bhola, the place I was born and raised, bordered by the Ganges river mouth and the Bay of Bengal aka the northern Indian Ocean. Looking back, I reckon, in a way, that sedimentary swampy Island in the center of Bangladesh’s 710-kilometer-long coast, was the best place to continue to grow with what I had started.

The path I took can be termed in the present-day jargon as ‘youth work’, through a mix of outreach, public relation, and mass-communication. My father was a high-school language and literature teacher, and an Imam also– leading Friday prayer services and guiding the community. For me, it started with public speaking from the school platform before I was involved in local politics at a very young age, then I found myself as writing for national newspapers and magazines. I had this personal trait, which may be loosely identified as being an ‘introvert’. But now when I look back it surprises me that, this personal trait was not a limiting factor for me to be a youth leader in my community. I was a fluent speaker and tireless organizer. I could spend a whole day on my bicycle to reach out to the farthest flock of young people. Though my community work, of course, was a limiting factor for my reading habit and writing too. And at the end of the day, I did not want to ditch my vision to be a writer who is deeply involved with the local community. But, the coastal local economy of Bangladesh was on the decline. Like most lower-income families who send their children to school, my parents did not see any ‘future’ for us on the Island. Jobs dependent on coastal and marine ecosystems was not ‘respectable’ anymore because of dwindling income.

The first thing after settling myself in the city of Dhaka what I did is to start writing for newspapers, and within a few years, the course of events had brought me back to community work. And here I’m today! as a ‘Scholar-in-Residence’ with the Georgia Sea Grant and Marine Extension at the University of Georgia, I am trying to understand how coastal people on the south-eastern Atlantic Ocean are faring in their life, where they do not have any apparently direct dependence on the ecosystems for subsistence, but highly vulnerable to ecosystem degradation, extreme weather, and sea level rise; trying to figure out how people of Indian Ocean nations can be benefitted from the American experience of nature conservation through institutionalized process facilitated by public agencies.

The stilt house I live in on the Island is part of a joint campus shared by an Oceanographic research institution established in the late ’60s, an extension facility of UGA, and a reef sanctuary office of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. After the office hours, only 4 to 5 people stay on the 1425-acre campus for most of the days, mostly visiting fellows. There are few crews though, living on board the research vessel on the river. On some days I’m the only person staying the night on campus. Outside this campus, life on the Island is expensive. It is home to the largest and one of the most affluent gated communities in the country.

Amid all these, when I am alone on the campus which was formerly part of plantations run on slavery, what comes back to me is the flashback of the daily life on this island from more than two hundred years ago. The flashbacks are becoming more organized into some kind of visual frames day by day, as I’m reading a lot about the history of this region and talking to people. When I walk through the nature trails or just sit idle on the bluff in the middle of the night, I can feel like I was here with the indigenous tribe hundreds of years ago, but certainly, I was not. Sometimes, I go the neighborhoods in the downtown of Savannah. I need to talk with people who are living in poverty but not living on the Island anymore. Because I am trying to come up with a public program for Georgia Sea Grant which will diversify the audience, will be able to attract people of marginalized races, ethnicities and lower income levels.

I try to keep the conversations very personal. Many of them ask me about the institutional nature of my work. With pleasure, I mention that I am grateful to the American people for they have institutionally and financially facilitated this opportunity to serve them. This sort of exchange of experiences has all the potentials to help them address unique environmental challenges through people to people collaboration. In this time of disaster and despair, this kind of learning-sharing can significantly influence our ability to look for common grounds for collaboration among the coastal communities of the world. Of course, many of them are doubtful about their benefits from any international roles taken by US government, or they just distrust any activism by ‘liberals’. For some, the ‘fact’ that the former Vice President Al Gore– the ‘guy close to Hillary’ is one of the celebrity leaders in the fight against climate change is enough to dismiss the whole threat.

