Oh hello, Ologites. Okay, so this is an encore presentation of an episode, but with a few new bells and whistles. I just added because you loved this ologist so much when this first aired in twenty eighteen. And she has a brand new podcast of her own. It just launched. It's called How to Save a Planet and it's co hosted by Alex Blumberg. The latest episode of her new podcast addresses the most common Patreon question we got for her, So you're definitely gonna want to go check out our
new podcast. Also, at the break, you're going to hear an update from the Ologist herself that she sentenced.
Specifically for Ologies listeners.
Trust me, you want to hear what she has been up to the last two years. It's amazing. Just trust me. Also, I think I swore like your grandpa at poker night in this episode, so sorry. Also, there's a new secret at the end. Okay, here we go. Oh hi, it's all pop. Here sot mowing the lawn in those shorts your mother wishes. I throwaway Alley Ward back with another episode of Ologies. Now. In this episode, let's just belly up to the coast. Let's gaze out over a craggy
cliff and stare into the glimmering sea. What wonders? What mystery? What possibility? What a shit show? We've made it? But is there hope? I don't know. I'm not an oceanologist, but that's okay because other people are. And you're gonna get the real time scoop on whether or not we have missed the boat, on saving the sea, and what we're doing to make it better. So hank tight, because before we sit sail a few things you can do
to help keep this podcast afloat. So thank you to the patrons who pledge a bucker moore a month to the show. You have kept it running almost a full year, now, can you even it's almost in our anniversary. Your questions are great, your hearts are greater. If you want to support ologies via items, ologiesmarch dot com has you covered literally the link is in the show notes.
And if you spend all.
Your money on a very tiny baseball jersey for your hamster, I get it. And you can support ologies with just your words and your thumbs by telling friends and tweeting and gramming and making sure that you're subscribed. So reviews and ratings are free to do. You can just do them and kind of like a rodent in clothes. I'm just a little creepy and I read every single review because it's really nice that you leave them, and it makes me remember that there are real human beings in
the void listening to this. So this week I just want to say thank you to Jenny Farn who says every day I commute an hour each way to my job, God bless you teaching elementary school art. And this podcast is like a billion mini hot tubs for my overworked brain cells. Will also give me cool stuff to talk to the kids about, like shark vomit and why the
darn sky is blue but not on Mars. Also, I've stolen Burbie as my favorite way to exit conversations with hyper six year olds and online conversations that have taken a bad turn. Thanks for everything. You're very welcome. Jen Okay, Oceanology board, Are you saying oceanography wrong? No, no, my tender bitches, I am not so. Oceanology is a thing.
It's defined as the branch of technology and economics dealing with human use of the sea, So heck, yes, this person is very much an oceanologist now at warning, Is this the cheeriest of episodes? Is it full of warm fuzzies? No, no it's not. But is it important? Yes, yes it is. I did my best to balance the gloom with some wonder, and I promise you it is important enough to stick
with the entire episode. There's so much good information. Also, special thank you to one of my favorite science in politics and Internet heroes, Baritonde Thurston for hooking me up with this allogist who I nervously emailed the all caps question.
How screwed are these oceans?
Keep listening to hear her answer. So she's based on the East Coast. So I had her on my wish list, and one day in August, I got myself to her native Brooklyn, and I tried to pretend I was cool enough to be there, and we met up at an audio studio at Pioneer Works, which is this beautiful art and cultural center and event space where I would love to live as a stowaway if they would never find me out. Now, as a marine biologist and a policy strategist,
she does TED talks. She's worked with the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and atmospheric Administration. She's an adjunct professor at NYU. She's also an environmental advocate. She travels the world working with politicians and communities to make their relationship to the oceans healthier. I am just like in gentle awe of her now. She had just gotten back from an occupational venture the night before, and I just had the tape rolling as I waited for her
arrival in the studio. Way too eager didn't want to miss a second, so we talked about her favorite aspects of the ocean when she fell in love with it, coral reefs, parrotfish, their butts, disgusting whale trivia, even more disgusting plastic trivia, the amount of doomed we are, what fish you shouldn't eat, and whether or not plastic straws really deserve their evil reputation. So it's not all sunny, but she is an expert who will really talk us
all into action. So please get ready to listen to the crashing waves of wisdom from oceanologist doctor Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. So do you need a minute, do you need anything else?
I'm good?
Or do you just want me to start lobbing questions? About oceans. I you I just got back from the oceans, So you just got back in the ocean like five minutes ago, pretty much. Yeah, how much of your work is in the field in the ocean and how much is like traveling around making policy, because I know that.
You do both. I don't have an active research program right now, so in the ocean, I'm just kind of like checking it out or hanging out, keeping in touch with the ecosystems and what's going on down there. So most of my work is more so than policy specifically, just strategy work. How do all these different organizations make their campaigns better, their communications better, policy work more strategic.
