Latest news with #KeyLargo
Associated Press
5 days ago
- Lifestyle
- Associated Press
Mother Ocean Fund Launches a Purpose-Driven App for All Scuba Divers
06/03/2025, Key Largo, Florida // PRODIGY: Feature Story // Joe Gonzalez, also known as Scuba Joe, founder of Mother Ocean Fund, has officially announced the launch of Aquatic Tribe, a powerful new marketplace app designed to connect divers with curated dive opportunities while fueling global ocean conservation efforts. More than just a tool for booking dives, Aquatic Tribe is scuba for a purpose, a platform that puts the planet before profit. 'We didn't just build an app,' said Gonzalez. 'We built a movement. Aquatic Tribe is about giving divers everywhere the ability to explore the ocean and protect it while they do. What we're doing is building a movement to make ocean conversation cool and easy.' Aquatic Tribe allows users to search, vet, and book dive trips in seconds, cutting through the time-consuming and confusing process divers often face. Whether one's wondering where they can go for a dive for the weekend or which dive shop has open spots on the same day, Aquatic Tribe delivers fast, tailored answers. Divers can filter listings by location, date, price, difficulty level, reef name, dive type, and more. Every diver is pre-vetted before they can even book, ensuring safety and confidence for both divers and dive operators. Dive shops and charters can list their offerings for free. A 10% convenience fee is added to bookings, and a significant portion of that fee is funneled directly into the Mother Ocean Fund, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit committed to ecological restoration and adaptive diving programs. At the heart of the app is a simple but powerful mission: to fund and facilitate ocean conservation efforts through scuba diving. Proceeds from Aquatic Tribe support initiatives like coral reef restoration dives, adaptive diver programs for people with disabilities, reef and pier clean-up excursions, shark conservation, and environmental awareness dives. Ultimately, Aquatic Tribe aims to get more fins in the water for free, offering no-cost ecological dives paid for by accumulated funds from the app and events like Ecopalooza, Mother Ocean Fund's music festival fundraiser. After a successful first event, organizers are now scouting locations in San Diego, Galveston, and South Florida for the next iteration. Aquatic Tribe offers more than convenience. It is a commitment to ocean stewardship and community building across party lines. By making diving accessible, traceable, and impactful, Joe Gonzalez and the Mother Ocean Fund are inviting the world to dive with purpose. 'This app isn't just for divers,' Gonzalez added. 'It's for anyone who cares about our oceans. Whether you're a beginner or a dive master, if you're part of the tribe, you're part of the solution. In a world filled with hate and ignorance, we're using love and brilliance to show people another way.' Media Contact Name: Kara Biery Email: [email protected] Source published by Submit Press Release >> Mother Ocean Fund Launches a Purpose-Driven App for All Scuba Divers
CBS News
17-05-2025
- CBS News
Two arrested for selling cocaine, fentanyl in Key Largo, sheriff's office says
Two people in Key Largo were arrested on Friday after allegedly selling drugs while a child was with them. Addison Lee Baumgardner, 37, and Shelby Lynn Baer, 33, were taken into custody by Monroe County deputies after they were spotted selling drugs in the 9800 block of the Overseas Highway, according to the sheriff's office. Baer's 6-year-child was with her at the time of the arrest, deputies said. Baumgardner was charged with multiple counts of trafficking fentanyl, trafficking cocaine, possession of cocaine, cocaine manufacturing, possession of a controlled substance, and possession of drug paraphernalia. Baer was charged with trafficking fentanyl and child neglect. The sheriff's office obtained a search warrant and the following items were seized. 2.3 ounces of fentanyl powder 105 fentanyl pills 8.7 grams of powder cocaine 1 gram of crack cocaine 36 grams of cocaine-liquid mixture 1 scale Multiple bags containing more than 100 assorted pills $976 cash in suspected drug proceeds Both Baumgardner and Baer were taken to jail. The child was turned over to the care of a family member and the Florida Department of Children and Families was notified.
The Guardian
08-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
When politicians tell us to focus on growth we need to ask: ‘Why, and for whom?'
