Ismaili.NET - Heritage F.I.E.L.D.

Last week, Prince Hussain delivered a keynote speech to students, partners, and fellow conservationists for ‘Our Living Ocean,’ in partnership with @wwf & @graduateinstitute in Geneva.

The event focused on solutions for a productive and resilient ocean, sustaining people and nature.

Prince Hussain said the following;

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But we can do better, you and I.

Forgive me, please, if I make mistakes, because I spend most of my time
trying to communicate with fish, cephalopods, seagrass, orchinoderms, not
humans. Poust said that beauty is a promise of happiness. So please share
with me through these photographs the burden of beauty. The inconvenience and constancy of dreams, ubiquity of joy, dread, despair and despondence in the face of desecration and destruction. The lust for improvements and inescapability of hope.

If I could channel the ancient mariner or had the fabric of a poet, I would
regale you with stories of crazy humpback whales that swim right up to
people, spyhop just a few meters in front of them, raising their entire heads
and much of their chests out of the water. Playing with the humans in their
space as much as they play with each other. Rising and descending, rocking and rolling, of calves that come right up to your group, all playful and excited, and introduce themselves to every individual gathered.

Of one calf in Tonga in 2015, who actually bumped us all ever so delicately
before descending back towards its much watchful mother's side. A place
calves can only stay up to seven minutes at a time before rising to the surface for a breath. I'd regale you with the story of a wonderful Napoleon wrasse which wandered up from the deep directly towards me in Egypt. A lovely lady with luscious lips lulling me and lollygagging by my side for a lengthy 15 or 20 minutes. So close I could easily have touched her.

So close and so enthusiastic was she that it felt like being in another world, in a dream. Deliciously delicate and with a wavy pattern all over her body.
Napoleon wrasses are called cheiliinus undulatus in Latin. The undulating pattern right in their name. I'd recount stories of magnificent, wise looking turtles which are between 150 and 200 million years old. As old as dinosaurs.They sometimes come next to us for hours on end. Like this hawksbill at St. John's in 2023, which appeared out of nowhere but stayed near me for perhaps 35 minutes, hugging the reef and basking in Egyptian light.

Or my beloved green turtles in the Exumas, which swim less than 4 meters
away from us, sometimes for an hour.

A loggeread, its mouth wide open in what seemed like a threat display.
Despite having swum with me under the waves for 300 meters, you'd be
surprised to know that the most dangerous of the fish in the sea are not
sharks, lionfish or scorpionfish, but titan triggerfish during mating season.

And the clownfish and damselffish, which often cohabitate, are ruffians,
instigators and outright avengers, rascals and hooligans. They protect their anemone in coral homes as well as offspring better than most lions, tigers and polar bears. They will swim meters away from their territories to nip or scare off an inadvertent diver.

So many wonderful, beautiful creatures and moments.

But here's the thing. We are living in the Anthropocene in an absolute
dystopia for nature, marred and worsened by human hubris, an ineptitude at best, neglect and inertia at worst, greed. Most of us have become apathetic, fearful of the future and apprehensive about how to live our lives. What harms we might cause, and vicious cycles perpetuate.

We have decimated ancient creatures hundreds and thousands of times older than us in the blink of a geological eye, pushing the extinction rate to up to 10,000 times what it was before the Industrial Revolution.

The Napoleon wrasse you saw is critically endangered, even though it was even extremely common a few decades ago. People eat them, they are overfished, and their numbers are declining rapidly.

The hawkesbill turtles I showed you are critically endangered as well. Six out of seven sea turtle species are endangered. And the seventh, the flatback turtle, which is limited to Australia in range, we may not have enough information on to determine its status.

In Iceland, Norway and Japan, they are still whaling. How dare they?

Before I send your home miserable and apologies if I brought you closer to the precipice, there is good news. Over time, we have managed to stop whaling nearly everywhere. We frequently discover new species, even sharks and cetations. Australia, which doesn't have the best record of ocean stewardship, declared that 30% of its waters will be highly protected by 2030.

One of the most important goals we actually have is to protect 30 by 2030.
The high seas Treaty has just come into effect. Beyond national jurisdiction, the high seas cover about two thirds of our oceans, and protecting them is crucial.

We know for a fact that sea turtles can rebound, and the director of the Sea
Turtle Conservancy tells me they respond very well to certain corrective
measures and improved management. In India, they saw a record number of olive ridley sea turtles nesting this year. People always ask me if I'm hopeful, and my answer is yes, hope springs eternal. And if legendary and tireless geniuses Sylvia Earle and Jane Goodall have hope and they do, then I do too.

Indeed, technology is advancing in leaps and bounds, and bright young minds such as your own are the most likely to fix the planet, save or protect its inhabitants.

You cannot, for the sake of the planet, for humanity, for wildlife and wild
places, give up. Whilst we once needed nature to live, nature now depends
entirely on us, merely to survive.

And importantly, it's up to wonderful, capable, committed organizations like
WWF, with conservation teams working around the globe, and who we are partnering with to save endangered angel sharks to lead the way. WWF has implemented more and better changes over the past few decades than we could count.

And with partners like Mission Blue, the Manta Trust and Whale
and Dolphin Conservation, I'm sure WWF will turn the tide.

Focused on Nature and I, in our minute capacity, here to help as well.