Collaborations

Environmental and creative collaborations through my work as Chapter Manager for Surfrider Pacific Rim

Surfrider Pacific Rim x We Are Travel Girls

Travelling can open us up in fundamental ways; we expand our perspectives to understand different ways of life, to appreciate new landscapes, and overall gain a new vision which can inspire how we act upon the planet. What can be the most challenging about travel is mitigating our environmental impact, and sticking to the environmental practices we cultivate at home while we’re abroad. Included in this is our consumptive behaviours, as there’s a lot more opportunity to use single-use plastics.

Surfrider Pacific Rim x Immersion Surf Magazine x Cristina Gareau

Remote clean ups can be some of the best adventures of our work, but also have great capacity to provoke one’s grief for the state of our planet, which we all deal with on these trips at one point or another. At the end of our adventure, we leave our sites restored, the token of our work being our skin that has collected day’s worth of hot salt and earth, a soul full from being disconnected to technology and modernity, as well as another dimension added to one’s ecological lens for understanding the world and our influence upon it.

Surfrider Pacific Rim x Reef Canada x Oiu Surf

The beach is a space that gives us such great happiness in life, and this should be remembered wherever we are. Everything we do has an impact on our beaches, oceans, and every other environment on this planet. Beaches are particularly vulnerable ecosystems as they are threatened by plastic pollution, litter, spills, over development and encroaching tides due to rising sea levels. From the time we wake up to the time we go to bed, it is essential that we think of the beach and our wider environment as our actions and attitudes have an incredible amount of power in preserving, protecting and restoring our planet.

Surfrider Pacific Rim x Stay Wild Magazine

There is a constant push and pull that we experience on earth, an ebb and flow, like the ocean that is continually inhaling and exhaling with the course of its tide. Balancing this push and pull in life is always one of our greatest endeavors, and I believe one these balancing acts is represented in the way we understand, relate to and operate in our environment. On the one hand, it is essential we learn the hardships our planet faces, the extinction of species, loss of coral, landscapes excavated, coasts eroded. In dealing with these circumstances, it is healthy to grieve.