To the Editor:

To start off I will be telling you about my opinion on the ocean. More specifically, I will tell you why it means so much to me and why we need to stop polluting it. When it comes to the ocean I go there every year for my birthday, the ocean is my relaxing spot where I can go to get away from life for a bit and every time I go, us as humans are just throwing trash everywhere.

It’s not needed. These animals deserve a life. Think about it how would you feel if you were an animal in the ocean choking on plastic thinking it was food? Now animals are smart in their own way but its not like they went to school like we do, they don’t know the difference between trash and food. In fact, some trash looks exactly like food.

The amount of trash thrown in is unbelievable. Approximately 8 million pieces of trash are thrown in each day! That’s just in a day, the amount of trash thrown in each year is 14 million tons! Now I just want you to take a second and think about something we dump so much oil, gases, plastic, and everything else under the sun.

For those that eat fish I just have a question for you, how do you feel about the plastic that maybe in our bodies. We’re not just killing animals but ourselves too. When we kill them, it turns to karma for us. Once fish aren’t around because of what we did we won’t be around shortly after them. And we won’t be able to see and hear these poor beautiful animals.

In a solution to this problem lets pick up after us or at least pick up what we can but we also have to look at it in a bigger scale to protect guidelines and to protect the water because the ocean will kill other animals that depend on each other, and water is one of our sources of energy.

Did you know that we depend on the coast for lots of things, the ocean helps control weather and helps us breathe? Couple of facts, 94% of wildlife is found in the ocean and 70% of the land is covered by the ocean and most of our food comes from the oceans and less than 7% of the ocean has been explored on the planet. All the land owned by the US most of it is surrounded by the ocean.

Ways to save the ocean from plastics and biohazardous things is… using reusable bags, reduce vehicle driving, carpool with someone even ride a bike. We’re killing our planet every day and don’t care to realize it, we can do a lot better for this planet and can save it if we try but we have to try.

When it comes down to it recycle because once we kill these poor animals, we end up dead from lack of food and oxygen. So let’s try to open our eyes up to see what’s going on lets be nicer to our oceans and be grateful for what the earth has provided us with.

With further research there are specific things we are not allowed to dump in the ocean Marine protection laws states, regulates that EPA is to protect our human health and prevent dumping into our oceans. Things we are not allowed to dump are municipal sewage sludge and industrial wastes, such as wastes from plastics and pharmaceutical manufacturing plants and the 1988 amendment also banned the ocean disposal of “medical waste.”

Natalie Jordan

Jay