So Ocean Collective, the company I founded, is a consulting group that supports other organizations trying to amp up the impact of their conservation efforts. It's thirteen incredible experts from professional surfers, marine biologists, underwater robot makers, filmmakers, policy experts, and we're all just coming together as this team to try to see what we can do to help.
And can we talk about your background a little bit about.
Your totally love of the ocean. That was so melodic. I thought you were going to like ask me questions about my former acappella career. So did you have a former acapella career? I maybe did. Yeah, I was a jazz singer for most of my youth.
Really side note, I'm sorry I sang it you. And also I asked if she had any music of hers that I could put in here, and she said, no, no jazz clips to share. Sorry about that, So I did try. Okay, all right, back to the sea. When when did you get into oceans and marine biology? When did you decide to take that path?
When I was five, I learned to swim in the Florida Keys on a family vacation. My parents would be down there specifically to teach me to swim, and I went on a glass bottom boat and I saw crawlry for the first time, and it blew my damn mind. It was so incredible. I mean just it's like a window to another world. Right. You look down and there's just fish and coral and all these colorful things that
you could never have imagined. So that, for me was the moment that I just wanted to know everything about the ocean.
So Iana went on to get a bachelor's degree from just this little startup college called in the field of environmental science and public policy. She also obtained a PhD from Script's Institute of Oceanography in marine biology, studying coral reef sustainability. Now during all of that, did she ever think like, maybe I should switch my major to bagpiping, like just take a turn into something totally non oceanic.
I decided pretty early on not to take any turns. So my PhD is technically in marine biology, but it was done through an interdisciplinary program at the SCRIPTS and Soution of Oceanography that was partnering with the Economics Department to make sure that ocean conservation was integrating all these
different things, because it's really a puzzle, right. There's a science, and there's the policy, there's the communications, there's the law and economics, and so I wanted to make sure that I had at least a reasonable handle on all these different pieces of the puzzle so that I could go out into the world and help to try to solve it.
In a broader sense, there's obviously like a strong need for people to go really deeply into each of those, Like, for example, I'm really glad there are people out there who just study octopuses and like tell us everything they learn because they're amazing by the way my mind works. And what I'm passionate about is that bigger picture puzzle and how we can really shift human relation with the ocean. Because the ocean is obviously like it's doing everything right.
It's humans that are causing all these challenges. So that's the piece that I focus on.
So here's how I thought I would split up the episode. I mean, everyone's like, how can we make the ocean less fucked? Like we've really, we've really messed.
Up, that's the question.
So I thought we would start with let's talk about the good things about the ocean.
Sure, there's lots, and so.
I'm going to essentially play like good cop, bad cop. I'm going to ask you all the good questions, and I'm going to let the patrons ask all the what are we going to do?
Plastic?
Oh my god, we're all gonna die. So I'm going to ask I'm going to ask you the happy questions about the ocean before we get to oh my god, what are we going to do? I would love to know did you ever have well it sounds like when you were looking in that glass bott of both you had kind of an epiphany that there's this whole world under the sea that you never realized. Have you had any other kind of epiphanies about the ocean or any other moments that you had.
So when I started my PhD research, I was I was thinking about fishing and how it can be really wasteful you catch fish that you don't end up using. And in fact, a recent research project I've been doing for WWF, the World Wildlife Fund, I learned that half of the seafood we catch in the US and EU is wasted somewhere along with supply chain. It's just insane. But there's also like the unsustainable aspects of fishing. They're both problems. So I'm already diving, no problems, but I
swear I'm getting to the good stuff. So so fishing can overfishing is a problem, and unsustainable fishing and then what we do with what we catch is a whole separate issue. But I was focused on how can we redesign fishing gear to make it more sustainable, And so I worked with fishermen and the fisheries department in Curasow in the Caribbean to redesign their fish traps to let babystickle, the babyfish and the ornamental like the nemo shaped skinny
species out of the traps. And it turns out you can let out eighty percent of the bycatch the fish you don't mean to catch without hurting fishmen's incomes because all the valuable fish stay inside. It's basically just inch wide slot down the side of the trap that lets all the little guys out. And you can't do it with a just making it a larger mesh size, because then you have like a big, a big hole that any fish could get out, including the valuable ones.
So do google her paper entitled quote reducing bycatch in coral reef trap fisheries escape gaps as a step towards sustainability For more on this I did, and then reading the abstract, I did a little yay way to go
squeal about it. Now there are also diagrams online, and the regular fish traps that snag all of those other little fishies can just be retrofitted with side panels that have little narrow slits for little fishies to sneak out and say later days, dude, I've got more growing to do, or you don't even eat my species it's essentially the equivalent of an Irish goodbye for coral reef fish.
