Our Oceans

​

 

Nature has always influenced my jewelry.  I get ideas from flowers, plants, tide pools, designs in the sky – everywhere. It was Hawaii’s volcanoes that inspired my Lavaline. 

 

One silver lining I’ve found in the current pandemic is that nature seems to enjoy the break from human activities: Himalayan peaks are seen in parts of India where smog hid them for 30 years. Noise pollution is down on land and at sea.  People are paying more attention to their surroundings. Here in Hawaii we have seen more whales, turtles and birds then ever before. Last week we watched a rare endangered Hawaiian Monk Seal come ashore briefly near us seemingly just to say, are you okay?

 

We’ll be okay. We’ll get through this. But this human crisis has made me want to help the animals and the Earth around us a little more.  I recently saw a comment that said in 30 years all the plastic in the ocean will outweigh all the fish in the ocean. I’m not exactly sure how that can be measured but I do know two things for sure: all the plastic ever made still exists, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - that gyre of trash in the north-central Pacific Ocean – is now twice the size of Texas.

 

So what can a small jewelry designer do to help? Well, for starters I’m going to give 5% from every Lavaline item sold directly to the Center for Biological Diversity and help their Ocean Plastics Pollution Campaign. https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/ocean_plastics/   After that, I’m not sure – what else could I do? What could you do?