Five years ago, we were beginning to face the imminent reality of lockdown. We were confronted with an uncertain future in which our habitual ways of coping, succeeding, displacing and overworking were going to be put mercilessly on hold because of an unprecedented existential threat. And for a few months we lived through a see-saw of emotions: public and private grief at the scale of loss; anger and confusion over the restrictions imposed, withdrawn, re-imposed; exhaustion at the pressure of sustaining basic public services – and also a kind of guilty, sporadic excitement at possibilities we hadn't guessed at. Clearer skies, silent roads; time; a sense of what mattered and who mattered, to us as individuals and to the whole of society. Fragile shoots of some sort of renewed spiritual imagination pushed a centimetre or so through the soil. Our capacity for not learning from crises, however, is impressively well developed (as it proved to be after the financial meltdown of 2008). After a few years of floundering and posturing, we are back where we were, our fingers firmly in our ears about the nature of international crises, medical or environmental, engaged in a hectic struggle to prove that we are not going to be 'defeatist' about our economic future. We are back with the supercharged language of 'growth' as the all-sufficient and self-evident goal of national life – cheered on by a global turn to bloodthirsty competition and the prospect of futile, theatrical trade wars. Being 'anti-growth' – or, in the new vocabulary of the past few months, being a 'nimby' or a 'naysayer' – is high on the new catalogue of deadly sins. But before we settle down with our new government's rhetoric about growth as the priority that trumps (I use the word advisedly) every other social or environmental goal, it is imperative that we ask what is meant by this language. What is it we want to 'grow'? We are constantly being fed a narrative in which growth is something that needs no explanation or justification. We are being hypnotised into the position of the gangster (played by the immortal Edward G Robinson) in the Bogart/Bacall classic Key Largo, who, challenged as to what he really wants, agrees that the answer is simply 'More'. But there are some better answers that could be given – answers that correspond more to what actual citizens might say they hope for from public policy. I've been working with the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (Cusp), led by Prof Tim Jackson at the University of Surrey, where some of these possible answers have been analysed and 'road-tested' in a series of wide-ranging public conversations. The evidence emerging is clear. Those involved in these conversations – and the very diverse social and economic groups they represent – are convinced that stable, successful, confident and positive societies are not produced by the pursuit of growth for its own sake, but by clarity and purposiveness about what growth is supposed to serve. People look for more stable patterns of employment. We want opportunities for secure work and fulfilling leisure for ourselves and our children – dependable public services and affordable housing. We want – a fundamental matter, surely – resilience, a durable, trustworthy environment rather than a state of fevered anxiety. We want breathing space, literally and metaphorically: it's no accident that 'breath' and 'spirit' are the same word in so many languages. 'Growing' an economy against such a backdrop should mean growing the capacity to sustain all this. But isolate growth from public good (let alone environmental security), and you are simply planning for breakdown: individual psychological collapse in varying degrees of seriousness and collective implosion as limited resources run out, competition becomes more violent and gross inequalities of power are intensified. And, as Donald Trump's second presidency is already showing us, one of the early casualties of a mindless focus on local growth detached from the realities of the natural and the human world is the rule of law, national and international – the protocols and skills we put in place to make power accountable. So when we hear politicians – and especially politicians of the left who are supposed to have some investment in the hopes and ideals just mentioned – appealing to the imperative of growth, we should be asking insistently what the word means, what we are supposed to be growing into or towards. So far, we have heard dismayingly little from government about how we are to develop towards a genuinely resilient society – resilient in the sense of being able to cope with unprecedented challenge without losing our commitment to one another's wellbeing and safety. The uncomfortable truth is that in our present global context, growth frequently means the opposite of such shared responsibility. Concerns about profit weaken accountability; the distance of workforce from decision-making reinforces alienation and insecurity. Who specifically wants this? Presumably those whose profits are most at stake. Is it that impossible to turn this into an argument for growth understood as the building of a durable tax base, with incentives to plough back profit into job creation? 'Public opinion research shows that the vast bulk of the population are more progressive and ambitious than what political parties present as being in the centre.' This is one of the conclusions of the Common Sense Policy Group (including Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, whose classic study of equality and wellbeing, The Spirit Level, first published in 2009, is still both admired and ignored by policymakers), at the end of its 2024 collection of 'manifesto' essays, Act Now. The work of Cusp suggests the same conclusion. There is growing evidence, set out in detail in the essays in Act Now, that policies capable of creating resilient wellbeing without assuming an endless spiral of simple economic expansion – such as universal access to essential goods and services, reducing working hours, and introducing carbon and wealth taxes – are not utopian fantasies. What if we marked the fifth anniversary of the beginning of lockdown with a speech or two from government starting from here – from the urgent need to demystify the fundamentalism of growth-in-the-abstract and to articulate something of what we want prosperity for? To encourage us to be clear about where we want to be as a society, in terms not just defined by possession and control but alert to the hunger for belonging, dignity, stability, a legacy worth passing on to a new generation? It might begin to look as if we were not, after all, incapable of learning. It might suggest that government was not wholly uninterested in building a new consensus around security, respect and hope. Rowan Williams is the former archbishop of Canterbury
