🌊 Show your Ocean Devotion on World Oceans Day!

[#1]

For World Oceans Day on June 8, we are partnering with Ocean Blue Cleanup to remove plastic debris from the oceans! We will be removing up to 5000 pounds of ocean plastic - and it is so easy to help.To earn this badge, take one of the following actions: Like a comment or a post Give kudos to another user You can earn the badge* up to 100 times, and everyone who earns it 100 times will get a special bonus. (We had 15 people earn Community Cupid 100 times and I feel confident we can do even better on June 8. 😉) For every badge earned, we’ll remove a pound of plastic from the ocean, up to 5000 pounds.

But wait.... there's more!

For every share of this post on social media we will remove 1 extra pound of garbage from the ocean. Simply click the “share” button and post to your favorite social media platform, and poof! You’ve just removed 40-50 plastic bottles from the ocean.

But what about the real overachievers?

You may not live near the ocean, but I bet you live near some body of water. Between now and June 12, we will remove 5 extra pounds of garbage from the ocean for the folks who go above and beyond. For everyone who goes out and does a cleanup at a beach, river, lake, waterway, sprinkler system, or drinking fountain and posts a picture in this thread, poof! That’s 5 more pounds of plastic gone.

           Take a few minutes out of your day to make an impact in your community

               

           Some inspiration from Dutch nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup

Get started today by sharing this post and making plans to do a local cleanup. And get those liking fingers ready, because we’re gonna help save the ocean on June 8!**

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*Important: Ocean Devotion is part of the Kudos program. If you are not enrolled in Kudos, you need to join before you can earn this badge.  Just log into the community and click the button at the top right of the nav bar that says Kudos; then click "Join the Kudos program" to enroll instantly.

**Editor's Note: Sharing features are currently unavailable on Atlassian community. You can fulfill this bonus by commenting a photo of your share (on platforms such as LinkedIn or Twitter) in this thread! 6/1/23

[Monique vdB]

Here are me and my daughter doing our cleanup on the San Francisco Bay.  Spot the skyline in the background!

(She had a grabber and I had some compostable gloves; I do recommend that approach for picking up random trash!) 

[Andy Gladstone]

@Monique vdB This an awesome opportunity, thanks for bringing it to the community! (No i didn't mean to rhyme, but hey it happens some of the time 😉)

I live 1/4 mile from the Atlantic Ocean, how do I report my Beach Clean Up?

[George Pomar]

Anytime you're at the beach, please leave it cleaner than when you came - pick up random trash!  While this should be the practice everywhere, it's especially important in our oceans, if for any reason, just because it's a major food source!  You are what you eat.

I was lucky enough to grow up near the beach, and even though I've moved inland my heart will always be lying on a towel getting some sun!

[Collista Lewingdon]

The Scouts teach kids the concept of "Leave No Trace" a concept we can use at the beach, the woods and even in our day to day lives. I love the fact that Atlassian is getting involved in cleaning up our planet and our project management. :) Is LinkedIn considered social media for sharing purpose?

[LarryBrock]

@Monique vdB - is activity restricted to June 8th?  Can we start early and finish later?

[Saralie S.]

@LarryBrock  The badge is only available on the 8th (and even a little bit earlier for time zone purposes) in terms of gathering user data. But there's never a bad time for cleaning beaches! 

[Saralie S.]

@Collista Lewingdon Sadly our sharing option is unavailable for the time being but that does not mean you can't share the link to your LinkedIn! 

[Saralie S.]

@Andy Gladstone  You can drop pictures of your cleanup in this article! 👀👀

[Krishnakumar Kesavan]

Great Initiative.  Why not whole June month do this activity...

[Craig Nodwell]

Loving this, we got a beach to clean now!!

[Monique vdB]

@LarryBrock you can do the beach cleanup (5 pounds cleaned up) and share this post (1 pound cleaned up) anytime starting now! The badge will be released when it is June 8 in Sydney so as usual, our community "day" will last around 36 hours.

@Krishnakumar Kesavan we have Likes for Trees II coming up next month for a full-month activity! 

@Collista Lewingdon yes, LinkedIn counts!  Gonna include my shared post here for credit but really just go read Andy's ;) #ImpossibleAlone

               

[Monique vdB]

Bringing back the thermometer! 7/5000 pounds. 💙

                 

[Trudy Claspill]

Shared on LinkedIn.

