A Love Letter to the Ocean

By Anurika Onyenso

“You don’t have to live near the water to belong to it. It’s already in you — in memory, in ancestry, in every breath you’ve taken.”

Today is World Ocean Day. It’s also World Ocean Week — a moment the international community has set aside to pay attention to something that is paying attention to all of us: the water that covers most of this planet and makes all of life on it possible.

I think about water a lot.

Not always in the scientific, policy, or activist sense — though all of those matter enormously.

I think about it in the personal sense…

In the way certain bodies of water hold specific memories for people. In the way diaspora communities carry the rivers and oceans they crossed in their bodies, long after arrival. In the way kids growing up in Edmonton, one of Canada’s most landlocked cities, might feel disconnected from conversations about ocean justice even as those conversations shape the world they’ll inherit.

That disconnection is civic. And civic disconnection is something ECHOFORM exists to address, not by lecturing, but by creating space for people to tell their own stories, in their own voice, in their own time.

What does a landlocked city have to do with the ocean?

More than we sometimes realize.

Through our partnership with Global Shapers Edmonton Hub’s Alberta Net-Zero initiative, we’ve been exploring what it means to build a more sustainable future in a province that is both deeply connected to energy and increasingly shaped by climate change.

The ocean may feel far away, but it quietly carries part of that story.

It absorbs enormous amounts of the carbon humanity releases into the atmosphere, helping stabilize the climate systems that connect us all.

In celebration of Ocean Week 2026, ECHOFORM is doing what we do — bringing young people together to make something, feel something and say something that matters:

Ocean Futures Lab: A Paint Night Event — on June 30, ECHOFORM and Global Shapers Edmonton are hosting a free three-hour creative evening at the Edmonton Public Library – Stanley A. Milner.

Painting, poetry, letters, conversation.

No experience required.

All ages.

Selected works will be published in a collaborative digital zine called Love Letters to Water.

I want to invite you to do something small today, wherever you are. Think about your earliest memory involving water. A bathtub, a storm, a lake at summer camp, a flood, a river you crossed, an ocean you stood beside or dreamed about. What does that memory carry? What does it tell you about who you are and where you’ve been?

You don’t have to share it anywhere.

But if you do want to share it, we have a space for it on June 30.

And if you can’t be there in person, we have a digital zine that will carry your words far past Edmonton.

This is what civic storytelling looks like when it meets climate. Not despair. Not data. Not distance. Just: your story, water and community.

The Artivism Cohort 2026 applications close June 20. If today's reflection landed somewhere in you, consider applying. Your story, including your relationship to water, belongs in this cohort <3

Anurika Onyenso