In this edition of World Ocean Radio, we pass two important waypoints in fulfilling the primary purpose of the World Ocean Observatory to build greater public awareness of the challenges and solutions to the world ocean. First, this is 300th audio presentations, launched some five years ago, surveying the full horizon of ocean issues, in English and now distributed internationally through partners in the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, on both coasts of Africa, to podcast subscribers, and to thousands of additional listeners through our many social media outlets. These scripts then have additional effectiveness as they are transformed, illustrated, and made available as videos available on our YouTube Channel, our subscription service program inventory, and on Google Ocean and other web-based resource centers. We are extremely proud of this accomplishment and are gratified by the enthusiastic and positive response we get from listeners the world over.
Second, we are pleased to announce an expansion of World Ocean Radio into four additional language versions – French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Swahili – translated from our audio archive and representing an extraordinary opportunity to extend our communication efforts beyond English and into major geographical areas that have heretofore been outside our broadcast capacity. Thus, we see the opportunity now to offer our radio feature to outlets in areas where these languages remain essential – obviously France, Spain, and Portugal in Europe and importantly all the nations in Central and South America and certain regions in Africa.
Technology is our enabler here. The internet provides us universal access to anyone with a computer; the smart phone provides connection to pod-cast subscribers; and short wave broadcast, to be launched later this year, will enable us to reach listeners in the most remote places where the more modern and expensive tools are not available. Yes, we will be able to reach even all the ships at sea. With this initiative, there is no reason that we cannot reach a vast majority of the world population should they know how and when to listen. We hope to add Chinese and Japanese editions in 2015, and perhaps additional languages thereafter.
World Ocean Radio, thus enriched, is a powerful opportunity to bring discussion of the ocean and its impact on all aspects of human survival to a global audience. The service is provided to any and all at no cost, and it is intended to provide responsible information and advocacy toward greater understanding of the meaning of the ocean for our lives, its rapidly degrading state, and a variety of specific actions that can be taken both by governments and individuals to mitigate the problems, modify behaviors, evolve policies, implement change, broaden public awareness, and build political will.
To succeed with this – and especially to engage the larger audience envisioned – we need your help. We must enlist your assistance to promote this endeavor to your network of friends and colleagues, to your employers and organizations, and to potential outlets where you live. Here are six approaches that each of you might attempt:
• 1) Share World Ocean Radio through your various personal connections, through contact lists, web-connections, and other communications links – and do so repeatedly and relentlessly, forwarding every week every edition to every one you think might be an ally.
• 2) Consider how your organization might help by linking to World Ocean Radio on its webpage, sharing it among fellow workers, incorporating it into the work it does, and promoting it to the population you serve.
• 3) If you are an educational institution, a museum, aquarium, or environmental program, share it with your faculty and students, incorporate it into curriculum, use it to stimulate and focus discussions, promote it as a membership or community service, share it formally and informally as an educational tool, even use it as a marketing opportunity to recruit new audience with ocean interest to your programs.
• 4) Identify other partners or associations with which you work and explore ways these broadcasts might promote mutual goals and collective objectives by sharing with their constituents to demonstrate professional and collective interest.
• 5) Look for broadcast outlets in your geographical area – the local, regional, or national radio network, the college or community station – and recruit them to the ocean cause, linking your organization to this product and growing your outreach and civic engagement.
• 6) Become a “Citizen of the Ocean,” an advocate who sees the powerful alliances inherent in this strategy, its utility as a platform for discussion and change, and its potential for you, as an individual, to recruit and motivate like-minded friends and strangers to advance a world effort, expressed in every language, to speak out and act for the sustainable ocean.
World Ocean Radio can speak loudly and widely for us all. Become its champion; take this simple action; make a connection, and help us spread a message for the ocean that will be amplified and echoed across the sea that connects us all.
We will discuss these things, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
