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Apathy is our greatest enemy. While, on a literal level, technology has allowed people to be more tuned in to each other than ever, we’ve also grown dispassionate and complacent. It’s hard not to be jaded; for years now, we’ve been barraged with information about the many ways the world is burning, all while we’re trying to go about our day-to-day lives. How many of us have scrolled past alarming infographics about ocean pollution or widespread extinctions without a second thought? Statistics have become mere numbers on a screen rather than absorbable insights about our material reality, and our collective relationship with the environment feels more distant than ever.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Marine conservationist Ajay Sawant has made it his mission to rebuild our relationship with the ocean. As the founder of Generation Artivism, an organisation that encourages environmental advocacy through art, the President of the youth-led ocean conservation non-profit ThinkOcean Society, and an ambassador for High Seas India with several accolades under his belt, Ajay is one of India’s leading young ocean activists. His approach to activism centres storytelling, “I work at the intersection of ocean conservation, policy advocacy, communication, and what I like to call 'emotional ecology'— the deep personal and cultural ties that bind us to the sea,” he explains.
“My work is both rooted and radical. Rooted in a childhood that taught me to pay attention, and radical in its belief that transformation begins in memory, identity, and feeling. Marine conservation isn’t just about saving the ocean. It’s about remembering the ways we once belonged to it, and daring to belong again.”
Ajay Sawant
Meet Ajay Sawant
Ajay’s passion for the ocean grew out of his childhood experience of playing by the Arabian Sea in Mumbai. He recalled fond memories of walking along the shore, picking up shells, building castles for tiny crabs, and swimming, feeling free by the water. However, in just a few short years, Ajay watched his place of solace transform, with seashells and crabs replaced by broken plastic and pollution. The grief of the decay was “quietly devastating” for Ajay, “like watching someone you love slowly disappear and not knowing how to stop it.”
Environmental deterioration also impacted his health, as he said he was a child of monsoons and medication, plagued with allergies that left him constantly sneezing, wheezing, and sitting out sports. His journey as a marine conservationist was then born out of the realisatiown that he and the ocean shared the same struggles. “I couldn’t breathe freely, and in time, I noticed neither could the ocean," says Ajay. "The pollution that clogged my lungs also choked the sea. My healing and hers were not separate stories after all.” So Ajay started writing stories, creating art, and sparking conversations, first out of frustration, then out of hope, all to help others understand the ocean as he did, not as scenery, but as a form of inheritance.”
“That’s what truly piqued my interest in marine conservation, not just the plastic or the statistics, but the quiet, almost personal sense of betrayal. And the deeper realisation that perhaps we treat the Earth as disposable because we treat our own pain the same way.”
Ajay Sawant
Redefining Our Relationship With The Ocean
Far too many of us view the ocean as disconnected from our lives. It’s a holiday destination, an endless stretch of blue so vast it seems invulnerable and impersonal. But, in actuality, the ocean is integral to every part of us; to life itself. After all, billionaires scour the universe for water in attempts to escape climate disaster and recreate the life it has brought us here. The ocean is the backbone of all creation and civilisation, and it’s about time we treat it as such.
It’s embedded in our daily experiences. As summers grow unbearably hot, and natural disasters strike at more frequent, unpredictable intervals, the ocean offers us solutions. Ajay describes the ocean as “the planet’s greatest climate stabiliser", explaining that, it absorbs over 90% of excess heat from global warming and captures around a third of the carbon dioxide we emit. However, a lack of knowledge leads us to treat the ocean like "scenery instead of a central character” in climate reform.
“But the ocean begins much closer, in breath, in blood, in memory. It touches us long before we touch it. Every second breath we take is given to us by the ocean. Which means we are already connected; intimately and irreversibly.”
