AWARE - OUR WORLD, OUR WATER
By a large number of contributors
Project AWARE Foundation, 2009, 115 pages
Reviewed by Michael Beach
This work is used as a manual for two PADI certification courses I took last year. PADI is the Professional Association of Dive Instructors. I've been a professional member of PADI since 1987 when I completed my Divemaster certification. One certification this book is used for is called Project AWARE Specialist. The other is AWARE Coral Reef Conservation.
The book walks begins with a more academic look at fresh and salt water systems in general. Then it moves to coral reef systems specifically. After that there is an explanation of all the ways the world aquatic resources are being damaged and the effects. Finally there is a review of what the diving community has been doing, and what individual divers can do to help make things better.
Regardless where a person stands on topics such as global climate change, or how humans and nature should interact, there is some good food for thought in this manual. I'm certainly not some radical environmentalist, but I have been taught my whole live to be conservation minded. From my earliest days I have been out in nature and have enjoyed wild places. I do agree with the sentiment of "think global, and act local." Diving in particular has brought me in contact with some amazing life as recent as just two months ago. On that occasion I was able to make two dives just off of the island of St. Thomas in the USVI. To me, if a person wants to see how masterful an artist God is, they need only to enter those sorts of environment and experience it directly, personally.
Here is a related thought from the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). It's called the outdoor code.
As an American, I will do my best to –
Be clean in my outdoor manners.
Be careful with fire.
Be considerate in the outdoors.
Be conservation minded.
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