A few of them ask me, what’s in it for you? I tell them my story, what happened back in Dhaka when after a few months into my first full-time media job, I managed to start extensively travel to the communities living across 710 kilometers long coastline on the Bay of Bengal. Those experiences were unlike anything I have ever read in newspapers. During our childhood, we had three newspapers at our home,of course, one-day-old, arriving from the capital by passenger ferries. We used to read them through next 24 hours, starting from the dateline to the printers line, before taking the afternoon walk to the river next day, waiting for ferries. But during my travel to the coastal areas, I realized that I knew nothing about these people. I thought all the ‘bad’ things are happening only on our island. During those years, I got to know what is actually going on in the life of coastal rural people in other places, who were forced to migrate to inner cities and take the perilous boat journey to other nations. But in public sphere on the national level, they were barely present in any discussions, they were totally left out.

I am grateful that my travels and conversations pushed me into serious community works, once again. The last couple of years, at the network we have founded in Bangladesh, with our associates and affiliates, we are trying to design, develop and monitor Participatory Action Research initiatives in coastal communities to enhance resilience. But no matter what we do, what is missing is concerted efforts to remove policy barriers for the communities so that they can avail the public resources to address social-ecological challenges by themselves. Conservation NGOs and INGOs in countries like Bangladesh do their ‘projects’ in a colonial ‘settler’ mode; they mostly address problems which do not exist in the first place. For instance, they run ‘awareness’ campaign among communities when the communities do not have access to the forest anymore, and the deforestation is led by industries. If sometimes they are forced to act based on local priorities, they always deploy top-down interventions, sometimes with misleading names, ‘co-management’, for instance.

They are always ‘parachuting’ science and conservation initiatives based on stand-alone projects and then leaving to pursue another project that may or may not be consistent with previous efforts. Virtually there’s no effort for local institution building to run permanent programs for creating local workforce and helping communities to achieve and maintain social-ecological resilience. There is no NGO-led ‘conservation success’ in last few decades which benefitted the people en mass. This is unfortunate, but this scenario is going to be changed, I believe.

Unlike those green-washing projects, I see at Sea Grant there is a notably different approach to conservation, the approach which necessarily related to its institutional nature. At Sea Grant, I see, my colleagues are working for the people, and with the people. I know, how this publicly funded institution strives for working with full intellectual autonomy to serve the most vulnerable people of the nation while remaining accountable and transparent to them. I am observing how the community leaders, natural resources managers, social workers, businesses, and members of academia work together for healthy coastal ecosystems, resilient communities, and environmental workforce development. This is one of the strongest public institutions in the world engaged in coastal and marine research and extension, and they are working for you, I say to the people I come across here.

To my relief, whether we agree or not, we can find some common grounds to explore more. It seems, the binary of global south and north does not work always. Besides, this region is the south of the global north. Particularly, many white people are proud as ‘southerners’. And, I am from the ‘south’ also, globally and locally, in a totally different meaning though.

September 9, 2017
Skidaway Island

Inside a student political meeting at the birthplace of American public higher education

To what extents young people are involved in community works and politics in the birthplace of American public education? And how they mobilize the organizational process? These are the questions which took me to the ‘Young Democrats of UGA’s weekly meeting in Athens yesterday. To explore about people’s participation in public policy I’ve met and talked with many people in last few months, but this was the first time I was in a kind of totally political meeting.

Of course, I did not participate in the meeting, but I ‘observed’ the meeting as a foreign scholar working with a Public Outreach unit at the university, did not say a single world or contributed to anything. Around 30 students participated in the meeting titled ‘Spooky Politics’. Trendy name it is! After all, this is the Halloween week.

It was a classroom, number 348, in the Miller Learning Center. When I arrived on time at 6.30 in the evening, the Pizza time was almost over, so the discussion began. Scheduled for one hour the meeting went to super overtime, ended around 8.

20171101_190158 — Barack Obama’s photo was distributed over the total presentation as the filler which worked as some kind of icebreakers in the meeting. Turns out, the young democrats still miss the former president.

My top takeaway from this meeting of Democrat Party’s young supporters is that they conducted the session in a very effectively minimalist way. There was an exclusively fun part, a Costume Contest where only the guy with ‘Richard Nixon’ mask failed to win a prize. And there were no ceremonial or ‘motivational’ fiery speeches in the meeting like we see in Asian countries. It was something between a responsive Briefing Session about recent political developments and a kind of a moderated ‘Talking Point’.

