Greetings All,
I am sorry for the length of this point but the topic is a bit far reaching.
I appreciate the interest in GUE as well as the opportunity to provide an overview of the organization. I think some of you bring up sensible points and some very nice ideas. I appreciate your interest in transparency and I agree we need to do a better job. Really there is no hidden agenda; there is merely an extreme deficit of time and resources. I appreciate that from your perspective this excuse could be considered insufficient and that it is our responsibility to provide the short of information you wish to see. I hope I don’t bore too many of you while trying to provide an outline of the organization’s organizing principles, past projects and future goals. However, reading some of the discussions about GUE makes me doubt many people have a good sense of the organization outside of their experience with our training.
One point I often encounter relates to the sense that GUE was formed exclusively as a dive training organization; some even believe this was to provide some sort of nefarious marketing benefit. Ironically training was not even part of the early GUE concept. We intended the organization to be principally involved in research and exploration, acting globally as a bridge between divers and scientists; in short as a way to harness the energy of passionate advocates to affect positive change upon the aquatic realm.
However, it quickly became apparent in GUE as it has in the WKPP that we needed a firm, capable and extensive training foundation to develop our broader goals. This reality together with our perception of declining industry standards encouraged an early focus on robust diver training programs. However, the focus on training did not sway our other passion as we continued developing our research and conservation initiatives. For example, we have been heavily involved in water quality/conservation meetings, testified in court during sensitive environmental land use cases, exhibit regularly (for more than ten years) at environmental awareness events, organize and attend town hall meetings to promote environmental responsibility, created a water conservation video (distributed free to schools to be used as part of a water conservation awareness curriculum) and initiated conservation programs (beach cleanup initiatives, presentations to schools etc.) This is only a very quick overview of our activities but we have been consistent with more than a decade developing our foundation and our skill set with respect to both diver training and conservation initiatives.
Regarding our early research and conservation initiatives, we decided to focus much of our initial energy within areas we have a natural expertise. This decision was partly economical (self-funding, limited time/resources) and partly practical (we have significant personal and academic expertise with ground water resources). Therefore, we decided to build our conservation framework using ground water resource protection (such as our work in Wakulla) as a skeletal framework. It would be impractical to properly detail the science, conservation and public outreach associated with our work over the last decade. Many thousands of hours have been dedicated to these efforts and we have received numerous awards from local and federal groups and governments over the years. Unfortunately many people struggle to see the broad relevance to this research. However, this work is extremely relevant as ground water is perhaps our most critical resource; called the next oil by many experts due to its critical importance as well as the nearly certain anxiety that will arise as demand outstrips supply. Consider that the vast majority of the planet’s drinking water is in the form of ground water. Moreover, contamination of ground water supplies affects local and remote ecosystems as water travels down gradient eventually discharging in the ocean. Understanding how this ground water flows and how it interacts with surface water is a key ingredient toward establishing effective ground water models, which could greatly support better land use decisions as well as protection, conservation and remediation programs. This is not a Florida issue; it is a global issue of wide ranging significance. Despite this heavy ground water focus we have continued developing other programs and expanding our capacity, contacts and general expertise.
I recognize our projects to date have not been well reported; nor is there always an obvious “benefit” – say to a diver on this list. Yet, these projects are far reaching and do provide benefits from conservation and archaeology to research and exploration. For example, one member questioned our project in Norway during which we worked with the local war museum to provide video and still images as well as information about the status and safety of historical wrecks. Similarly our operations in Italy have been coordinated with the Italian ministry where we provided a detailed three-dimensional map of an ancient wreck site as well as coordinated the recovery of ancient amphora for museum study and display. Likewise GUE and our WKPP project have donated thousands of hours (estimated 300,00 since 1990). In this case the team provides an incredible wealth of data as well as practical and logistical support for a wide range of science and conservation initiatives. A huge (actually the majority) of diving in the project is not exploration diving and is not particularly fun. For example, towing large flow meters, cables, sampling tubes etc thousands of feet into the cave.
