Culture

Meet Mabon - the 8 year old environmental activist

Team Ecohustler
23rd February 2021
3 min read

This stunningly stark north welsh coast has an unexpected guardian

An 8 year old boy residing on the stunningly stark north welsh coast.

Mabon works with his mum to keep the welsh beaches clean, spending hours each week, scouring the beaches of plastic washed up on the sand.

There have been a million films about the effects of plastic on our oceans and the surrounding environmental impact. But we have a different story to tell now. We now need to be thinking about our future generations, who will grow up educated, passionate and enthused by the idea of climate and social change. These future adults will grow to live in a world we have left them, with the same plastic carrier bags we threw into the ocean, floating past as they swim in the ocean in 50 years time.

https://youtu.be/HAYLJuPootM

This story is more powerful if told by the children who deal with this waste, who have taken the burden of mankind's glutton for plastic products and understand their responsibility to follow a new more sustainable path.

We feel Mabon’s is a very special story, one that many people will sit up and pay attention to. So Friction Collective wanted to tell Mabon’s story from his perspective. We want to listen to his thoughts about the world he lives in, the beaches, the litter, the nets and things he would say to the world that has left him this mess to deal with.

Our world has a serious ocean plastics problem.

There are now a higher number of plastics in the ocean than the number of fish.

This story is one best told by the children who deal with this waste and who have taken on the burden of mankind's glutton for plastic products. Mabon is the perfect example of this wonderful mindset, someone who spends time cleaning his favourite beaches, rather than just being able to sit and play in the sand like most children would. Mabon and his mum, Laura, a wild-swimmer, take their time to methodically clean the beach and name and shame the brands that produce the single use plastic in the first place.