We've seen a lot of policies and executive orders come down in the last little bit. From the US, Canada, all over the world. We see policies all the time. A lot of times we just don't even know what it means. There are so many different levels to each policy that makes it really difficult to understand how is it actually going to protect us as people and the oceans and nature in general.
It could be very difficult to understand some of these policies, even though I've been studying them for quite some time and sometimes I get confused. Now let alone just actually seen the wording of an actual bill. I know here in Canada, it can be very complex to even just translate that. It's almost like translating Shakespeare into modern day English. It can be very complex and you can stumble on some of those words.
Regardless of it, policies are extremely important and the problem that we're seeing right now, that was highlighted in an article at phys.org, which I'll link in the show notes, is that we are falling behind in the policy. A lot of the times it has to do with the government at hand or a government of the day, but we are falling behind in those policies, which is showing right now based on climate change, based on overfishing, based on plastic pollution, and we need to bring those up.
And on today's episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast, we're going to talk about ways that we can catch up and ways that we can actually get people more connected to nature and the ocean. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lew, and this is the podcast.
We find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. Now today's episode, we're going to be talking about policy and I know policies are really hard to get a handle of because it can be really complex. There's a lot of layers and sometimes the language of like a bill that's actually read through Congress or Parliament or wherever you live and whatever the government reads through can be really complicated.
It's like converting Shakespeare into modern English. It's really difficult to kind of understand at the beginning when you first learn it. But once you get used to it, then you start to listen and we have a lot of experts in the how to protect the ocean network that really contribute to doing that. Andrew Thaler talked a little bit about some of the policies for deep sea mining just the other day and the other episode. And so we do a lot of stuff around this today.
What I want to talk about was the fact that policies are not really catching up with the times with all the problems that we're seeing and there are a lot of things that I will go into. But before we do, I want to talk to you a little bit about the last couple weeks. Let's just take a breath because look, it's winter time up here and it gets cloudy and it gets cold and we don't go out as much and we see problems on TV. We see forest fires like wildfires out of control destroying homes.
We see the introduction of a president that some of us may not want to see and a lot of the policies that they're pushing through. It could be a little tough to digest really tough to digest for a lot of us and it could be really hard on our mental health and I know mental health is a big big thing. And for me, especially over the last couple of years, you know, coming out of covid, I've seen a lot of changes in my life. I've lost my father a couple of years ago.
I was getting really messed up in terms of my organization in terms of my focus in terms of my clarity and that really took a hit on my mental health of the last couple of years. And I started to wonder like how do I change this? You know, I saw the right people. I spoke to the right people spoke to my family and really started to gather like what in my life was so messy that I could clean up and help me focus on specific ways.
It ran for a lot of things that are personal that I won't go into, but a lot of us go through this stuff where we just don't really get it after a while and we need that focus and clarity. Something that's really actually helped me is with Magic Mind and Magic Mind is like a little concoction that I take. It's like a little elixir that I take every morning and I just down it. It just keeps me focused. It keeps me clear. It allows me to get things done now on top of that.
I've done a lot of organizing of my life and making sure that I've gotten rid of some of the things that I don't need to take on and that clog up my life and clog up up here in my mental health. But Magic Minds really helped me to focus through the day to get through the process and not lose focus to get distracted by other things in my life and focus on the task at hand because I do have a lot of tasks with the podcast. My job being a parent all that kind of stuff.
It's a lot and so having Magic Mind in my life has really helped. It helps with just like a nice little dosage of caffeine that's released throughout the day. I don't like slam down Coca-Cola's anymore where I get like a shot of caffeine and I just crash. I don't feel like doing anything. And so now I'm able to do a lot of things in my life and to be honest for the first time in a long time. I actually feel great. This is a personal story of mine. I'm not saying this going to happen to you.
I put in a lot of work but Magic Mind has really been there and really helped me focus in. So I want to provide you with something that could help you and this is just helps me as well. If you want more information and you want to buy your own, please feel free to go to the link. www.magicmind.com forward slash Luen Jan J A N for January because we're really focusing on this in January. I know this is the end of January, but highly recommend that you grab it.
It's really important that you do for your own mental health and I think it'll help you with just your overall performance in life and trying to do better for yourself because it's done better for me. Put the link in the description below and you can click on that and hopefully it'll help you. I'd love to hear if it'll help you. All right. Let's get started with the show. This is going to be a lot of fun in a way because it's one of those things where we only talk about conservation.
Like I love talking about ocean animals and seeing new things that are happening. Orcas hunting whale sharks and being able to discuss that. But at some point we have to discuss conservation. How we get conservation done. It really starts with understanding the ocean, the science behind understanding how we can protect the ocean. What is going on in the ocean that we need to protect better than we were before. A lot of the times it has to do with human disturbances. We have fishing.
