Founder Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop discusses Ocean Education with Finisterre
You know it’s going to be a certain kind of expedition when someone you’ve only known for five minutes, takes their gloves off at forty below and rubs your snoticled (a technical term to describe the encrusting snot icicle that occurs in the polar regions) nose to melt the incipient frostbite. There are many first encounters that lead people to have a lifelong working relationship with the ocean, rock-pooling as an eight year-old, a Cousteau documentary, the guilt of plastic-ridden coasts, but this was mine. I was standing on the ocean, two metres of sea ice separating me from a black frigid unknown beneath. We were stationed at the Catlin Arctic Survey Ice Base, a temporary science station set up off Ellef Ringnes Island along the northern edge of the Canadian Arctic archipelago.
"Then I remember we are a narrative species, built on the stories that we tell and hear, not the numbers, our world view is forged through encounters, not graphs. I am an educator by trade and was asked to build an education legacy to the work that had been done on the Catlin Arctic Survey. 'No problem,' I said to the charming man who offered me the contract, only to turn to the national curriculum framework to find that it mentioned the ocean a total of zero times", iterates our founder, Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop in a heartfelt article on Finisterre UK's Broadcast blog.
With over 10 years of work on advocating ocean literacy, Jamie has created many flagship education programmes through Encounter Edu (previously Digital Explorer) and empowered millions of students worldwide with the skills to tackle 21st-century issues.
Finisterre UK is a sustainable apparel and lifestyle company for ocean lovers. The company started making purely sustainable products for surfers over a decade ago. It is now one of the UK's most end-to-end ethical stores whose products have journeyed with us to the Arctic, climbed mountains and swam in countless seas worldwide.