From ocean plastic to local action: How unscripted moments fuel Guadalajara’s environmental movement
José Luis Zambrano Flores has pulled plastic six-pack rings off the necks of seabirds. He has freed sea turtles tangled in fishing nets. In the open ocean, the professional diver from Tabasco was horrified to see plastic bags with fish swimming inside them, trapped.
Zambrano wasn’t a scheduled speaker at Sunday’s Green Action Week workshop in Parque La Calma; he didn’t even know the organizers. He had simply shown up to learn about plastic packaging. But as he stood to share what he’d witnessed beneath the waves – “mountains of plastic, floating islands of waste” – the afternoon transformed from a scheduled workshop into something rawer and more urgent.