The deck of the ship Santa María Manuela, as part of the ‘Escala a Castelló’ event, is the stage chosen by the ‘Dialogues without borders’ cycle organized by the Rototom Sunsplash festival and its Cultural Association Exodus, for its fifth debate of the season, ‘Objective 14: Dialoguing with the sea’.

A plea in defense of the oceans which will bring together Mª Ángeles FernándezProfessor of Financial Economics at the Universitat Jaume I of Castelló and director of the Master’s Degree in Sustainability and CSR; and to Francisco TornerD. in Biological Oceanography from the Universitat de València.

Moderated by Ramón Olivares, director of Castellón Plaza, and with free access, will be held on Friday, April 5, at 18.30 pm at the Muelle de Levante of the port of Grau.

“We return to the essence of the cycle: different themes, in different spaces and that are part of the narrative, and the deck of this vintage ship, wrapped by an event of the magnitude of ‘Escala a Castelló’, it is,” explained from the organization. The Santa Maria Manuela was built in Lisbon in 1937 and until the end of the 1980s was dedicated to cod fishing in the Newfoundland and Greenland seas.

“We have the challenge of raising awareness at a time of maximum urgency to reverse a drift, to avoid the points of no return of the seas and marine ecosystems. The Mediterranean is a threatened sea and we want to show our commitment to it from here, on its very shore”, they add from Exodus.

The experts who will lead the debate agree: “The sea gives us life, I don’t know what we are doing”, says Mª Ángeles Fernández in allusion to its threats, among which plastic pollution and acidification stand out, endangering its life chain, its ecosystems. “It is an environment that is as seemingly inaccessible and uncontrollable as it is fundamental to human existence,” says Francisco Torner. Both defend the need to “look at the sea again, because the knowledge we have of it is quite primary and this affects the little care and lack of value we give it”. “And the sea has a value; an economic, social and environmental value,” says Fernandez.

However, in the face of this challenging scenario, “the limits of the sea can still be reversed if the right measures are taken, but we are on the verge of no return,” warns Mª Ángeles Fernández. These measures include the so-called blue economy, which promotes economic growth from a development model based on the preservation of marine ecosystems and environmental sustainability, and the mobilization of resources and investments that should lead the “sustainable finance for which Europe is already betting” and by attracting, says this expert, private financing aimed at conserving the oceans.

For his part, Francisco Torner advocates the transversality of knowledge and the involvement of the different economic sectors in this collective defense of the sea. “It is necessary to organize all the scientific knowledge and make it travel to all the actors involved: from fishermen to active tourism personnel, that it reaches the entire civil structure related to the sea, and above all to governments, so that they make decisions based on that scientific knowledge, and thus be able to prevent what may come to us.”

After inaugurating the series last December at the Llotja del Cànem in Castelló with a debate on human rights, ‘Dialogues without Borders’ made the leap to Valencia for the first time on January 26 to share a debate on religions and peace in the Aula Magna of the La Nau Cultural Center. Democracy in the face of the check of ‘technological despotism’ focused in February the third incursion of the itinerant cycle, which in March fixed its gaze on the triangle ‘woman-equality-art’ taking as a reference the figure of Frida Kahlo on the 70th anniversary of her death.

The videos of the previous sessions of the ‘Dialogues without Borders’ series can be viewed at the following LINK of the Exodus YouTube channel.