Lesson 118

Lesson two: Your Role as a Diver

Course Complete

We will discuss Your Role as a Diver

By the end of this section, I should be able to answer these questions:

1. Are divers a significant threat to the overall health of the underwater environment?

2. Why is it important to apply environmentally friendly dive skills and awareness while underwater?

3. What role do I have as a diver in the long-term survival and health of the world’s aquatic ecosystems?

Your Role as a Diver

Although divers aren’t a significant threat to the overall health of the aquatic environment, it is nonetheless very important to have environmentally friendly dive skills and awareness while underwater, for several reasons.

First, while diver damage may not (by itself) cause an ecosystem to collapse, it can destroy its natural beauty. Minimizing your effect on the environment is important to leave the places you visit beautiful for your next visit and for divers who follow.

Second, an ecosystem already under stress from pollution and other sources may struggle to recover from – or be unable to recover from – damage caused by divers (or any other sources).

For example, a groove on a coral head caused by a dragging console would repair over a few months in healthy, pristine conditions. But in less than optimum conditions (increasingly widespread), the same injury could become a foothold for disease that eventually spreads and kills the entire coral head.

Third, dive skills and habits that are good for the environment are also good for you. You also cause less damage to your gear, save energy and reduce the risk of hazardous aquatic life injuries if you stay streamlined, control your buoyancy and swim well above the bottom.

Diving without damaging is also important to your influence as a role model and an ambassador for the underwater world. As society struggles to solve environmental problems, perspective and constructive insight become increasingly important.

Because you see it first hand, you can influence your nondiving peers to help preserve and protect the aquatic world. But, diving will lose this influence if people think diving is damaging. It would make divers appear hypocritical.

Your influence gives you a role in being part of the solution to the problems facing the long-term survival and health of the world’s aquatic ecosystems. You can report your observations by taking part in environmental surveys and reporting online. Visit projectaware.org for more information.

You have credibility as the aquatic world’s ambassador. Adding your voice and votes to those of other divers helps make positive changes. Diver support has already helped steer and advance initiatives to protect environments and preserve endangered species.

You also have the power to take direct action. Examples include

Underwater cleanups. Organized by PADI operators and other groups, these events remove, and document trash and litter to further efforts to reduce them at their sources.

Invasive species removal. In some locations, divers may remove invasive species (organisms not native to the environment that have taken hold after being transferred there by human activity).
Ecotourism and science. Several organizations rely on volunteer divers in gathering data. While some require substantial expertise, many do not.

To learn more about how you can help in preserving the underwater world, see your PADI operator and visit projectaware.org.

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