We have pollution. We have development along the coastline and then of course we have other indirect effects like climate change that we're contributing to and we need more understanding of the science allows us to collect that information and then understand the information and then nonprofit organizations and other groups and scientists will allow that information to be decided.
And then we have the people who want to know like you want to know what's happening with the ocean how we can better protect it by watching or listening to this podcast. I provide that information to you the best I can by looking up information and bringing it to you. I'm not collecting it raw data like a lot of the other scientists are but I'm trying to tell you about what everybody's doing so we have a channel you can find out a lot of different things about. That's my goal is to get it out.
A lot of other organizations have their own constituents their own audiences that they speak to on a regular basis whether it be through email whether it be through videos whether it be through reports or anything like that or community events and they help get that awareness raised so that you can know more about what's happening with the ocean once we have that knowledge then we start to look at what should we be doing about this and that's where we start to talk to our
government and the governments will put in policies that will allow these things to be rectified.
Right so for instance let's talk about plastic pollution right if we have plastic pollution going on we know that this plastic pollution in every piece of our ocean to the deepest depths that we know of all the way to the surface we know it's everywhere and we know that we're causing it this is not just a natural phenomenon that's happening we are causing it we are consuming more plastic we're using more single use plastic so what do we do we talk to the government we start putting policies on
banning certain plastics that we find most in the environment whether it be in the ocean on a beach or in the ocean or in the ocean or in the ocean.
Or in the mangrove or in a salt marsh or in a river system we find it everywhere just as a matter of fact if you ever walk down your neighborhood when is after garbage a it's a windy day using plastic all over the place we pick that up we get rid of it as a neighborhood as a community that helps each other out and we say hey you know what like let's keep this neighborhood clean so we don't see plastics we don't get animals hurt we don't get in our gardens we don't get in
our systems and we can be happy well that's what we hope that the government will do by putting those policies in place.
To clean the plastic pollution up this could work for pretty much every single thing the problem is that the government's don't always want to listen out you're probably wondering why would they want to listen to the people well in a democracy that we live in canada in the us in the UK in australia a lot of the other countries are listening to this where we get to vote for elected officials they should be listening to the people.
They don't always they listen to the people who speak up the most that could be a small population to be a small percentage of the population says hey you know what I'm really really passionate about this and I want to see this being rectified and whatever that could be we you know it could be anything from the environment to human rights to.
You know other policies that we are may not care about but people want those in place and that's how government works and hopefully the government puts it in place but. A lot of the times they don't listen because there are competing factors or competing interests that want something opposite.
And this is where I feel that we're running behind and we'll talk about that in a second with in terms of the policies right this article talks about sort of like the interconnected crisis so we have biodiversity loss climate change and pollution.
That are deeply intertwined so they're like I always call this the cumulative effects when one makes it the other one the worst and it makes the other one the worst and when they combine it just makes it that much worse it's really hard to untangle those cumulative effects and trying to figure out stuff.
Either together or separately a lot of times we try and figure them out separately because again competing interest so it's leading to compound impacts on human health and well being which we know we've seen with climate change and force fires and hurricanes and floods and all that kind of stuff.
We've seen those human effects affect the way people live where they live in the future it's going to be really interesting to see what happens over the next 30 years as this crisis continues to move without these policies catching up so if we address each of these policies individually that's going to be a problem we have to address these policies as they are intertwined so they have to address them together.
There were some reports that were mentioned in the articles and they are two major assessments by the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services which called IPBES highlight the need for transformative change the nexus assessment emphasizes the links between biodiversity loss water quality food security health risk and climate change.
So they had some policy recommendations based on these two reports basically looking at integrating biodiversity considerations into sectors like agriculture fisheries forestry urban development infrastructure mining and energy the proposed actions include and I'm going to read these off because I think these are really important implementing nature based solutions in urban areas and reconnecting people with nature.
That's a really important one if you think about how to connect people you look around if you're living in a bigger city you don't have as much nature as you do say in the country right in the country it's a little bit slower moving.
It's not densely populated you don't have concrete everywhere you have a lot of maybe rolling meadows or maybe agricultural fields but it's quiet it's slowed down people tend not to move as quickly in and about because they're not in a rush to do things they've done their job maybe they're a farming community or fishing community and they maybe sit on their patio maybe sit with some neighbors or just relax after a hard day's work and they just kind of relax and they get to
see the green they get to see the blue where they live and they get to enjoy. Just enjoy looking out right into the horizon and just be like wow that we live in a really cool place in cities where I live it's a lot faster you're trying to get your kids to all these different activities are trying to do this you're trying to do that you go out to dinner but if you look around.