Ajay Sawant
Our feeling of distance from the ocean prevents us from understanding the bilateral nature of our relationship with it. “We forget how easily the ocean is reached by habits,” Ajay says, citing how everything that enters a sink, a sewer, a storm drain, eventually makes its way to the sea. From the toothpaste you spit into the sink to the disposable plastic you haphazardly toss aside, the myth of distance is what keeps people from realising the ocean is not just a place, it is part of our daily rituals. The belief that marine conservation is only pertinent to policymakers and scientists could not be more wrong. Ajay notes that, “If you eat seafood, drink water, or have ever been affected by flooding, environmental justice is already your issue.” Caring and evaluating individual impacts is an important aspect of conservation. "Conservation does not live in institutions," Ajay says. "It lives in choices. It lives in language. It begins when someone decides to name the ocean not as a resource, but as relative.”
Acknowledging both our collective and personal impacts is crucial in understanding what is actually happening to our oceans. “We often lose most when we lose what we never knew to look for," adds Ajay. The loss of marine species and destruction of coral reefs is happening under the public’s noses. Sure, you may feel a pang in your heart when the news cites a statistic about the ocean’s grave losses, but true connection is contingent on empathy; on understanding the ocean beyond its capacity as a resource.
“Ocean literacy must move beyond data points. It must become cultural, emotional, remembered.”
Ajay Sawant for Homegrown
Past Meets Future: Employing Memory To Find Solutions
According to Ajay, who’s still in his early 20s himself, engaging the readily passionate, forward-thinking youth is a great first step forward. Young people arrive in movements with a clarity untouched by decades of compromise, whereas older generations have succumbed to the conviction that there is nothing they can do to change the course of the environmental crisis. "Young people don’t enter with rehearsed slogans; they arrive with raw truth and a deep sense of urgency, because they will live longest with the consequences of today’s decisions.”
Activists like Ajay are moved by desperation to secure a better, more just future. The youth are often brushed aside for being excitable or overly optimistic, but, as Ajay says, this energy is “...often born from a need to make sense of the world they are inheriting.” Courage and urgency propel us forward, and luckily, young people have both in abundance.
“Those who inherit the future deserve a seat in shaping it, not later, but now, while the world is still soft enough to change. Young people do not carry the weight of 'how things have always been.' They carry the courage to ask how things could be. And that courage changes everything.”
Ajay Sawant for Homegrown
However, as we look to the future, we also must examine what we have done right in the past. Indigenous communities across India have dedicated themselves to conserving the environment for generations. Their cultural practices are interwoven with the preservation of marine ecosystems.
When I asked him about the connection between culture and conservation, Ajay offered several age-old Indian traditions as examples of how the two intersect. Naarali Purnima, a day during which fishermen offer coconuts to the sea before the monsoon season, offers the ocean a period of rest to let marine life regenerate. “The Koli community in Maharashtra follows lunar cycles to avoid fishing during breeding seasons. In Odisha, communities celebrate the Olive Ridley turtles as sacred guests. In West Bengal, mangrove worship honours ecosystems that protect against storms and rising seas. These were never just ‘cultural’ practices. They were conservation, wrapped in everyday life,” he explains.
Our indigenous knowledge systems were built around sustainability because those communities felt connected with the natural world. They respected it, treated it as a friend rather than a resource to be exploited. Today, as our oceans overflow and marine life suffers, we no longer have the option to look away. Instead, we have to think back to our fond memories by the sea and nurture the connection that is already there, albeit neglected.
“Storytelling is about bringing that memory back, not to live in the past, but to help us build a better future. So yes, some might think environmental justice doesn’t matter to them. But the ocean doesn’t check your job or where you live before it floods, or when fish disappear. The sooner we reconnect culture with conservation, the better chance we have at protecting both.”
Ajay Sawant for Homegrown
It’s easy to cheer activists like Ajay Sawant on from the sidelines. It’s far more noble to let their actions incite your own.
Learn how to get involved with ThinkOcean Society here.
Learn more about Generation Artivism here.
Learn more about the High Seas Alliance here.
Follow Ajay Sawant here.
If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:
'The Understory' Is Reimagining The Future Of Conservation Through Indigenous Knowledge
Through Ritual, Research, & Design, Kaanchi Chopra Tends To A Planet In Crisis
Saved By A Curse: This Documentary Shows Us Why The Chambal River Remains Pristine
