The missions are what drive us. They are why we are here, and they are designed to be finite, achievable and useful to helping our oceans, seas and waterways. They are, after all, for all of us.
Our missions are designed to evolve over time, and be achievable, verifiable and have a defined outcome. When one is finished, another should take its place: and we should remain high in ambition, because easy is already being done.
It should be noted that, even though we have a previous body of work, we have had to mothball our missions due to loss of funding. We hope to restart our core missions in late 2024, with mission 2 following in 2025.
- Mission One is education. Not preaching, nor dictatorial in nature, but information provision. Many have decided that environmental issues are partisan, which is clearly not true: flooding doesn’t care who you vote for, nor does environmental disaster, but we have to move away from the toxic political game and talk data, fact and verifiable information. You can’t argue with provable fact, and education is about helping folk make up their own mind, not telling them how to think. This falls into three more narrow categories:
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- Documentary – documenting both our missions, and our world, and making available access to it as completely as possible (allowing for some commercial needs).
- Informational – engaging with broadcast platforms to make programming that further the aims of recycling, upcycling and repair – if we can all fix things, instead of landfilling them, they don’t end up in our waterways.
- Availability – making sure we get that information out as broadly as possible, by factoring programmes into packages suitable for consumption across networks, from cinema and television to internet, including across paid platforms, free platforms and hybrid platforms.
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- Mission two is the data mission. This is the pure science of data collection, aligned with academic need across academic disciplines across the globe. We see this as two distinct mission profiles:
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- The Deep Mission – builds on the work of mission one, via additional exploration of the deep oceans, for documentary purposes, but with a better focus on actual data, useful to others for environmental monitoring, to include: fine-area mapping, deep chemistry monitoring and analysis and wildlife surveying.
- Broad-scale data collection initiatives, such as deploying data collection technologies into schools, colleges and universities, perhaps with those who have less of a core ocean mission focus (or no ocean focus at all), and across waterways, rivers and bodies of water that are outside of our oceans and seas, contributing to our understanding of the whole-water life cycle. Data should be made freely, or mostly freely, available to help drive academic research and understanding.
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- Mission Three – is the bluesky mission. To involve ourselves in research that can drive positive ocean outcomes, but might not be immediately directly ocean related, such as plastic reduction initiatives, research and development initiatives, or early stage promotion and investments in initiatives that drive our goals indirectly, so are better off delivered by third parties, rather than in-house. This will be our toughest mission of all, because we will need to justify every effort spent here, and tie it back to measurable outcomes that inform and drive our main missions, but this is also likely to be where the magic happens, where step changes, often driven by the data mission, can be achieved, that actually make the challenge work. We’ll announce more on this mission over time, as we develop data-sets that help support this work.
As we stated at the start, our missions are what drive us, and this is core to who we are. We’ll keep you posted on how we’re doing.
Featured Image Credit: Free Texture #91 by Brenda Clarke on Flickr. Creative Commons usage.