Protecting the Sea That Gives Us So Much

What the Sea Asks of Us

Every surfer, swimmer, sailor and coastline wanderer carries a relationship with the sea that is hard to articulate to anyone who does not share it. It is something close to debt — a debt of joy, of peace, of perspective. The sea has offered us all of these things freely and without conditions, which is perhaps why the condition of our coastlines and oceans can feel so personal when things go wrong.

And things have been going wrong for some time. Ocean temperatures are rising, sea-grass meadows are disappearing, plastic accumulates in the food chain, and the combined pressure of agricultural run-off, sewage discharge and coastal development has altered inshore waters in ways that directly affect the people who use them. This is not an abstract environmental problem. It shows up in swim-flag closures, in diminished surf sessions at polluted breaks, in empty rockpools where there were once crabs and anemones in abundance.

The good news is that the situation, while serious, is not irreversible. And the coastal community — surfers, kayakers, wild swimmers, divers, sailors — is arguably better placed than any other group to be part of the solution, because they are present, vocal, and motivated by direct personal experience.

Understanding the Threats

The most visible problem — plastic — is not the most significant one, though it matters. Macro-plastics: bottles, bags, fishing line, nurdle pellets. These cause harm to marine wildlife through entanglement and ingestion and have been found in the digestive systems of everything from seabirds to deep-sea fish. Microplastics — fragments below five millimetres — are now found in virtually every ocean sample taken anywhere on earth, including in human blood.

Less visible but arguably more immediately damaging to swimmers and surfers is sewage discharge. In England alone, water companies discharged untreated or partially treated sewage into rivers and coastal waters for more than 3.6 million hours in 2023. The charity Surfers Against Sewage has been fighting this issue since 1990. Their Safer Seas and Rivers Service app provides real-time water quality alerts across 400 UK locations — it should be on every sea swimmer's phone.

Ocean warming and acidification — both consequences of rising atmospheric CO2 — alter the chemical environment that marine organisms depend on. Coral bleaching is a tropical phenomenon, but warming UK waters have disrupted fish migration patterns, reduced plankton populations and pushed some species north of their traditional ranges.

What Collective Action Looks Like

Organisations working on UK marine health range from the national to the hyperlocal. Surfers Against Sewage runs the Great British Beach Clean and campaigns politically for clean water legislation. The Marine Conservation Society publishes the Good Beach Guide, conducts annual beach litter surveys and advocates for better fisheries management. The Wildlife Trusts manage several marine nature reserves around the UK coastline.

Volunteering with any of these organisations — even at the level of participating in a single beach clean — contributes real data and genuine labour to work that would otherwise not get done. Beach clean data feeds into government reports that inform policy. The act of counting litter by category (fishing waste versus food packaging versus single-use plastic) sounds modest; the aggregate picture it builds is not.

What Individual Action Looks Like

It is fashionable in some quarters to dismiss individual action in favour of systemic change, as if the two were in competition. They are not. Individual behaviour is the feedstock of culture, and culture shapes the environment in which systemic change becomes possible or impossible.

In practical terms: switch to a reef-safe sunscreen (most standard sunscreens contain benzophenone-3 and octinoxate, both harmful to marine organisms). Use a wax designed to biodegrade. Choose a wetsuit made with limestone-derived neoprene rather than petroleum-derived, or explore the growing range of suits using natural rubber. Carry a bag on the beach and pick up what you find — yours and other people's. If you're a boat owner, use non-toxic antifouling paint.

These are not heroic gestures. They are the low-grade, persistent kind of care that accumulates into habit and eventually into norm.

The Political Dimension

Here is one that some people would rather skip past: write to your MP. The UK's water quality legislation, the enforcement powers of the Environment Agency, the conditions under which water companies can discharge sewage — all of these are determined by political decisions. The coastal community is large, geographically distributed across constituencies, and highly motivated. It is exactly the kind of constituency that elected representatives notice when it organises.

Surfers Against Sewage make this easy. Their political campaigns page provides pre-written letters to MPs, petition links and updates on live legislative battles. It takes approximately four minutes.

The Long View

The sea has been here for four billion years. On the scale of geological time, even the damage we are doing is a blip. But on the scale of a human lifetime — on the scale of the surfing and swimming and sailing lives that the coastal community cares about — the changes are real and the losses are cumulative. Kelp forests that once extended for miles off the Devon coast were cleared by trawling; restoration projects are now attempting to bring them back. Sea-grass meadows that sequester carbon and nurse juvenile fish can recover, given the chance.

Recovery is possible. The sea is resilient if given even a fraction of the help it needs. That seems worth something.