ABU DHABI // Water is Ayesha Al Blooshi’s element, and it has flowed through her childhood, her studies and her career.
She naturally gravitated towards the water, having grown up by the corniche and with a grandfather who served as a nokhada – a captain – for Sheikh Shakhboot.
“I think the sea was in my blood before I knew it,” said Ms Al Blooshi, 30, a marine biologist who is director of marine biodiversity at the Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi (EAD).
After swimming competitively while in school, she spent in a year in the US studying environmental science, then decided to instead pursue marine biology and aquaculture at James Cook University in Australia, off the Great Barrier Reef, where she also learned to scuba dive.
Before continuing her studies for a master’s degree, she became interested in pearl aquaculture, and worked for five months on a pearl farm in Bali.
“I think pearls are very graceful,” she said. “They’re very much a part of our history and tradition, and so throughout my life I’ve had interactions with pearls and pearling,” she said.
She has found pearl projects especially rewarding.
“It’s very exciting for us to try to revive and take back our place in the world as the producers of the best pearls in the world, so we want to reinstate that and revive that culture and tradition,” Ms Al Blooshi said.
For the past six years she has been with EAD, where she first started working as an aquaculture scientist before becoming manager of that section and then of the marine biodiversity division, where she manages five sections and close to 60 people.
Other jobs may require less effort and more return, but civil servants have a mandate to the public.
“We’re protecting the beaches,” Ms Al Blooshi said. “You see people on the Corniche, you see people out there swimming, and you feel really proud.
“You’re like, we’re the ones making sure this is OK for people to swim in. We’re the ones making sure people can eat hammour – that our kids can eat hammour in the future.
“You feel like you’re really leaving something behind.”
Marine life is also a driving factor outside of work. Her first diving experience, in 2001, was less than five metres underwater, but she remembers the colourful parrotfish.
“Because of that, I love parrotfish,” she said. “They’re so interesting to watch and they were just spinning around.”
She compares diving to meditation and can be seen during a dive sitting in a patch of sand, staring into a coral and watching the creatures.
“It’s like watching a cartoon,” she said. “They really come to life. I feel like they all have their own personalities.”
Along with diving, Ms Al Blooshi has also learned about pressing her limits while on land. On a cycling trip through South America at the end of 2012, she broke both physical and mental limitations.
Most days, the group would cycle through mountainous Ecuador, and Ms Al Blooshi would get tired. Once they were forced to ride at night.
“We went on forever,” she said. “When you couldn’t see the challenge – the road, when you couldn’t see it – suddenly, you weren’t tired. A huge part of the obstacle was what we saw.”
Ms Al Blooshi’s work has involved outreach and education about the environment but she hopes that by the end of her career, respect for the environment, which she finds “very instinctual”, is just part of society.
“I want to see an evolved society where we don’t really have to talk about things like environmental awareness,” she said. “Look around you. Without this, we could not survive.”
She referred to a quote from Sheikh Zayed, founder of the UAE, in which he talked about how their forefathers knew how to live in the environment. They recognised the need to conserve it and to take from it only what they needed to live, he had said.
“I would like to go back to that,” she said. “My dream would be to wake up one day, and our awareness has risen.”
lcarroll@thenational.ae
