Earth Day isn’t really about solving everything. It’s about not ignoring it.

“The third culture is not a nationality. It is a shared experience.”

A lot of environmental problems are easy to ignore. Not because people don’t care, but because they’re not directly visible in everyday life. I’m on a mission to change that.

First used by Ruth Useem, this term describes people who grow up outside of their parents’ home country and end up forming a kind of “third culture” that isn’t exactly one place or another.

When people ask where I’m from, I never know how to answer it quickly. I was born in London, my parents are Swedish, and I’ve gone to American schools in different countries. None of those things feel wrong, but none of them fully explain it either.

On February 7th, I joined an underwater and shoreline clean-up with the Emirates Diving Association at D-Marin Marsa Al Arab. I went into it thinking I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.

But seeing it collected in one place was something completely different.

When you first look at the beaches on Palm Jumeirah, they seem clean. There’s no obvious trash piles, nothing dramatic, nothing that makes you stop and think something is wrong. It’s the kind of place where everything looks taken care of.

And for a while, that’s what I thought too.

But then I started paying closer attention.

When people think about plastic pollution, they usually picture the obvious: bottles in the ocean, trash on beaches, bags floating aimlessly everywhere. But the bigger problem isn’t what we can see… it’s what we can’t.

When people think about motorsport, they usually think about speed. What you don’t see as much is everything happening around the track to make those moments possible.