When we think of oceans, we often picture distant coastlines, crashing waves, and blue horizons far from our farms, our cities, our daily lives. But standing here — in the heart of inland India, among fields I’ve nurtured for over a decade . I know a different truth: the ocean begins on land.
Every time we use chemicals in our soil, they find their way into rivers. Every plastic bottle tossed on a roadside eventually meets a drain, a stream, and then the sea. Our oceans are choking not just because of offshore drilling or overfishing, but because of inland choices made every day in agriculture, in waste management, in land planning.
In my work at Sportsland, we’ve tried to reverse that tide. We compost every leaf, we harvest every drop of rain, and we grow food without poison. Not because it’s trendy, but because it’s necessary. Healthy land holds water. Clean soil filters runoff. Conscious communities create cleaner oceans whether we live beside them or miles away.
It’s time we stop treating marine degradation as a coastal problem. It’s a systems problem. It’s our problem.
To those in positions of influence — policymakers, developers, investors the responsibility is even greater. Every decision you make about land use, industrial waste, urban planning, and agricultural subsidy echoes in our oceans.
This World Ocean Day, I ask you to see the unseen connections. What you do on land doesn’t stay on land.
Protecting our oceans doesn’t start at the shore. It starts at the source — with soil, with streams, with how we treat the Earth beneath our feet.
Because in the end, there’s only one ecosystem. And one chance to get it right.
