I’ve seen several good things, but I have also seen people throwing trash into our seas here in Thailand. Since I am a native Thai, this experience motivated me to help fight the problem of littering. I began researching online and visiting popular Thai dive destinations such as the Similan Islands. I took some pictures of the trash I saw there and saved it for future use. One morning, my father was reading the Thai newspaper when he came across an article about how dolphins were dying because of plastic garbage that had been discarded into the sea. It was then that I decided to create a movie to help teach Thai people to stop throwing garbage into our oceans.
This movie mainly has to do with littering and its effects, and what we can do to stop the problem. In the beginning of the movie, I felt it was appropriate to introduce myself since it isn’t so often that people come across a young diver such as myself. I also wanted to introduce my home, Thailand. By showing the natural beauty of the Thai seas, I knew I could emotionally and mentally impact the audience by drawing attention to the huge contrast between the beautiful images in my movie and photos of the damage caused by littering. After clips of my most favorite family pictures and videos, I showed pictures of trash from the Similans plus some scary images of dead dolphins. My hope was that this would impact the viewers and make them visually understand just what is happening to the seas.
As you’ll see in my video, I also created a group called NauticalNinjas – a club of people interested in cleaning up the ocean. I even designed a logo and made official t-shirts for people to wear. For the group’s first project, we collected trash during a trip to the Similan islands. You can find a photo of my t-shirt being worn by several people (including me) in the movie. While visiting the beaches in the Similans, some of us went free diving to pick up trash. Free diving right from the beach gave us the chance to pick up even more trash since people tend to drop litter right on the sand, from where it gets washed into the ocean. Most of the garbage we saw was glass soda and beer bottles, but we also gathered several aluminum cans.
The message I want people to take away from my video is about the importance of taking good care of our beaches and seas. If people were just as interested in picking up trash as they are in taking photos of the ocean’s beauty, the seas and beaches would be a lot cleaner and safer for the animals living there. In the end, I really hope that people reading this and watching my video will decide to take action and possibly start their own club or movement to pick up trash. Even if you don’t get inspired to create a club, I’d love to encourage you to pick up trash whenever you’re on the beach or during your dives and swims in the ocean. In the end, I hope that picking up trash will become as natural to us as photographing the ocean’s beautiful creatures.
