King’s Water PhD Researcher Becca Farnum has just released her first book, an exploration of the Kuwait Dive Team’s efforts on marine conservation, environmental education, and conservation volunteerism in the Gulf.
Becca has released the book for sale in the United States in conjunction with World Water Day.
A year and a half ago, Becca was invited to the Gulf for her first visit as a guest of the Kuwait Dive Team, a volunteer organisation working to preserve and protect the marine environment of the Gulf. She was then just beginning her doctoral work at King’s. In October 2014, Becca participated in the Dive Team’s activities for a week in order to learn more about their operations and, at their request, wrote a book in English sharing their story. After hearing about the Team’s efforts to leverage their expertise in salvaging and coral reef care for international relations, Becca decided to use their ‘diving diplomacy’ activities as the basis for one of her three ethnographic case studies in her dissertation on environmental peacebuilding in the Middle East.
You can learn more about Becca’s research with the Dive Team by watching her interview on Kuwait National TV during her fieldwork in January and December 2016.
“Defending the Deep: Guardians of the Sea” is now available for order on Amazon. Though Becca has written and presented academically about the Team, this book is intended as a fun, accessible exploration of the beautiful world that resides under the sea, and the many ways we as humans can help – or hurt – that world.
On Christmas Day in 1991, the Government of Kuwait formally accepted an offer from a group of young scuba divers to help remove underwater debris left by the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait. What began as a patriotic act of post-conflict rebuilding grew into a national movement for marine conservation and environmental volunteering. This is the strory of those volunteers, young Kuwaitis dedicated to preserving and protecting the rich resources and natural beauty offered by our planet’s water. Today, the organisation holds hundreds of beach clean-ups each year, salvages thousands of tons of boats and fishing nets from Kuwait Bay, and creates a safe haven for millions of animals in the Gulf. This book invites you to take a journey with the Environmental Voluntary Foundation. It is a story of life and death, capture and rescue, wreck and restoration. It is a story meant to show you a different Middle East than you know. It is the story of the Kuwait Dive Team.
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