There's not as many green spaces that there are say in the country right is more densely populated there are more residences are more businesses their business plazas their business areas there's playgrounds and so forth but there's not a lot of green space as there is when you compare to the country and I feel as though and a lot of people are thinking the same thing if businesses had their way a lot of them developers especially they would turn those cities
into more concrete areas because it's more profit for them the more they can sell on the land the better it is so case in point in Ontario they're gonna go very local here in Ontario where near I live they want to create a different highway now we have already the gardener like the QEW we have 401 we have the four seven which is a toll route so we have three different highways that go through Toronto and they hit different parts of the city so one hits really really self by like the
gardener in the QE hit right by the lake shore by Lake Ontario then you have in the lake the middle of the city is the 401 which is insanely busy so is the QE at times and the 401 seems to be busy all the time then we have the four seven which is a toll highway very expensive to use but a lot of people will use those back and forth and the trucks aren't allowed on there so the truck stay on the 401 there is more development that has gone on since I've been here since I've been on
this earth north of Toronto and it's been now it's just blooming neighborhoods like they're just neighborhoods with malls and car washes and restaurants and everything they are like small cities in comparison to the Toronto but they are cities and there's more concrete than there was when I was younger I used to go up there and these be farm fields and things like that very little homes now it's like a bustling area but there are less green projects and what the Ontario government is
proposing is like let's do a highway at the bottom of those cities but the top of Toronto that's free to ride it's Ontario owned but it goes right through a green space a number of green spaces in one part it goes through the green belt now the green belt is a protected area is owned off as a protected area to protect the rest of the watershed that goes down to Lake Ontario we have been messing up and I can't go into it now because we don't have the time we have been messing up the greater
Toronto watersheds for a long time because of creating this city we've buried a lot of our rivers as they get close to downtown so they don't interrupt we've lost a lot of our green spaces they have become heavily polluted in certain areas they're getting better but still not the best and there's sometimes there's nothing we can do about it or there's not enough priority to do something about it now we're talking about putting a highway into a section of green space that is
protected to make sure that we protect the rest of the integrity of the watershed and why are they doing this because what's been uncovered in some scandals is that the Ontario premier Doug Ford has his buddies who got the contracts to build on those areas that are going to make like billions of dollars just from the development of that area there are other green spaces that are not used that are not protected that could be used for this high way but they refuse to use that one
because it's not land that will make these developers even more rich and more billions of dollars so this is the problem when we're talking about implementing nature based solutions in urban areas and reconnecting with nature we keep taking away our green spaces we keep taking away access to our blue spaces in 20 years ago as downtown Toronto was being built and even here in Burlington where I am another local example and I'm sure this has happened in other cities buildings were put up and it
was sold with hey you have access to beautiful views of Lake Ontario of whatever coastline you live off of and then like 10 years later another building gets built right in front of your view so now you have a view of another building that has a view of the ocean or of the Lake Ontario of a great lake or whatever that might be whatever coastline you're on this is the problem that we keep seeing is the access to more money takes away all the stuff that we're doing to
protect and putting in nature based solutions but making sure that having our politicians abide by the regular zoning and not changing it for green spaces ininson growth and I from different methods nature studied is extremely important they'll use other means to get by there really good at let's plan it out and let's just make sure this area will never get chosen to be developed on because it's a green space. It's very important to this area that we have green spaces.
We need to continue to keep nature abett us because that's what regulates our lives. We need to keep that intact. We need to recognize that the dollar value should not matter about these places. These places are forever protected. They should be forever protected, right? And that's really important. Measure, and the third one, measuring and reporting on natural assets to manage and enhance ecosystem services.
So in other words, making sure that when you see these green spaces and blue spaces and the coastal spaces, right, making sure that we're monitoring them, we're saying, "Hey, are they healthy? Is this what we need? Is this what we need to keep around? Can we keep around more? Do we need to restore more? How are they keeping those services that they provide intact? And if that's changing, what can we do to bring them back or enhance those areas? That's extremely important.
Restoring carbon-rich ecosystems such as forests, soils, and mangroves. Now, we're talking a little bit of land and sea here because it really matters when we talk about pollutants because pollutants usually come from the land and they end up into the sea. Talk about plastic pollution, bad water quality with chemicals and nutrients and so forth. We need to make sure that land is available. A lot of times, basic watershed maintenance, basic forestry maintenance can really help in this.
But the priority has to be there by the government. You can't put policies in to take an entire area down for a residential build or for a commercial build, right? Like we see a lot with these massive warehouses that are showing up in Canada, the US and all over the world that have like huge plants or storage warehouses, drop shipping warehouses becoming really popular these days. And we're seeing land being used that are normally natural and contributing to our ecosystem services, right?
