Diving opens doors for disabled

May 19, 2024 By Eric Douglas

Throughout my diving and writing career, I’ve written hundreds of magazine articles, newspaper stories, books and now digital essays. I can say without any doubt that I’ve written well over a million words on the ocean, diving, adventure and the environment.

Below you’ll find links to some of the more recent essays about the ocean I’ve written on Substack. If you aren’t a subscriber there, I highly recommend it. For me and others. There are a lot of great writers using the platform to talk about a wide range of topics.

One of my books, though, is probably one of the most amazing stories I’ve written and it is a work of nonfiction.

My friend Leo Morales lives in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Fifteen years or so ago, he discovered he had cancer. It was in his hip and he had to have his entire leg amputated to get rid of the cancer.

Depressed and struggling, a friend suggested he try diving as a form of physical therapy. He did and he hated it. But his friend convinced him to try again. At that point, Leo never looked back.

Leo is a dive instructor. He is also a cave diving instructor as well as a technical diver. That means he can go places and do things most divers never imagine doing. And he does it all with one leg. Leo also travels the world as a motivational speaker.

In 2018, we worked together to publish a book about his life called Dive-Abled: The Leo Morales Story. Check it out. The ebook is on sale, too.

Semi-related, I also spent some time working with Jim Elliot, the founder of Diveheart, helping him and his crew develop the training program he uses around the world to teach dive instructors to work with the disabled. He does amazing work and the bravery and excitement from people who use wheelchairs and then are weightless in the water is awe-inspiring to see. It puts my own challenges in perspective.

It just goes to show that diving opens doors for people who never knew they could even walk through those doors.

Substack Essays

Some of my recent essays about the ocean and the environment.

PFAS is a major problem for the oceans — and us

April 15, 2024 By Eric Douglas

My day job is as the news director for West Virginia Public Broadcasting. Our team reports regularly on the presence of “forever chemicals” in groundwater and in rivers, streams and fish around the state — as well as federal efforts to curb them, now.

Forever chemicals are commonly referred to as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances). The most famous of these is Teflon, but there is an entire category of these substances. They were designed to give materials like paints long-lasting qualities. The chemicals take forever to break down.

The problem is these chemicals take forever to break down. Even after the paint has deteriorated or the firefighting foam has been cleaned up, to all of its other uses, the PFAS themselves are still around.

Today, these chemical contaminants have been found in remote corners of the world — in Arctic Sea ice, in fish.

“A study published in January by the American Chemical Society, a nonprofit scientific organisation, said that PFAS had been detected in the Arctic Ocean at a depth of 3,000 feet (914 meters).”

That’s from an article on Phys.org.

“From the tiny zooplankton eaten by shellfish, which are consumed by smaller fish and ultimately larger predators, PFAS lurked at every step along the way.

“A 2022 study in Australia established the transmission of PFAS from female turtles to their unborn offspring, while other research found traces in polar bear livers and birds, seals and other animals.”

Exposure to PFAS has been known to cause cancer and other illnesses along with complications for pregnancy. The problem is, there are 4,000 chemicals in the family. Many of them are proprietary so it is difficult to study them.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved to limit six of the most common forms of the chemical from 70 parts per trillion to between 4 and 10 PPT.

Just last year, a statewide survey in West Virginia found high levels of PFAS in finished drinking water being delivered to homes.

It’s been 62 years since Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring about the dangers of DDT killing birds and bees. The book met huge amounts of resistance from industry at the time, but it ultimately led to the creation of the environmental movement and for Richard Nixon to ban DDT, sign the EPA and the clean water and air acts into law. That all happened between 1970 and 1972.

The first Earth Day was April 22, 1972 and it grew out of the environmental movement of the time as well. Today, kids are taught in schools to protect the environment and Earth Day is something they expect to discuss every spring.

As we approach the 52nd anniversary of the first day, it makes me wonder if PFAS chemicals are our new DDT. There isn’t as clear of a connection between problems with PFAS as there was with DDT — so far. But its pure pervasiveness and resistance to degradation once it is in nature makes it just as concerning.

Podcast appearance and a special price to keep you warm!

