June 7, 2010

Dear Sir,

As Bermudians join the rest of the world in marking the United Nations' World Oceans Day this week, it struck me as disturbingly ironic that Monday's front-page photo portrayed hundreds of plastic ducks bobbing in St. George's Harbour.

Not to be a party-pooper on a charity event, but … as our tiny, mid-ocean society strives to become more environmentally aware, surely the celebration of copious amounts of vinyl plastic in the sea has become an outdated-and dangerous-message for charities and their corporate sponsors to be sending out (even if all the duckies in this case were collected afterwards).

Plastic debris is perhaps one of the greatest long-term threats to all the world's oceans – one whose ruinous impact our children, and their children, will be left to suffer. As a country whose heritage has been so dependent on the sea, we owe it to ourselves to get better informed about the problem, and learn greener ways to capture the public imagination.

ROSEMARY JONES

Paget