I am sure you all already have dreamed about swimming within thousands of little pretty fish, gigantic whales, dolphins and maybe sharks, and just simply integrate yourself perfectly in the marine ecosystems to see what is happening in there. This can be done by scuba diving. But you all know that nothing can be perfect, and that everything has an impact on our world.
It seems logical for a lot of people but if you don’t live near the sea, the ocean, a river or a lake in which there are plenty of things to look at, scuba diving can be a little bit difficult … You will need to move to a place where you can practice your passion. For that, you will take the plane, take the boat, the train or even your car. Moving from a place to another like that will for sure have a negative impact on our world by polluting it because all transportations pollute in a way or another.
Also, you are not going to scuba dive directly in the port or directly at a beach because there won’t be anything interesting to admire. The world’s best diving spots are situated in places where no one goes, in places that are almost untouched by humans. To go there, one more time, you will ride your boat. Taking your boat, will first of all consume a LOT of gas, then it will pollute the sea a lot by spreading some dangerous chemicals in it because the motor of your boat will leak, and finally it will create a really big sonorous pollution to which all the marine species are very sensitive. On top of this, we can think about the fact that filling bottles with air requires a lot of energy. We all know that energy does not appear magically from nowhere and that producing it is very hard and destroys our planet. All of these elements are negative impacts made by the diving industry.
You can also add to all of these negative things the fact that divers as strange as it could seem are not respectful with the environment they are in, even if most of them are passionned. While underwater, they will deteriorate everything, for example by touching fragile corals or other very weak species. They will do it maybe not on purpose, but they will do it.
Even if scuba diving has a lot of negative impacts on our world, for me it also has some positive ones.
By scuba diving, people are allowed to stay a very long time underwater. A time that even the best apneist in the world couldn’t handle. This allows us to discover this mysterious world, and learn a lot of very interesting things about it, that make us understand how our world works a little bit better. We can also admire how beautiful nature is, and how wonderful ecosystems she can create.
Our oceans and seas are the less studied, discovered and searched places on Earth. That makes them very interesting for curious people. Diving is a way to study this environment and learn a huge quantity of new knowledge about it.
Scuba Diving is incredible but people need to practice it in a very respectful way for the underwater ecosystems.
To make things a bit better, we could say that apnea is better than scuba diving in many ways except the fact that It doesn’t allow you to stay longer underwater, and dive deeper. It could be considered as better because you won’t need any type of energy to fill bottles with air. Unfortunately it is not accessible to everyone, because you will need a lot of physical capabilities to be able to enjoy it and spend a satisfying amount of time underwater. You can swim easily, that means that you can access a lot of diving spots that are further away without taking a boat. Apnea really allows you to move underwater as you want and it gives you better sensations but it is a bit more dangerous.
Apnea could be a solution to scuba diving for people who have the capabilities to hold their breath long enough and that are not scared of holding their life inside their lungs.
Thank you for reading, this was just a thought about some of the impacts of the diving industry and what kind of solutions we can try to figure out.
Lucas Vahlas' Blog 