Presha Soogrim – the face of making a change to the world
I believe I have always been a conservationist at heart and loving all animals came naturally to me at a young age, seeing snakes and frogs elicited feelings of fascination rather than disgust or fear. After school, I did the sensible thing and spent two years studying business science; as hard as I tried I couldn’t picture myself being in the corporate world so I made the brave and unpopular decision to follow my passion and study nature conservation. Trading power suits for hiking boots was the best decision I have ever made! Being in nature, I feel most myself, most complete and is a reminder that we do not exist outside of nature- we are nature ourselves. So when our natural world is under attack from greed and consumerism, we must stand up in defence of nature.
I run an initiative called KZN Beach Clean Up, through which we have removed over 20 tons of waste off our coastline. Every month at our clean-ups, I am so inspired by the hundreds of volunteers who give up their Saturday mornings to help clean our beaches.
I am currently an environmental educator at the South African Association for Marine Biological Research where I get to share my love for the oceans with others every day, share the challenges the oceans face and empower others to make individual actions against pollution, climate change and over consumption.
The current environmental crises can be so overwhelming, according to a recent report released in May- over 1 million species are at risk of immediate extinction due to our actions.
Its easy to blame “the bad guy” for the problems of the world, but I believe in the power of individual action which ultimately makes the biggest differences, there are 7 billion of us on this earth after all.