January 19, 2024 By Eric Douglas

If you’re like me, you’re burrowing in and trying to stay warm right now. Much of North America is dealing with snow and ice.

But I have two things I want to tell you about and hopefully the second one will keep you warm.

I was asked to be a guest on the Off Gassing Scuba Podcast this week. It was a fun interview and I had a great time speaking with Nick Hogle about my early diving career and making diving writing believable. Nick is an American but is currently based in Malaysia so it made time zones interesting. He caught me first thing in the morning, but at the end of his day.

Check it out!

Let me know what surprised you most about my early career. I guarantee I never expected to end up where I am today.

Tales from Withrow Key

Through the end of the month, my short story collection Tales from Withrow Key is on sale for just $0.99. It includes eight stories set on a fictional island in the Florida Keys. As I wrote these, I imagined them being television shows and I still believe Withrow Key would be a great serial program for a streaming service. Let me know what you think.

This book happens to be in “wide” distribution so you can pick up the ebook on Kindle, Barnes and Noble and Apple Books — probably a couple others as well.

Kindle

Apple Books

Barnes and Noble

Using stories about the ocean as teaching opportunities

December 29, 2023 By Eric Douglas

(This week’s substack article is below. Follow this link for previous essays.)

I’ve been fortunate to have a career that has involved telling stories and working around the ocean. I’ve gotten to write about the things I’ve seen above and below the waves.

One of my goals when I started writing novels was to expose readers to the magic of the ocean. Coming from the recreational dive industry, I hoped divers would enjoy my books so I attempted to make the diving as realistic as possible.

But, I have written with nondivers in mind as well. I want those readers to be excited about my stories. I want some of them to decide to learn to scuba dive and explore the ocean. And I want everyone to learn a few things about the ocean itself.

Recently, I read an essay called Why We Need New Stories About the Ocean: Natalie Hart on the Urgency of Literature That Brings the Ocean into the Climate Story

One thing Hart discussed was the difference between literature about the climate versus the ocean. With climate-based stories, the reader is likely predisposed to have an interest in the overall topic. But with the ocean, it is typically just a setting for a love story, adventure story or even a story of personal reflection like a memoir.

“People can come to books that feature the sea, with no motivation to understand the ocean at all, but they can learn or feel something about the sea through the process of reading. And perhaps these people that we don’t normally reach are the most important of all.”

I don’t write science fiction, but I’ve always understood the genre as taking what is known and extrapolating it into the future. Think about concepts like Warp Speed and digital tablets from Star Trek or Isaac Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics.

With my books, there is always something readers can take away when it comes to oceans, water, the environment, or reef systems.

An example of that is the 10th novel in the Mike Scott series. It’s all about the shortage of fresh water and the international upheaval that causes.

Recently I saw a story that drought conditions and sea level rise had allowed more salt water intrusion into the Mississippi River causing problems for municipal water supply systems. So many things I extrapolated in Water Crisis are coming true and causing problems.

There are times, as a fiction writer, I question whether I am doing any good. I want to influence people to love and respect the ocean while being in awe of everything we don’t know about it. But it’s easy to get frustrated and wonder if anyone is listening.

And then I shake that feeling off and go back to writing. I continue to tell my fiction stories with truth as the background to help people learn whether they want to or not.

Read my latest essay on Substack

August 17, 2023 By Eric Douglas

I’ve started a new weekly outreach on Substack. This platform is popular with journalists and other writers discussing a number of topics.

Give me a follow if you are interested in stories about writing, diving and whatever else comes along.

Check out my latest post on the tragedy of the dive boat Conception

The dive boat Conception tragedy and learning lessons

I was in Houston a little more than four years ago when I heard about the Conception dive boat tragedy. Thirty-four lives were lost that day. I think about every diver heard that story with a sinking feeling in their stomachs, imagining that it could be them. It has been termed the deadliest maritime disaster in U.S. history.

Even if they’ve never taken a liveaboard dive trip, nearly every diver has spent time on dive boats often out of sight with land. There are times you aren’t sure exactly which way land is. And that inspires thoughts of worry — even if just for a moment thinking “if this boat sinks, what do I do.”