So that was really exciting to me because it was a moment where I saw that you don't actually need super high technology in all these cases. You just need to think practically about solutions, and if you work with the fishing community and with the government, these things can actually become law. And so en curis how that type of trap design is now required and in a few other places as well, in Barbuda, and I think they're
using it in Kenya. So that was super exciting to me because you can this idea of low tech solutions I think is underappreciated, right, So that was a really eye opening moment and which led to the next one, which was it's not actually about fish.
Wait, it's not about the fish.
Did I hear that right? It's not actually about fish.
This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, Adaptation, which bears the iconic line from a former aquarium enthusiast.
I once fell deeply, you know, profoundly in love with tropical fish. He grows bored in one day, I.
Say a fuck fish, I renounce fish. I vowed never to set foot in that ocean again. That's how much fuck fish now. Two things, That clip from adaptation is so beloved that someone has built a website at fuck dot fish. That's only that clip from the movie. You just press play and enjoy. Secondly, that wasn't Ayana's deal at all. When she says it's not actually about fish, she means that she loves fish so much. She had to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
I had done all this work, like counting fish and surveying fish populations on coral reefs, and then I was like, actually, it's about fishermen, it's about coastal communities. It is about the tourism sector and how people are impact in the ocean. So that's when my research shifted to doing hundreds of
these socioeconomic interviews with people across the Caribbean. From this mindset that I had to understand people how people were using the ocean, what problems they saw, what solutions they would support, Ask them if they could write the laws to manage the ocean, what would they be, And then see what I could learn from all these experts who spent more hours than I ever have in and on the ocean.
So in order to save species in the ocean, we have to look at the humans on land and like what they're even doing?
Yeah, human behavior and like what makes us tick and our incentives and motivations and culture.
That makes so much sense because the fish are like, don't look at me, dude, Like I'm not the one rooting exactly.
Like I'm just simming around. I like find a snack, make some babies, like not get munched by a shark or whatever.
But you're like, hey, humans, let's look. Yeah, let's put the microscope on you guys for a minute.
Time out, let's think through this.
So, oceans, it's not you, it's us. It really really, really really really is us. But anyway, okay, sorry, this portion is the positive portion of the episode. Let's try to stick to the light fun stuff before the conversation gets a little bleak. Can you give some like an anatomy lesson of the ocean some zones? What's an ocean versus what's a sea? Like just basic dumb questions.
So the way that we talk about the ocean has changed a lot in the past decade, and now we say the ocean it's really one ocean. It's all connected, and there's these different sort of parts that we name seas and to have different ocean titles, but there's currents that run through and connect everything. So I guess the easy answer is it's just the ocean. Oh yeah, So there's the Caribbean Sea in the Mediterranean Sea, and there's the Atlantic Pacific in India and all these oceans. But
really it's all one big thing. And then as the zones that are more important when I think about the ocean, I think about sort of the depths of the ocean. The shallower waters where there's more sunlight, have a very different thing going on than super deep parts of the ocean. And so it's a lot of it is about temperature and sunlight that creates these different zones.
Okay, quick, quick rundown of ocean zones. We covered this in the Ichnology fish episode, but who doesn't love a refresher course, So let's break it down.
Now.
Epipologic is at the top. This zone from the surface to about two hundred meters or six hundred feet down gets some sunshine, so plants grow. The bulk of ocean life hangs out there below that are the mesopolagic, bathy polagic, abyssopolagic, and finally the very bottom the hatl zones. Now, the average depth of the ocean is about thirty seven hundred meters and its deepest known point is almost seven miles below the surface in a trench near Guam. I'm just
thirsty for stats. Here's another good one.
That ninety seven percent of the water on Earth is in the ocean. So when we think about fresh water and drinking water, that's a good like reality check on how important it is to be careful with our water.
I'm sure that like children ask you this, but the ocean, why is that salty? I'm just gonna ask.
I'm gonna ask. The ocean was formed by all this stuff that comes off of land, right, so all the rocks that are sort of eroding over time into the sea have different things in them that make the ocean salty. And I think over time things change, right as evaporation happens and things like that, So salinity can fluctuate a bit. And that's actually part of what creates these large ocean currents,
is how salinity has an effect on things. Because if you've ever had the chance to go in the ocean after it rains, you'll realize that it's in the Caribbean anyway. So this just happened to me. I jumped in the Caribbean sea after a rainstorm, and there's a layer of fresh water on top that's cold, like cool rain, and
then the ocean underneath it is salty and warm. Because salt water is heavier, it's more dense, and so it sinks, and colder water is also more dense than it sinks, and so that sets up can set up either like layers or currents that are are moved just by like these gradients in salinity and temperature.
So imagine dense cold water and dense saltwater doing a very fluid kind of sensual tango. Now I'm still trying to keep this half of the episode light and sunny. So okay, let's see questions about the oceans that are not depressing. Okay, all right? Was she always into like messages in a bottle like the world's oldest one was found earlier this year in Western Australia bearing a note from a German naval vessel from eighteen eighty six. Maybe that's fun.
