At a time when people’s resources are being stretched, why do we think the public should support The Ocean Challenge?
When all is said and done, there are literally hundreds of calls for your time and money each day, week and month. Membership subscriptions, books, magazines, television, movie theatres, live theatre, restaurants, jogging, squash, tennis, wandering through the countryside with no particular objective; all of these things and many, many more vie for your valuable time, and then some. Add in work, or retirement obligations, dog walks, cat fussing, whatever your thing is, and there is little time left. Except we always manage to find a bit, for Facebook, Twitter, or your social interaction of choice. Now add in YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, and you have to start to wonder why we are not able to sleep some nights. Oh, and of course sleeping, that takes time, right?
Yet here we, The Ocean Challenge, come and ask for more of your attention, knowing you probably don’t have much left, oh, and we are trying to persuade you to support us on Patreon, all so we can provide you yet more viewing you don’t have time for. But the viewing, via exclusive content and natural history programming is just part of the story. Let’s complete the picture and look at the rest of the story.
Our approach from the start has been to be a data collector, so those with more experience, bigger brains, thought leaders, actual leaders, they end up writing the scientific papers, the policy papers, the white papers, the green papers, the laws and rules that govern our life. And while there are other organisations who produce data, they rarely produce raw data, which makes them non-neutral. We, on the other hand know that brow beating people over outcomes we want is not going to achieve those outcomes. Proving that they should, without too much comment, and certainly no partisan involvement, that’s how you change policy.
If information is devalued by being over-run with opinion, then you lose most of your audience, and our thought was more simple: let’s provide data, natural history programming and documentary (which rewards our Patreon supporters), and then we don’t have to charge anyone for the data, but can make it freely available, including to those that would wish to check it, cross-check it, verify it, use it to derive their own models and meaning of the world, and that is where the magic is – people can make connections and do research with it we never dreamed of, and that is where new insights will come from. From there, new policies will be developed that will inform legislation and, we all hope, in the end drive the protection of our oceans as a precious resource that will be around and healthy long after we’re all gone.
That is why The Ocean Challenge matters. We’re here to make a difference, together, with you, our supporters. And we might just change the world and make it a better place. Is that not worth a small subscription on Patreon? We hope you’ll think so.
