Regaining Paradise
Added to website: 08 February 2004
Omar Khayyam wrote: ‘Drink! For you know not whence you came, nor why:/ Drink! For you know not why you go, nor where’. Yet for Peter Raines CBiol FIBiol, founder and man-aging director of Coral Cay Conservation, plenty of beer suggested where he should go, and why. It was after a long night in a pub in the mid-1980s with other diving enthusiasts that the idea of going to a salubrious, tropical clime to undertake ‘reef survey work … at someone else’s expense’ was hatched.
What unfolded over several years of tropical locations, much soul-searching, serendipity and dedicated hard work was his marvelous organisation, CCC. Its purpose is to ‘provide resources to help sustain livelihoods and alleviate poverty through the protection, restoration and management of coral reefs and tropical rainforests’. That teams of volunteers are pre-pared to fork out several hundred pounds and more to be worked into the ground six days a week to collect scientific data for these programmes is testimony to the organisation’s excellent work and the invaluable experience it imparts.
Biobits- May 2003 Issue
To read the full article visit: www.iob.org/