I was super into picking up like shells and pieces of sea glass and things like that. I was always enamored by the things that you would find on the beach, but not messages per se.
Right, do you still have any of your seashells?
And oh, totally you do. Yeah. I started a shell collection when I was five in Key West, Florida, and I usually find one shell from every beach I go to. I mean, you can't. I don't want to like take all the pretty things, but and sometimes I take just like a little tiny fleck of something to just put in my I have a fish bowl full of one tiny thing from each to beach I've ever been to.
Really, do you have a name for that fishbowl?
Or is this a fishball?
Now?
Have you been to all of the what would have been considered oceans?
And I've spent a lot of time in the Caribbean, a little bit of time in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, but very little time in the Pacific. Is the whole world of Pacific islands I haven't been to yet? Now?
Is it true that the Pacific Island that the Pacific Ocean was named because they thought it was calmer?
I think that's right. Is that not to be the case?
A little backstory. So Portuguese explore Magellan had hit some shitty conditions through what's now known as the Straits of Magellan near the southern tip of Chili Is in the fifteen hundreds, and rounding the corner into the Pacific basin. He was like, oh, so much better. It's so calm here,
it's so Pacific, hence the name. But not all of it is calm, however, but in the equatorial region of the sea, that part tends to have kind of a more chill vibe, less wind activity, and it's technically called the doldrums. That is the maritime term for it. So the next time you're having kind of like a ho hum period of your life, I guess just take comfort that life isn't tossing you around and making you barf into its violent currents. See this is the optimistic part
of the episode. Do you listen to any ocean apps on your phone to chill out?
Like ocean sound? But yeah, no, I put earplugs in and just like Zone all the way out.
I wasn't sure if someone who studies the ocean and has dedicated their life to essentially saving the ocean would be like I don't. I don't want to hear an app because it's just a bad simulation.
Or yeah, I'm a pretty light sleeper, Okay, so I like complete silence, and I think, yeah, as someone who is like ninety five percent vegan m hm and who never eats fake meat, is maybe the same thing, right, Like I'm not going to go have like a soy hot dog and I'm not going to listen to like fake ocean sounds.
Do you do a lot of like diving? Did you have to do a lot of diving?
I used to. Yeah. For my PHDV search, I did three or four hundred dives.
Do you like being underwater? I know some people are like, it's so beautiful, it's like I'm flying, and other people like it's so big, it's terrifying.
It's pretty cool. Yeah. I mean some people think that if you don't scuba dive, you can't experience the ocean fully, and I totally disagree with that. I think scuba diving is nice because I can't hold my breath for an hour.
Yeah, I neither can.
I I only learn to dive when I realized that I needed to as a tool for my scientific research. And it's pretty neat. I mean, to be able to, you know, be underwater long enough to really watch the behavior of an octopus or a parrot fish or whatever it is is an amazing opportunity. But I think snorkeling is underrated. Yeah. I think more people should get like super into snorkeling because you can see so much just bye, you know, diving down and taking a look and being
in shallow water. So I hate the thought that people think if you're not scuba diving and then like why bother because there's so much you can learn about the sea and just enjoy like the spectacular creatures from the surface or from like a little shallow dive down with your mask on.
You just got to learn that trick where you blow the water out when you surface, right, Yeah, Okay, is that hard to master?
Now you can totally do it. Anyone can do. Ok. Or sometimes when I like don't have enough air left in my lungs when I come after this surface for whatever reason, I just take the mouthpiece out and just breathe there. Normally you could do that too. There are definitely ways that anyone can figure this out.
But as long as we're banding about some facts, why is the sea such a pretty blue, Well, same reason the sky is the water absorbs the redder part of the visible spectrum and then the shorter, bluer wavelengths bounce back at our faces. Most scientists, especially oceanologists, agree that this is very pretty.
The one thing it reminds me of is how the color of blue and shallower water changes based on the color of the sand. So if you have really white sand, you have really bright turquoise in the shallow water, and then as the sand gets different colors, you get kind of different colors of blue. So it matters what the bottom is. If you have like a dark rocky bottom or like a volcanic it's different.
And I didn't realize that a lot of white sand is coral sand, right, yeah.
