Mindfulness and Art creation to save our ocean
Can you imagine one day, there are no fish in the ocean?
Overfishing, climate change, and plastic pollution have put 90% of marine species at risk of extinction. What you are facing is not just a crisis for marine life, but a catastrophe that threatens your life on earth. The ocean provides food to feed you, supplies oxygen for you to breathe, and absorbs carbon dioxide to relieve global warming. A healthy ocean is crucial to the ecosystem that you live in. We can’t live alone if marine life is dying.
If you are lucky, you may be one of the 0.5% world population who can dive. But you may feel so desperate and helpless, because you may have already heard that 99% of the beautiful coral reefs you saw are dying. If you are one of the remaining 99.5% world population who have never dived, you may not have the privilege to witness the collapse of the ocean ecosystem, but you may have heard about the ocean crisis. Without even knowing, some of you may have developed what scientists called eco-grief, the anxiety that can arise from experiencing ecological destruction directly or indirectly.
Yet many people are not aware of the urgency to save our ocean. They may think fish are just food, and fish don’t feel pain. To them, the ocean is an unlimited resource that we can harvest, and an invisible site with infinite space for dumping waste. How can we cultivate more empathy towards marine life? How can we unite and empower more people to save our ocean? How can we recover from eco-grief? Mindful Ocean Metaverse is a social project that tries to answer these questions.
Our vision? Let’s make art to save our ocean.
We believe art is an effective way to cultivate understanding and empathy. Through the lens of art, you can see and feel what you normally can’t perceive. In addition, art is an accessible stress-reliever. Anyone can make art and feel its healing power to our anxiety. Research has found that art-making can reduce stress hormones like cortisol, and increase pleasure hormones like dopamine. Art-making can also create new neural pathways in your brain, allowing you to link different concepts more easily to generate creative ideas.
In addition, art-making can develop mindfulness, which allows you to be more aware of the present moment, and enables you to look at the world with new angles. We believe developing mindfulness is extremely important for everyone living in a fast-paced world. It can also lead to the development of social mindfulness, so that more people can be aware of the unprecedented ocean crisis we are facing.
In our next articles, we will explain how we use blockchain, augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence (AI) to create a sustainable ecosystem for artists, Web3 users, and conservationists to save our ocean collaboratively.
