Dee Scarr is an environmentalist, marine naturalist, and scuba diver who lives and works in

Bonaire Bonaire (; , ; pap, Boneiru, , almost pronounced ) is a Dutch island in the Leeward Antilles in the Caribbean Sea. Its capital is the port of Kralendijk, on the west (leeward) coast of the island. Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao form the ABC ...

Career

Scarr received a Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English and Rhetoric and Public Address from the

University of Florida The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida, traces its origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its ...

, and taught high school English, public speaking and debate. Afterwards she became a scuba instructor in

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, a ...

in 1974 and began her diving career on the island of San Salvador. Dee arrived

in 1980 and started working in the Bonaire National Marine Park, and in 1982 she created the diving program Touch the Sea, in which special care for the area is taken. In 1985 she married David Batalsky. Between 1988 and 1991, Scarr and her workmates tied more than 600 sponges back onto pilings beneath Bonaire's Old Pier in Touch the Sea's Sponge Reattachment Project. In the mid-1990s she surveyed Bonaire's harbor area, removing trash, establishing misused areas and informing the Bonaire Marine Park to educate misusers. The first major recognition of Scarr's work was in 1991, when she was the second recipient of the PADI-SeaSpace Environmental Awareness Award, after

Jacques Yves Cousteau Jacques-Yves Cousteau, (, also , ; 11 June 191025 June 1997) was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful Aqua-Lung, open-circuit SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus). Th ...

. Scarr was recognized and inducted into the Inaugural Roster 2000 of the

Women Divers Hall of Fame The Women Divers Hall of Fame (WDHOF) is an international honor society. Its purpose is to honor the accomplishments of women divers, and their contributions to various fields of underwater diving. Full membership is restricted to nominees who ha ...

at the Beneath the Sea Exposition at the Meadowlands Exposition Center, New Jersey, on 25 March 2000. She was also an inaugural member of the Women Divers Hall of Fame and SSI's Platinum Pro Divers, those with more than 5000 dives; Scarr has logged over 7000 dives. After realizing that dive training agencies didn't provide critical information about living coral to their students, she founded Action in Behalf of Coral in 2005. In 2006 she was awarded Captain Don Stewart's Accolade Award for "making knowledge of the sea fun and spreading desire in others to learn and become themselves part of our sea.", in 2007 she was awarded the Boston Sea Rovers Diver of the Year Award, the Beneath the Sea Diver of the Year Award for Environment and the Underwater Club of Boston's Paul Revere Spike. In 2008, at the 49th Annual

NOGI Awards The NOGI Awards is an award presented annually by the Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences (AUAS) to diving luminaries and is "considered the Oscar of the ocean world." Selection of recipients is based on their record of accomplishments and ...

Gala, she received the

Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences The NOGI Awards is an award presented annually by the Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences (AUAS) to diving luminaries and is "considered the Oscar of the ocean world." Selection of recipients is based on their record of accomplishments a ...

(AUAS) NOGI Award for Distinguished Service, one of the oldest and most prestigious award in the diving industry. Dee has written three books: ''Touch the Sea'', about interactions with marine animals, ''The Gentle Sea'', about undersea creatures likely to be encountered by divers, and a children's book, ''Coral's Reef''. For more than a decade Scarr wrote monthly articles about marine animals and their behaviors for Dive Training magazine, and currently writes for The Bonaire Reporter about marine animals. She was the photographer for the original Guide to the Bonaire Marine Park and contributed to the second edition of the guide.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Scarr, Dee Living people Bonaire women Women naturalists Environmental writers Underwater divers Year of birth missing (living people)