Yeah, and a lot of it came out of a parrotfish's but why Yeah. Fish are my favorite fish. They have a beak like a parrot and they come in all these like teal, yellow, green, red, magenta, like amazing colors, And they have a beak like a parrotfish, and they a bite. They scrape algae off the reef. Basically, they are the lawnmowers of the reef. A very important job. And as they're doing that scraping, they get bits of dead coral or rocks, and then they digest that and
they poop sand. So if you're on a reef with a lot of parrotfish, and this is where it's actually very cool to be diving, and you look out at the landscape of the reef and you see all these fish swimming over it, and a lot of them are parrotfish, and they're just like leaving trails of sand in the water behind them. But it looks like these like con trails of parrotfish poop, as if the sea was the sky and they were airplanes. I had no idea. It's
pretty amazing. So some beaches are like ninety something percent like parrotfish poop sand. I mean it, it is coral and rocks and stuff, but it's like that's how it's been pulverized. You're like, thanks dudes, thank you so much. And so there's a push right now to protect these fish because they're doing such important work of taking the algae off the reef. Because algae grows so much faster than coral. Coral only grows a centimeter or so a year,
whereas algae, like plants, just go gangbusters. And as we're putting in more nutrients are running off into the ocean from different kinds of human pollution, agriculture in particular, you're seeing that the algae is basically being fertilized, so it's growing even faster and there's more of it. So we need these parrotfish, these lawnmowers more than ever, and so there's a bunch of people working on campaigns around the world to protect.
Parrotfish, protect sand butts.
Protect the sand poopers.
What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen in the ocean?
Oh, that's such a good question. Oddly because we were just talking about the colors of blue, the thing that comes to mind for me is just really really clear and being able to see like one hundred feet, and that's pretty amazing that just that clarity of being underwater, being and really being able to see.
Here, we veered off into a whole discussion about the horrors of shrimp, but I'm just gonna stick with this format of a happy first half of the episode. More on shrimp in just a few minutes, just a few more wistful, positive things, and then we're going to get to Patreon questions and ocean sets. I'm just trying to stick with this vision. It's hard.
Do you have a.
Favorite movie or book set in, set in or about the ocean. Do you have like an escapist movie where you're like, ah, love that ocean?
The life Aquatic is pretty good? Really yeah, I really cracks me up, especially because it captures like the ridiculousness of light on boats and like, yeah, trying to capture rare creatures and get along in tight living quarders with a bunch of weird scientists and yeah, that's a good one. And I'm writing a children's about the ocean. Oh, it's about a little black girl from Brooklyn who goes to the Caribbean, falls in love with the ocean, and decides to try to save it. But on earth to you
with that idea? I don't know. It just like came to me to dream. Do you have a title for it yet?
Can you say?
No?
Not yet.
I'm just like starting to finish up the very first draft, so I don't have an agent or anything for it yet, but stay tuned. Oh my god, heads up.
If you are a literary agent listening to this and you're not the one to reach out to doctor Johnson to get this idea. Made I feel bad for you because this book is going to be so good. Also, as she was grabbing something out of her purse at this moment, she told me a very wonderful story and I would have loved to have mm hmm, that's so great.
I know.
I never leave the help about right now.
Yeah, I have a friend who does a lot of theater works. Had I met up with her when I was just coming back from a trip out to Long Island, and I was telling her about it, and she introduced me to another person as a marine biologist. And then I was like, yeah, but I didn't even like use my snorkel this weekend and like pull it out of my person. She was like, I would never even use that in like a play. It's just so over the
top that you carry this. I know, so sometimes I pull snorkels out of my handbag.
Okay, this is where we're going to take a turn.
All right, I'm ready.
We're going to ask some questions from Patreons. Now this is we've talked all about how wonderful the ocean is. It's time to get into maybe the darker stuff. We're like, this is where like the sad music would be cute, like you've really fallen in love with a character in a movie and then you find out that, like, yeah, you know whatever, they have a horrible disease. So okay, let's do it. Let's get into this sad stuff via
questions from the ologies Patreon patrons. But okay, before we do, because this is an Encore presentation, we have the power to time travel two years into the future, almost to the day that this interview was recorded, so we checked back in with doctor Anna Johnson about what she's been up to. Okay, you're going to want to hear this.
Hello, Alogy's crew, this is doctor Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. I am so glad to be back with you. I am coming to you live from my closet in my apartment in Brooklyn, where lots of podcasts I think are getting made these days in various closets around the country, and I thought I would give you a little update to let you know what's happened since twenty eighteen when it
comes to my work and the ocean. So I started a think tank called Urban Ocean Lab for the future of coastal cities, so I get to nerd out about ocean and climate and urban policy and design, which is a total blast. And maybe the most exciting thing actually is that on this very podcast, when Ali was interviewing me, I talked about wanting a book agent, and Anthony Mattero from CIA actually heard this interview while he was on a treadmill and apparently almost fell off and found my
email address and got in touch with me. And we now have signed two book deals with Penguin Random House, and the first one is coming out in just a few weeks in September on the twenty second, and it's called All we Can Save, Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. It's an anthology of essays and poems and quotes and illustrations by women climate leaders that I've co edited with doctor Catherine Wilkinson, and it's really beautiful.