[Monique vdB]

Sorry the little starfish is so GINORMOUS 😆 but at least she's cute!

[Andy Gladstone]

Posted on LinkedIn!
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7069802225404960768/

[Amanda Barber]

[Piyush A (STR)]

[Saralie S.]

Everyone is already doing awesome!!!

[Collista Lewingdon]

Wait...sharing doesn't count until June 8th right?

[Andy Gladstone]

@Collista Lewingdon I believe that sharing and cleaning starts today, the likes are activated for June 8 (across all time zones).

[Summer Hogan]

Posted on LinkedIn to spread the word! 

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7070255471638564864/ 

[vikram]

very good initiative 

[Dreamsuite Mike]

This is a topic close to my heart.

I have been fortunate to be able to work and travel living in all corners of the globe and have spent time in every ocean except the Southern Ocean.  I am a keen diver, a budding but clueless naturalist but most of all I am left in awe of our oceans.

For those who have not explored our oceans, I implore you to do so, whether physically or by reading/watching about them.  I am going to explain why every single person should be interested.

1. I can't emphasis this point enough...OUR VERY EXISTENCE IS DEPENDENT ON IT!  People shouldn't need more of a reason to do something to reverse the damage we are all responsible for.  If we affect this ecosystem beyond its natural resilience (and it is very very resilient), we aren't going to destroy the ocean, we will destroy the human species and take a lot of others with us but the Ocean will keep going, it will reform and it will go again...Just without us.
2. The ocean, and in fact most of nature can humble us all.  It's size, power, beauty, capability and other-worldly unknowns should serve as a reminder that we are not special, in fact quite the opposite.  In fact the ocean is a finely tuned ecosystem, with every part being there for a reason, with symbiotic relationships and incredible superpowers that we humans can't even come close to recreating
3. It is just absolutely beautiful.  Every unique lifeform is beautiful.  Even the creatures we have been conditioned to fear are beautiful.  This beauty can be an absolute assault on our senses.  

So that is why it is so important...

What is the picture right now....

Our garbage is just the tip of the iceberg.  I have swam in the seas off Indonesia, thousands of miles from home and been surrounded by plastic packets, including crisp packets from the UK.  I have been to remote islands that have so much garbage wash ashore that you can barely see the beach.  I have seen animals caught in fishing line, commercial fishing nets that have killed huge areas of coral reef.  I have seen entire reefs bleached and dead in as little as a few years.  

This is a picture from a beach clean up my wife and I did a little while back.  We collected this much in less than 20 minutes:

    

Of that lot, 1/3 were Coca Cola products!

In addition to plastic waste, other things killing the ocean.  Agricultural and industrial pollution, overfishing, indiscriminate trawling of reefs, increased shipping traffic, construction, increased CO₂

What can we do and is it worth it? 

This is what I spent a lot of time agonising over.  What can little old me do to change when there are greater powers that I cannot do anything about.  I ended up concluding that I can make a difference and even if it is negligible, it has to be worth it.  

There is one reason why as humans we don't do anything to help!  It is far easier to be blissfully unaware and it is much harder to take an introspective look at ourselves and make changes.  

We can all make changes and cleaning up the sh*t we've already dumped seems like a good start.  However, we should all take a look at how we can stop contributing to the problem as well.

We all consume to much, we are groomed to continue to crave things as a society.  We almost do it like robots.  We never think about if we NEED things, we choose to treat the word want with the same meaning as need.

If we all think about reducing what we consume, we can make a huge difference.  We as a population consume too much, much much more than we need to.  We also live in a world of convenience, a push society where we can be given what we want whenever and quite often are effectively encouraged that we need to.  You have to consciously fight this

This is so important and so true for it to be in that order because otherwise we'll never solve the problem.  

I am happy to hear this initiative from Atlassian, it is a start but companies, especially ones of the size of Atlassian could and should do much more.  Without working on solving the root cause endless endeavour to clean up the damage we have done wont work...

 

[Collista Lewingdon]

Gorgeous pictures!!

[Dreamsuite Mike]

@Collista Lewingdon They are beautiful and I dream that everyone can see this beauty, as well as their children and children's children....

Without action, this may be what a trip to the beach looks like in the future