There was an MS PowerPoint presentation for the whole program divided into some categories; local and national news, weekly actions, forthcoming local and national legislative agendas, and the ways students can contribute in taking actions about those agendas. Almost, every discussion came with some recommendations about how the students can engage themselves in the process.

Secondly, the students seemed to have a strong and sincere conviction to their liberal cause. When discussing recent political news and forthcoming agendas, topics related to public infrastructure, and environmental sustainability got more importance. And when discussing the latest ‘Terror Attack’ in New York, the presenter Ruth Pannill was careful about the contents. The reason there was no visuals on the slide probably was not a technical glitch, but a conscious decision. ‘It’s important that this kind of terror attack is not being exploited to spread Islamophobia’, she said.

Thirdly, the student politics are heavily partisan too. A lot of discussions was about the forthcoming Georgia state legislative special elections. It seemed the students are seriously taking part in the campaign because if the Republican party wins they will retain their ‘Supermajority’ which gives them the power to change the state constitution.

The local Democrat candidate is Deborah Gonzalez. Ms. Gonzalez is a Latina who raised her two children as a single mom. The meeting was apparently happy about the fact that in contrast to the Republicans, their candidate is not a white male.

The Republican candidate 22-year-old Houston Gaines was heavily criticized at the meeting for his alleged failure to elaborate on important public issues. One of the presenters mentioned that in an electoral forum Mr. Gaines who is a former student body president at UGA, even failed to elaborate on what ‘unique perspective’ he will bring to the state legislature. At a point in that forum, the UGA graduate said, ‘It’s obvious just by looking at us that we have a different perspective’. Young Democrats also made fun of Mr. Gaines for this. Terming him a ‘man-child’, one of the student leaders said, as if being white and man is a perspective.

And another important note; the participants were most responsive when the discussion entered into ‘crazy things’ the current Republican president is doing. Almost everyone has something to say about it.

Lastly, the students seemed very engaged about any discussion on ‘legislative’ process. After discussing recent and forthcoming legislative agendas at both state and federal level, the students were asked to reach out their representatives with feedback and demands. Texting, calling and attending town halls, ‘make them scared for the midterms if they are doing shitty things’, one of the leaders said.

Also, turns out, the students think it is really difficult to find out important decisions and processes from House and Senate website, mostly because of acronym-infested and jargon-filled language.

So, of course, it was only a single meeting, which I decided not to ‘participate’. One can’t possibly know much more as an observer. Probably, at the meeting, I’ve got some ideas about how politically active young people see their potentials to shape public policies in the USA.

But I look forward to more one to one and group conversations with the southern youth. In a country where most college graduates are deep in the financial crisis with all the loans and so on, there should be more intriguing perspectives from the youth to find out.

I’m looking forward to exploring more about their thoughts about policies which oftentimes negatively impact the access to natural resources by families which eventually leads to more fiscal spending and debt.

Report on Saint Martin’s Island Ecosystem Boundary

This study was conducted by Save Our Sea, co-funded by the BOBLME project of United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

The report titled ‘Report on Saint Martin’s Island Ecosystem Boundary, Bangladesh’ was prepared as one of the outputs of the Strengthening national capacity on managing Marine Protected Areas (MPA) project in Bangladesh implemented by the IUCN Bangladesh, with the assistance of BOBLME-FAO and Save Our Sea.

My co-authors are Alifa Bintha Haque, Lecturer of Zoology at the University of Dhaka (formerly the Director of R&D at Save Our Sea); Mohammad Eusuf Hasan, Conservation Biologist, Dr Niamul Naser, Professor of Zoology at the University of Dhaka, and Dr. Kazi Ahsan Habib (Former Adviser at Save Our Sea), Professor of Fisheries Biology and Genetics at the Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University.

You can find the PDF file on Save Our Sea’s Website or search for it on the Website of BOBLME-FAO project.