So if you want to learn more about who the contributors are and other details, you can find us at All we Can Save dot Earth. But one of the reasons I'm here back with you today is because I have just started my own podcast with Spotify and Gimlet, co created with Alex Bloomberg. And he and I are co hosting it as well. It's called How to Save a Planet, and it's all about climate solutions and what we can all do to effect change at the level
that really matters. So I hope you will find us and tune in on Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts. Yeah, because we've got some work to do when it comes to the climate. So the last thing I'll say is we're coming up on election season, and I hope you will all think about a climate and the ocean when you're deciding who to vote for, because that really matters, and we are running at a time to get it right when it comes to the environment,
so please vote. And the last last thing I'll say is that when I came on this show two years ago, I got the loveliest, war most welcome from the whole ologies community. My comments were just overflowing with sweet things. So thank you all for being so darn wonderful and keep it up, okay.
In side note, back in twenty eighteen, we didn't have sponsors of the show, just wonderful patrons who helped with all the expenses. But now since we have sponsors, we can donate a portion of the proceeds to a cause relevant to the ologist. So I'm choosing to donate it
to Urban Ocean Lab. Urban Ocean Lab harnesses collective wisdom to envision and design targeted solutions for the future of coastal cities, and that drives development of policy frameworks, and that drives development of policy frameworks to catalyze legislative change. So Urban Ocean Lab is a five oh one c three nonprofit founded by doctor Johnson herself, and you can learn more at Urbanoceanlab dot org. And so that donation was made possible by spon who you will hear about. Now, okay,
onto your ocean questions. They are salient ones.
Let's dive in.
So Becca asks how bad, just point blank, how bad have we found up the oceans? Is it salvageable or are we just playing a sad waiting gabe. So she says, it makes me really emotional to think about the disgusting and terrifying things down there. Who are going to die because people are assholes? And then Mama Awesome said, this is also my question.
So this is like, this is the big question, how bad, really bad? Y's the answer, It's really bad?
Oh man, this is like the scene where a corseted heroin cough's blood into a white kerchief. Here we go.
I mean, we have done an amazing job of messing up the ocean on a planetary scale. We've completely changed the chemistry of seawater through polluting the air with carbon dioxide. The ocean is absorbing thirty percent of that, and so it's acidifying the oceans, which makes it hard for things with shells to grow their shells, makes it hard for fish to smell their homes and navigate, and make them a little bit delusional and not run away from predators.
There's all these different things that we're just learning about that changing the very chemistry of the ocean is doing so that's pretty bad. And just the warming of it. All these creatures have been adapted to specific temperature ranges and now those ranges are changing, and so they're trying to migrate so that they don't like melt. Their metabolisms can't necessarily handle all this. So between the acidification and the warming that are associated with climate change, and then
overfishing is a big one. We've taken out about ninety percent of the big fish in the ocean since nineteen fifty. Right now, ninety percent of fish populations around the world are either fished to capacity or overfished. So there's ten percent that are like not fully exploited. The other ninety percent are fully exploited or over exploited, so there's not
like a lot of room left to take more. And we've also been fishing further from shore into deeper waters, using like more and more high tech tools, all the like radar and sonar and helicopters and these things that were developed to fight wars are being used to find the last fish. So we have these like really high tech boats and high tech equipment that we have to use because the fish should become so rare and so.
And then with coastal development, we're destroying the habitats on the coast, whether that's mangroves or wetlands or whatever that is. And those are the nursery habitats for the sea, and those are the natural filtration systems from land to sea.
As long as we're in the sad half, let's get some straight talk about shrimp, one of my favorite foods, which I also always assumed was relatively sustainable because they are like the ocean's cockroaches. They're small, they're gross, they're plentiful.
Right, percent of shrimp is horrifically unsustainable. Really.
Yeah.
It's either caught with like a net the size of a football field in industrial fishing, that's like dragged along the seafloor, taking up everything, and a large portion of what's caught, like up to half or so of what's caught, might be thrown back dead and wasted. I catch. So that's no good, and that proportion can actually be even worse, and it, you know, bulldozes the habitat while that's happening as well.
Oh, that's terrible. What about farmed fish? Is there such a army?
Yeah? So farm shrimp is often farmed by bulldozing mangroves along the coast to make these ponds for them. And the mangroves are the nursery habitat for all the fish on the reef. They filter pollution running off from shore. They and they protect places from storms like in the tsunami in Indonesia ten years ago now more. Yeah, the places that had intact mangroves fared a lot better because
that buffers the waves. And so when we bulldoze that ecosystem, that's the protection, it's the nursery habitat, it's all these functions that we're losing, and then we just pollute it with shrimp growing in high density and feed them all this stuff and antibiotics as we're growing them in such close quarters that they're all getting sick. So it's not
really a great way to do it either. And then there's been some exposees in the last few years that a lot of shrimp grown in Southeast Asia is probably peeled by slaves.
Oh my god.
So whether you care about like the human rights angle or the sustainability angle, i'd stay away from shrimp.
