Name: Hannah Huang
Social Justice Group: Microplastics (B)
Date of Fieldwork: January 29, 2025
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):David – Just One Ocean
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork:
On January 29th, 2025 we went on a Zoom with David Jones, who is in charge of an organization called Just One Ocean, where they focus on marine biology, and how plastics can affect ourselves and our planet. David spent 17 years in the military to pay off his university debt, where he studied nuclear physics. In the military, he had a side job where he was the head of the diving team, which got him interested in diving in the ocean, which lead him to getting interested in plastics and ocean life. In 2013, he went to Korea and listened to other presentations and decided to make his own organization called Just One Ocean. David made a film called Plastic Ocean, that is shown on Netflix.
David gave us lots of information, he taught us about measo-plastics which are microplastics that are distributed and transported in marine environments through ocean currents, wind and wave action, and biological processes. Another term that David told us about is Bioaccumulation (Food chain) which are toxins becoming higher and higher and higher the bigger the animal. Toxins magnify abnormally based on size. Bioaccumulation is harmful for the environment because it allows toxic substances like heavy metals and pesticides to build up in organisms within a food chain. These are all new terms to us, that are very useful. He had a lot of knowledge about plastic in the ocean, and he even said that plastic isn’t the worst habitat-destruction.
Did you know that in the last 10 years, we have produced more plastic than we have in the last 100 years? We have produce so many microplastics, that its impossible to clean up all of the plastic. We have produced 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic. Which is 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic. Which is 80 million blue whales, or 822,000 Eiffel towers. Because of how much plastic we have produced, there isn’t any way that we can clean it all up. All we can do is reduce the amount of plastic that we use.
Even though we have interviewed a few marine biologists and a few people who work with the ocean, he still taught us a lot about the ocean, and I think its cool that he has traveled so many places to learn more about the ocean. I found it so cool how he got inspired by other people to start his own organization. Thank you so much David and Just One Ocean for letting us interview you!
