(upbeat music)
(applauding)
Kia ora te whanau (Māori introduction)
- If we protect the realm of the land and the sea,
the people will be sustained.
I'm Camden Howitt and I am here to tell you a love story.
First a little bit about where I came from.
I grew up on Ōtautahi, Christchurch.
And now I live in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland.
(laughs)
And I have a vision
and I want to share that vision with you.
I have a vision for beautiful beaches.
Imagine beaches around Altura in New Zealand,
around the Pacific, around the world
with no plastics on them, with no pollution on them.
(applauding)
Imagine healthy waters,
waters we can wade through,
waters we can swim in, waters we can take our kids to
and waters we can drink from
around Aotearoa and the world.
And imagine inspired people everywhere
that love the place they live in,
that want to protect that place they love.
This is my vision.
The amazing ocean explorer and filmmaker,
Jacques Cousteau once said, people protect what they love.
And that's why this is a love story,
because if we don't have love, we don't have protection.
I love our coastlines, I love our ocean.
I've spent my entire life as a New Zealander
surrounded by the sea.
We have 15,000 kilometers of coast,
the 11th longest coastline in the world.
We can't be more than 120 kilometers from it.
We harvest from it,
we play in it.
Our economy depends upon it, and we love it.
But we need to protect it.
I traveled and when I was in Puerto Escondido in Mexico,
surfing wave that I should not have been surfing,
I was hit in the face by a nappy.
I returned to the shore,
found a toilet seat on a beach
amongst the plethora of rubbish that I found
and was disgusted by what this place could be
but in love with the place at the same time.
This is a story of love, but a story of pain, as well.
I traveled further
and saw what our world could be, the bad that it could be,
not just for the environment, but for human health.
Burning plastics creates dioxins, the same active agent
that was used in Agent Orange.
It's also the animals, our brothers on earth
that live there that are suffering from the same fate,
those things we love.
And I came back to New Zealand full of hope.
We are clean and green, we are 100% pure, aren't we?
Aotearoa
we had exactly the same problems.
We're one of the highest consumers
of waste per capita in the world.
Our streets are littered, our drains flow to the sea.
Our birds are filling up with plastic.
I've seen nest of black back gulls on Rangitoto Island
in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf, made out of plastic.
So what did I do?
I went and worked in advertising,
(laughing)
selling people things they didn't want.
And I really, really, really struggled with it.
I was not fulfilled.
I had no purpose.
And I lacked that purpose.
I tried my best, I wrote sustainability policies,
I helped people recycle,
I put up signs beside the light switches saying
how much they were costing the business
and how much carbon they were burning
if they left the light switches on overnight.
But I was working in advertising.
(laughing)
But it didn't change until one day a friend of mine
that I was in Mexico with, Sam, came home
and he didn't have any money left
so he lived on my couch.
And we planned some stuff, some fun events.
And we ended up in Tonga in the Ha'apai Islands.
We cleaned up eight shipping containers worth of rubbish
from beaches that had never, ever been cleaned before,
an island group that had never had rubbish removed.
And following that,
I had an experience which changed my life.
I was underwater with a humpback whale
and I decided I wouldn't fly back home
to my job in advertising
and I would quit to protect these places that I love.
And now that's what I do.
We pick up rubbish.
We decided to start small
but if you pick up rubbish,
all you'll ever do is pick up rubbish.
So we scaled it up, we got more people involved.
We decided that actually you'd need to be the fence
at the top of the cliff,
rather than the ambulance at the bottom.
Education, behavior change,
societal change, attitude change, everything,
to solve this problem before it begins.
And to clean up our coastlines we looked upstream.
We had started cleaning up our rivers
because you need to do both.
And now, 10 years on, we've picked up 1.4 million liters
of rubbish from our coastlines,
35 shipping containers full.
(applauding)
We planted 60,000 trees to restore our waterways.
And educated nearly 200,000 people about this issue.
But it's not enough.
We need to scale this up.
We need to make it systemic.
We need to make it across our entire community.
We need to prove this problem once and for all
and how the solutions are going to work.
So that's why I'm here.
We need to scale this up around the Pacific,
around New Zealand, and do everything we can
to solve this issue.
I want to harness the power of technology for good.
And I want to harness the power of love for even better.
So thank you so much.
I look forward to this journey and having you with me.
(applauding)
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