IPSO - Every Second Breath

Any of you, wherever you are, whatever you are doing can pause now and connect directly with the ocean. Just breathe.

That breath came from the sea.

All the people I care about need oxygen to survive and at its simplest level, the role of IPSO is to make everyone understand why they and the people they love, need the ocean to function effectively.

Alex Rogers and I set up IPSO about six years ago because we believed that until people understood the role of the ocean at the Earth System level – the level of making this planet habitable – we would never see the change necessary to protect it.
Our aim was to bring together science and communications to first increase the collective understanding about ocean services to the planet and to then communicate that understanding.

Some of our efforts towards achieving that have been humble – working out exactly what those Earth system services are and trying to explain them simply and diagrammatically (never been done before I’m told); some have been bigger – like the release of the report this week.

Alex and I started working together back in the 90s when I was with Greenpeace and he was an expert witness for us in a Judicial Review. Then he helped me develop a series of DSCC science tours to bring scientists into politicians’ offices to explain what was happening and why they needed to take action.

For years we talked about what we are allowing to happen to the ocean and the impact it would have on our great grandchildren, then our grandchildren and we campaigned harder and set up IPSO.

And now we have to talk about our children and what we have allowed to happen to the planet they need in order to live and the ocean they need in order to breathe.
So today I am proud to see IPSO on the front page of the Independent and across the world’s media and excited to hear that the report is being referred to at OSPAR, in the UN and that campaign groups are using it widely to support their demands for better ocean protection.

I owe a debt of thanks to my colleagues at Comms Inc who are working so hard to support IPSO and get the story out there and to the scientists and others who participated in the workshop and were prepared to be brave and say what needs to be said. I’m also grateful to the JM Kaplan Fund who had the vision to support something different at a time when no one else understood the need for a bigger picture.

Onwards.