So ask your fish sellers where the shrimp comes from. Ayana says there are domestic shrimp farms in Florida and Oregon. They're doing a really good job bringing less guilt laid in shrimp to market, but it'll cost a little more for obvious reasons.
But if you're not paying like twenty dollars a pound for shrimp, it's not good for the planet or for oh my god. And it's all like laden with these antibiotics and chemicals from the processing, so it's not healthy for you either.
Oh my god, I eat.
So the fact that it's the most popular seafood in America, and like people don't know their day. It's all these like buffets. It's probably in my college. I'm a monster. Yeah, well that's the thing, Like people don't know about it.
I thought they were like you'd figure like, oh, they're lower maybe on the food chain, and they're kind of buggy, they're a little bit insect like maybe they're maybe it's fine.
Yeah, oh my god, I had known. I think the challenge is that And this is another one of those moments when I realized had a realization about ocean conservation, is that traditions don't necessarily scale. Like the things that humans could eat and the ways we could fish and use the ocean when there were you know, one billion people on the planet or less. It's just very different what we can get away with as we're approaching eight
we just can't do things in the same way. And that's a really hard conversation to have with communities that have these strong traditions tied to the sea, but whose populations are growing and are being impacted by what's happening in other places. Because the ocean is all connected so yeah, we're at this moment where we just need to rethink
our relationship with the ocean. And that doesn't mean we can't still enjoy it, and there is such thing as sustainable seafood, but we just need to be more careful and change our expectations for what we're how we're going to be able to use it, and be ready to make some adaptations.
I'm just thinking about cruise Ship Shrimpface.
What a horror show. It's a house of course.
Listen, I warned you that this episode would be more on the tragic side, So let's just dive deeper.
So between coastal development and overfishing and climate impacts and then just like straight up pollution. Yeah, everybody knows at this point about plastic pollution in the ocean, but there's all so a lot of pollution that comes from the runoff of all the pesticides and herbicides they put on to our farms. When it rains, runs into rivers, and that runs into the sea. So even if you're inland,
there's still that connection. So yeah, we've done a really good job of thoroughly screwing up the ocean, but there are a lot of reasons to not give up, because I'm also extremely good at sitting on my couch eating popcorn and watching trashy television, and so I would like hone that craft. If I'm not in the ocean, We're just not worth it anymore. And so instead I'm like seasons behind on everything and really focused on this because I feel like we have an incredible opportunity to really
make a difference. We've seen so many examples of things that work that when you change the way that fishing happens, when you establish a protected area, when you work with hotels and companies to change the way they manage their waste, when you work with farmers to explain how they go snick to the sea and they change their practices. There are just more and more and more stories about things that are working, and so it's about replicating what's working
and scaling that that work. So definitely don't give up. But I obviously I'm not sugarcoating it either, like it is bad. The ocean is different than it was when we were born and we're not even that old. Wow, So the ocean that I saw in nineteen eighty five, when I first saw the ocean is different now and perhaps permanently. So the way that I deal with this sort of like existential crisis of like, oh my god,
the planet is dying. What do I do? Should I just like drink a bottle of whisky and forget about it? The answer is like, no, I can't be hungover because there's all this great work to do, and it's a matter It's not a matter of like zero, like a totally dead ocean, or like one hundred percent healthy ocean.
It's where we're going to fall in between, because with eight billion people on the planet, we can't go back to like a perfectly pristine ocean, but we can aim for eighty percent or sixty percent or even thirty percent is much better than zero in our livelihoods, our food security, our health hangs in the balance. So depending on the day, am either fighting for like twenty percent or eighty percent, but like, any of it is better than zero?
And now, okay. Ocean cleanup. Carrie Stewart and Rob Smith both had the same question, does supporting a group like for Ocean really help clean up the ocean of plastics? Like, are any of those methods of getting things out of the ocean? Are those really going to work. Are those like, do we want to believe that they work?
We definitely want to believe that they work. Oh my gosh, do we want to believe that they work? And a lot of people have been sort of fooled into thinking that that problem is solved, like there's this technology that we'll just like clean it up and we don't have to worry about it anymore. But that technology is far from being proven, very far from being proven. And if we think about the challenges of cleaning up something as big as the ocean God, which is, you know, seventy
two percent of the planet, that's a tall order. And not to say we shouldn't try, but I think the question is where are we going to devote our resources and energy? And so one when I think about it, I think about how do we stop the flow of plastic into the ocean.
This is a good point, and gird your hearts for another horrifying statistic.
Because the cleanups don't matter if we're still dumping one ton of plastic into the ocean every four seconds. What I worked with the group Lonely Well, I've been working with them on making these calculations. How much are we actually putting in, Where is it coming from? What types of sources is it? And that's the number that we
came up with. One ton of plastic is entering the ocean every four seconds globally, and so when we think about that, I've spend my time thinking about how to prevent every second of plastic entering the ocean.