Takeaways from Global Youth Biodiversity Network’s Asia Capacity Building Workshop

On May 27, 2017 we’ve just wrapped up one of the most important events in Asia this year. I know, most of you did not heard of it, but don’t be surprised; we know, relying on mainstream media as the only source of information has its own limitation- in many cases, the media fails to report on important things.

So, please let me convince you about how the recently held Global Youth Biodiversity Network’s Asia Capacity Building Workshop will shape the future of Asia and the planet Ocean.

The Homework

One of my fellow participants at the workshop, Naseem Sultani from Afghanistan already written about it; the week-long workshop held in Singapore (with generous support from Singapore’s National Parks Board and Japan Biodiversity Fund) had a wide range of participants from the Central, South, Southeast, West and East Asia, and all of them are back to their home countries with a very specific homework. And the homework is not just about same-old-same-old romantic environmentalism about biodiversity; it is not about photogenic environmentalism of just holding another conference. The organizers were very clear about it, and this policy position was well reflected in all of the training sessions of the workshop (See the Schedule: PDF File).

The workshop was designed to train the youth leaders in real down-to-earth efforts for utilizing the already available multi-national process and mechanism (Convention on Biological Diversity, for example) on local, national and regional level to minimize the impact of market-economy on the diversity of life our planet hosts, and eventually help the governments in successful drafting and implementation of National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) to achieve Aichi Biodiversity Goals.

With this homework, the trained participants are out, therefore, more learning and real work, in their respective countries.

Using ‘System Thinking’ approach, they’ve built a scenario of current status and identified best possible leveraged to contribute to the conservation of biodiversity in Asia as a youth group. They’ve conceptualized several programs for the coming years to establish ASEAN and South and Central Asian sub-regional networks, to build a knowledge network, and to run a grassroots conservation program through Participatory Action Research led by youth organizations and fellows. In the coming months; they will design, develop and start implementing the programs.

So, in a brief, with the goal to secure more diversity of life on the planet, this workshop just deployed a team of well-trained youth leaders in the field to take part in political and decision-making processes at local, national, regional and international levels. The team’s work will certainly help the national governments in Asia to bring sustainability in the development process, also achieve many targets of the Sustainable Development Goals in the process and reconnecting the people with nature.

Strength

In these times of growth-hungry economy devastating the people and the planet, being a conservationist means you are engaged in really down-to-earth activities to reverse the process. The Convention of Biological Diversity’s stated role is to ‘prevent and attack the causes of significant reduction or loss of biological diversity at source’, you know it. And it’s not easy, rather daunting, oftentimes exhaustive too. But this workshop was a forum where we met the people face to face who are building their lives around this daunting task, it was really comforting.

Even in places like Singapore, where the economic violence affected the social-ecological systems severely, things have started to change, we’ve met several groups of people who are working for reconnecting people with nature. Even within such an extremely modified landscape, as a result of orchestrated efforts by government authorities and citizen-science groups like Otter-Watch and NUS Toddycats, the Singapore River is now hosting at least two large families of the smooth-coated otter. We’re aware that, there is no final victory in conservation, there will not be, but this sort of conservation-optimism story once again shows us the way.

And, it’s not just that, you listen to others’ stories, experience, and observation or go visit successful conservation initiative, which in some ways, or in many ways may be reasons to you, inform you about how people around the continent is bringing positive change for the conservation of biodiversity. One of the most important parts, for me, at the workshop was, I’ve learned a lot while articulating mine to others. Also, can sense that other participants were also re-discovering themselves by explaining their experience and ideas to others.

So, it is about self-motivation, as one of my fellow participants, Xu Waiting from Singapore was saying during their group presentation; ‘It’s the self-motivation what keeps you running to achieve what you believe in.’

We the people

The most important aspect of the forum was, I should say, together, we can now think of ourselves as a people, the people for advancing conservation in Asia. By taking parts in a number of self-organizing tasks (System Thinking, Project Concept Developing for example), through the process of feedback and evaluation, we’ve already started to work collaboratively.

As a team, now we know about our internal resources, strength, expertise we can offer to each other; and we have already come up with concepts about how to get easier access to this team and keep collaborating.

(The blog was originally published on the Global Youth Biodiversity Network’s website)

Photo courtesy: GYBN