A lemon shark pup only a few months old, swims in the shallow water of a mangrove on the Bahamian island of Bimini.
Doomed by a gill net, a Thresher shark (Alopias superciliosus) in Mexico's Gulf of California is among an estimated 100 million sharks killed yearly worldwide.
Both the above images can be creditied to Brian Skerry. He is arguably one of the most admired underwater photographers at work today, boasting an incredible talent for capturing both the fact, emotion, and beauty of a scene. When it comes to ocean conservation, this talent is exactly what is needed to connect the masses to what is too often (and wrongly) considered both an endless basket of seafood and an inhospitable desert for living things. Skerry works tirelessly to tell -- in a beautiful, compelling, and emotionally connective way -- the story of our ocean, and his images are able to connect viewers with their sense of responsibility to protect and conserve what we have left and restore what we have lost.
School children marching to raise awareness for climate change and the need for increased environmental awareness.
Protesting is a very American way of doing things, namely creating change. In this case both images to the left include climate marches of varied scales. I know a few people personally who attended the New York Climate March last year. A few of those individuals were very passionate about the effect climate change was having on wildlife around the globe and they turned their passion into a method of garnering support and increasing attendance. Some people question the effectiveness of such a method, but simply look at the mass attention events like these get. They spread awareness and can be used to gauge public opinion.
The Climate March in New York City. Protestors raising awareness for not only climate change but also the need for both federal and economic policies to reform systems currently harming the environment.
The conservation legacy of Theodore Roosevelt can be found in the:
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230 million acres of public lands he helped establish during his presidency. (Much of that land - 150 millions acres - was set aside as national forests.)
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Roosevelt created the present-day USFS in 1905, an organization within the Department of Agriculture. The idea was to conserve forests for continued use. An adamant proponent of utilizing the country's resources, Roosevelt wanted to insure the sustainability of those resources.
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Roosevelt was also the first president to create a Federal Bird Reserve, and he would establish 51 of these during his administration. These reserves would later become today's national wildlife refuges, managed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Today there is a national wildlife refuge in every state, and North Dakota boasts the most refuges of any state in the country.
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Efforts made by the Roosevelt's administration to improve and expand the National Park System. When the National Park Service was created in 1916 - seven years after Roosevelt left office - there were 35 sites to be managed by the new organization. Roosevelt helped created 23 of those.
Roosevelt was a leader in conservation, fighting to end the waste of natural resources
This can be categorized as art in my opinion. It's essentially repurposed "trash" and I think is a very visual representation of just how much trash we really have in this world. It brings awareness and leaves jaws wide open. One can't really ignore a 20 ft sculpture as they may a poster or an ad or chant.
Architects Amanda Schachter and Alexander Levi‘s massive “Harvest Dome 2.0,” assembled from 450 umbrellas and 128 bottles, once floated around the inlet of Inwood Hill Park in New York City. Deemed a piece of “performance architecture,” the 24 by 18-foot structure further proves the world’s garbage can we reused in many unexpected ways.