The Great Barrier Reef
The Great Barrier Reef, one of the 7 natural wonders of the world. A spectacular environment that will change your perspective of the earth, with all of its varieties of shapes and colours and the enormous amount of wildlife living in this amazing ecosystem. To think this is all falling to its knees thanks to the ignorance of the human race.
The Australian Government is allowing large areas of world heritage waters, to be made into 4 mega ports. These ports will be horrible to the reefs with oil spilling throughout them, damaging the corals and wildlife. Even without the ports, at the current rate of destruction, the reef will eventually be fully bleached and will lose all of it's amazing colours. Since 1985 the number of reefs has declined by 50%. This will be terrible for both the wildlife, corals and also the people whose livelihoods depend upon it's survival. Sixty-nine thousand jobs are supported here and it has a $6 billion tourism industry. If the government continues along this path Australia will lose billions of dollars. How devastating will it be if the 7 natural wonders of the world become six just because the people entrusted to take care of it failed. The Great Barrier Reef houses 10% of the world’s fish species and 6 of the 7 species of marine turtles in the world. As time goes by these numbers will be decrease rapidly and we're not doing enough to stop it.
As Australians, we need to step up to stop this madness. Millions of marine animals are dying each year at the hands of our insatiable appetite for industrial development. As it's protector, we have the responsibility of caring for the largest coral reef ecosystem. This beautiful reef stretches 2, 300km along the Queensland coast. It is sought out by thousands of animals especially the migrating whales who make a beautiful show for tourists. I really don’t know why we would destroy such a beautiful part of nature. Thousands of ships each year travel through these heritage waters leaking oil and gas. After the corals absorb all of these substances, they start a process called coral bleaching which turns them mostly white or cream.
What we can do to help:
One of the best things we can do to help the reef is to conserve water. This means less runoff into the ocean and less polluted water. Another thing we could do is reduce the amount of fossil fuels we use. For example: riding your bike or walking to school instead of catching the bus or taking a car ride. And lastly, stop using plastic bags!!! These horrible plastic bags kill off millions of animals in the reef each year. Especially turtles who think they're just jellyfish. This needs to be stopped and it's extremely simple. All we need to do is bring our own bags from home, (that are not plastic) to the supermarket. Together we can stop the death of the World's largest coral reef and get it back to the great natural wonder it once was.
Reflection
English task 1: This assessment was an enjoyable but definitely challenging assessment. Through this assessment there were a range of different tasks to complete each involving quite a lot of effort. For me the most challenging part was Photoshop. Since I have not used this program before it was a completely different experience. It involved putting picture over picture and then adding text onto the images. Even though I had lessons on this, it was still a challenge but I hoped I pulled it together. It was an extremely interesting task that I hope to do again one day and perfect.
My contemporary issue was the damage done to the Great Barrier Reef in recent times. This issue was fascinating to research as I have been to the GBR before and loved my trip. Finding information was not as hard as I thought and I found multiple websites. It was an extremely exciting issue to work on.
What I loved about this assessment was when I started putting all my text together, it actually started looking like a webpage. It was a truly satisfying part of this assessment that I really enjoyed. The good thing about this was that you could add images, links, buttons slideshows and more. This really added a look of professionalism to the page and I felt really proud of it.
My time management in this project was a quite good I thought as I started 2 weeks before the due date. It got a bit tight at the end as I was hit with other assignments, but I feel I managed quite well. Personally this was challenging but also quite rewarding and I developed new skills that I know I will be able to use again soon.
Hbettsblog, last update 16 March 2017