The Dive Evangelist

I was half asleep this afternoon on the ride "home" and only barely noticed the atrocity of a multi-million dollar façade of the resort golf course next door. In that dreamy notice an image popped into my head and I realized at once why I find the thing an atrocity and I hope that a hurricane knocks it down. Soon.

The other day as we were breaking down our dive gear a dog came wandering by. Dogs are all over the place, not just in Mexico, but in most developing areas. They’ve been with us since the stone ages, why should now be any different?

This semi-feral weimaraner mutt ambled up to us strangers with friendly eyes and a happily wagging tail. Below the pup-like glee was also a haggard, emaciated look. He held his right forepaw off the ground as he walked to avoid the pain the ugly, purple infection there was surely giving him.

Just a dog.

We have the luxury in much of the US to consider dogs beloved family pets. We can afford fancy-pants food for them and vets’ bills. But in developing nations where food for your family is the struggle, what is a dog but just a dog?

That dog’s happy look at just being petted a bit and being told what a good dog he is flashed into my head as if the stone façade was a movie screen. The money spent on that ugly neo-modernist piece of crap isn’t going to improve the quality of living for the local Mexicans and Mayans. The revenue generated by the hotels up and down this stretch of paradise mostly goes offshore to multinational corporations who could barely give a whit about the local help as other than The Help.

And as long as the tourism industry continues to stamp on the necks of local populations mercilessly, they will stay too poor to be able to consider the feral animal populations as anything other than just dogs.

As divers we have a special connection with the growing eco-tourism movement as the environment our sport is dependent upon is so ecologically sensitive. But among the talk of global warming, dying reefs, dwindling fresh water, and other such dramatic effects, we need also to remember our impact on the populations where we travel.

The locals who are a meal away from hunger, the forests beyond the resort gates, littered with broken down auto parts, the dogs who, each and every one, deserve a human who loves them and lets them sleep on the bed instead of dying of gangrene in the jungle… they are all part of the "eco," too.