We need to make sure that we enhance those and restore those that have been taken away because you'd be surprised at how much has been taken away. Seeing a salt marsh or a mud flat may not look appealing to many people, but it's extremely important into coastlines and making sure that we're maintaining the intactness, the importance of those coastlines and the protection, not only to our coastline, but also for the animals that run those ecosystems that provide us with those services.
Nice views, but also just regular ecosystem services that provide protection, biodiversity, stability and so forth. And I think it's really important. Also, carbon rich ecosystems, mangroves, seagrasses, those as soils, forests, those are really important. They're so important now more than ever because of the amount of pollution that we're putting into the air, the amount of greenhouse gases that we're putting in. We need more absorption. We need more tools to absorb.
If we don't put those in, we can't put those in, especially when we're talking about marine-based or aquatic-based. Seagrasses, mangroves hold up to like four to 10 times as much carbon than land-based forest trees, right? Trees. So this is important that we do both. And it's expensive to restore. It's less expensive to protect and we should be protecting those and restoring those in other areas as well.
Now, this is the last one is probably the most important is supporting indigenous food systems. This is not just supporting indigenous food systems, but we as people that have taken over land from indigenous people in the histories that we have, right? In our country's histories. We have lost a lot of the knowledge or we haven't taken up a lot of the knowledge that have kept indigenous communities living here for hundreds of years, maybe even more.
The way they take care of the land and they integrate their economies or their way of life into the land and protecting that land and doing it in harmony. We need to learn from that. Like I can't even tell you how important it is that we need to learn from those systems, right? We need to have workshops. We need to incorporate more indigenous communities into putting these policies together so that we can really understand what is a way to build that.
And that's a true caretaker of this, you know, like for me in North America, what indigenous people call Turtle Island. It's an important aspect. It's an important way to put this together economy and environment. So how do we live off the land where we can be prosperous, but also how do we maintain the land so we can continue to be prosperous at this point right now? We're just destroying the land and we don't care about the harmony. We don't care about the environment.
That's how many of our companies are working. And we need to incorporate more of that indigenous culture into our practices so that we can actually take care of the land and have a good economy. Doesn't necessarily mean that our economy has to grow all the time, but it's really important that we do this kind of stuff. That's sort of my opinion on all and what this article discusses.
It's extremely important thing to do when we look at policies, but we really need to catch up and we need to catch up quickly. And our politicians have to be smart. They have to listen to the experts, right? And us as citizens, we have to pressure the government to listen to the experts. We have to say, look, we may not understand all the science and everything that goes on in the environment or everything that goes on in economies and politics and everything like that.
But there are people who do listen to those people and let that drive our policy, not just the opinions of politicians based on not listening to people and just forming their own opinion. Okay, for instance, Donald Trump, a number of years ago when he was president, he stated he was in front of a panel of forestry people during the last big wildfire scares or wildfires are always scary.
But the wildfires when he was president and he was listening to some scientists and scientists like we just can't ignore the science here. We need to do something more about climate change rails. These forest fires are going to get out of hand and more people are going to get hurt and lose their homes. Donald Trump looked the guy in the eye. Actually, he didn't even look the guy in the eye.
And he just looked straight and he says, well, you know, I'll tell you it's going to get cooler in the next few years. I'm telling you that right now. It's going to get cooler. No scientist that has any kind of reputation, no NASA scientist, no government scientist at the time were saying that it's going to get cooler. We were saying it's going to get hotter. Everybody was saying it's going to get hotter. The entire world knew it was going to get hotter.
We were hitting records and records and we have continued to hit records and record breaking years every year for heat. And look what happened just not long ago, like a month ago, and it's still kind of going on. Devastating wilds across California floods due to hurricanes that are earlier and more severe that scientists have been particularly for a long time hit in 2024.
This stuff is happening, but we are keep continuing to put politicians in place that are like, no, I don't think it's going to happen. I'm going to ignore everybody else. He goes, well, I just don't think the science knows it doesn't make sense. It just doesn't make sense from a prosperous life, like in the future perspective. Right. And even now, it does not make sense. We need to put politicians in power where they listen to experts. That's all. That's really what it comes down to.
It doesn't matter what party they're from. Every party the leader should know we're going to listen to the experts and make a decision based on what the experts say. That's really what it goes and what the people feel. And that's really what it comes down to. And policies need to catch up according to this article. And I agree with it. And I want to share that with you. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know. You can DM me on Instagram at how to protect the ocean.
That's at how to protect the ocean. Don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell on YouTube. You can also leave a comment in this video below. And of course, you can leave a comment on our Spotify. We have video and audio available. And of course, you can subscribe and follow on any of your favorite podcast apps. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Angelou. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time.
And happy conservation.