Regarding the various activities mentioned above, I am sure people vary in their desire to support these efforts. And in any case, very little GUE money is used during these projects with the vast majority of expenses covered by the participants. There is certainly no membership money being spent for personal diving or product development (as was inferred by one rumor on this list). Given our projects over the years, GUE is well positioned to organize a sustained campaign in support of our broader mission. This is particularly true as the administrative functions of the organization are now reasonably well covered. The expense of supporting dive training (creating materials, paying staff, funding quality control programs, managing overhead, programming website registration etc,) consumes the majority of our operational budget; other outreach costs such as Quest editing, printing and distribution consume most of the remaining budget. However, with these basic costs essentially covered additional funding can be targeted toward key growth projects. This is the primary reason we are beginning to engage in a more sustained effort to expand awareness of the broader goals of the organization. So, one might ask what would we do with additional revenue?
First, I should point out that our budget is quite small and there is really not much to go around. Creating a very high bar for instructors and students has, of course, limited the revenue of the organization. Therefore, GUE members that join to support our efforts have been especially critical over the years. Going forward this support also enhances our ability to develop better materials/courses and hopefully to expand more capably into areas that are consonant with our organizational purpose. As we have grown and reached a point where administrative support for diver training mostly covers its own costs we can begin to organize our plans for the future. Of course I really need to outline them in much more detail than would be appropriate here but we plan to notably expand our membership while developing a range of conservation-oriented goals.
One of these programs is something I call Project Baseline. As with most of this note I will be rather superficial (in the interest of time) but the idea is to leverage the international diving community to begin assembling a global baseline of environmental quality for aquatic environments in their region. These baseline "measurements" would be more or less sophisticated depending upon the divers or the project in question. For example, in Tallahassee we currently provide survey, image, video, water chemistry, flow and other custom data. However, other dive groups might only provide video or images etc. The resource would become a global database allowing one to measure or evaluate (depending upon the precision and type of data) the region over time. These aspects are critical for future resource protection. In fact, having rudimentary baseline data at Wakulla Springs is likely one of the single most important factors in our success at convincing the City of Tallahassee to allocate 160 million dollars toward a new, advanced wastewater treatment program. Developing a baseline measurement is critical in nearly all forms of environmental protection as well as in the legal and regulatory arenas.
We are also attempting to identify the best way to interface various GUE and DIR groups globally with particular emphasis on projects (thanks for the suggestions Keri), including mentoring and hopefully expanding to resource, expertise and even material support. You would be right to imagine this occurs informally on a very regular basis. Our initial plans to formalize this process involve a reasonable investment (in terms of time and programming) in our recent web site, which will allow us to grow social networking functions more efficiently. We are also looking to migrate our annual GUE conference (a pretty significant current expense not covered by admission fees) in this direction. Also, recent collaborative efforts with a group known as Reef Check (
About Reef Check - Saving Reefs Worldwide) are designed to expand our capacity in this regard while harnessing the energy of passionate divers worldwide (one of our organizing principles).
Lastly, I wanted to say that I always expected some level of resistance to the idea that GUE and Halcyon were not the "same thing" and I do appreciate why this is true. Maybe that is a key ingredient in the level of mistrust displayed by some. However, I encourage you to make at least some effort to look at GUE on its own merit. If my goals were as sinister as proposed by some there are many ways I could much better leverage GUE to my advantage. This is decidedly not the case. GUE is my passion and my lifelong attempt to contribute something meaningful to the diving world – GUE is about so much more than selling dive gear and it is sad to see people try to devalue the people and the organization without a second thought. Please try to remember the vast majority of people in GUE have nothing to do with Halcyon. These people donate thousands of hours a year to very good environmental and diver training causes. Ignoring the value of this work is a disservice to more than a decade of hard work and hundreds of hours of donated labor by people that have no meaningful interest in Halcyon.
In closing I want to be sure you all know that I am deeply grateful for the wonderful support many of you have demonstrated over the years. I realize we need to do a much better job educating people about our activities as well as our goals and our intentions. I suppose we have always let our selves get more wrapped up in the doing and less in the expression of these important aspects. I will endeavor to do a better job as pertains both to transparency and to education. Thank you very much for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,