So quick history, how long has plastic been around? So technically since eighteen fifty six, but it wasn't in until World War Two that mass production started. Now, around nineteen fifty four, DuPont and Dow Chemical invented and licensed expanded polystyrene, which is used in packaging and bottles. Although there's a bunch of different types of plastic. So yeah, in the
nineteen sixties we saw an explosion of plastics in commercial uses. Now, nineteen sixty seven's classic film The Graduate was sadly on point about one piece of career advice.
I just want to say one word to deal, just one word yes, sir Ian listening, yes or plastics?
So what can we do not? And I think beach cleanups are great, they raise awareness, they built community. We obviously should pick up what we can. I think the focus should be more on coastal cleanups as opposed to weigh out in the ocean, because once you get to weigh out in the ocean, you're dealing with a lot of like interesting physics and oceanography challenges, but also the fact that if you're just scooping everything up, you're scooping
up the marine life as well. So there's a lot of opportunity to just clean up along the coast, but then to really force corporations and governments to do their part. This shouldn't be about you and me going up and picking up straws and bottles from the coast. It should be about us refusing to use them. But it should should really be like corporations changing the way they are manufacturing things, and governments improving their recycling capacity and demanding
that companies produce only recyclable things. So much of the plastic that's produced is not even recyclable.
Oh, I didn't know that. Just checked out a nat GEO article from last year that said ninety one percent of the world's plastic isn't recycled, and I audibly whimpered in a public coffee shop. So you know how plastics usually have a triangle with a number in the middle on the bottom. Not all of those will be reincarnated into other objects. One in two usually can four and five are baby and three, six and seven are usually
not accepted by recycling programs. So read up on the hot goss between the numbers because some types of plastics even contain fun chemicals like PPAs that have shown to contribute to infertility. Did I warn you that this podcast be a bummer, because I know I did. Welcome to Hell.
Now.
Luckily, people like Ayana are out there working on better public policy. She's like the Amal Clooney of the sea. Also, some folks in the other room while we were recording this, we're having kind of a spirited discussion. So if you hear their chatter, just pretend we're having a fun time at a cocktail party chatting about preventing environmental doom.
There's a lot of room for improvement there, but we're seeing I think we're actually seeing some really positive signs in that direction. The UN has been organizing something called the Clean Seas Initiative, and they have gotten I think three dozen countries to sign on and make commitments to reducing ocean plastic pollution. So we're starting to see commitments at not just at the individual level. I will, you know, give up bags and straws and caramun water bottle and
these are all great things to do. I do them. But what really inspires me is Kenya and Rwanda banning plastic bags, Costa Rica pledging to go completely without single use plastics by twenty twenty. The EU is starting to make some big policies, and so all around the world we're starting to see these shifts. I think Chile just ban plastic bags as well. So yeah, there's a lot
of good stuff happening there. We're starting to see a lot of momentum there, and I think that's great because it's also an opening to talk about ocean problems more generally. Great now that you care about, you know, a straw and a turtle's nose, like, let's talk about let's talk about what else is happening to those turtles. Let's talk about overfishing and poaching and the state of the habitats
that they are trying to live in. Right, So what you're saying is the tide is changing, the tide is turning.
I of course I got this question, and I'll just touch on it just in case there's anything that you didn't just answering that. But Maria Kumro, Jen Borlck, and Sarah Millington all wanted to know how much positive impact on marine plastic debris will the plastic straw ban really have. They all kind of want to know, like what's your thought on like plastic straws or the problem like they are. But essentially, the.
Plastic straws are a really big problem because they cannot be recycled. They're like too small for municipal recycling to deal with. Okay, So that's one of the reasons they're a particular problem. There's obviously a lot of other problems. We're using a million plastic bottles every minute, so that's not good.
Just personal shout out to companies like LK and Hosley Taylor for making these public water bottle filling stations so we could stop buying plastic bottles when we're parched and in public. It's they're so great. Look for the little bottle silhouette near a water fountain. You can roll up with your thermos and just filler up boss for zero dollars.
It's great.
And they have these little counters that took off the number of plastic bottles they prevented from being on Earth, and so when your bottle's done filling, the number goes up one more. It's very fulfilling.
And bags, I think we the average plastic bag is used for twelve minutes before it's thrown out. So there's a lot of other issues. But straws are problematic because they can't be recycled, and they also are one of the top items that you find in beach cleanups? Are they So they're like they're small, right, so they kind of like escape garbage cans and like people, they just they end up on the beach a lot, and so that means they end up in the ocean a lot.
So yeah, they're one of the top five items that the Ocean Conservancy has been consistently finding when they do these organize these global international ocean cleanups, and they collect data on you know, what are what is really out there? Like what are the top ten? And plastic straws are always in the top five and number one? Yeah, and you guess what number one is?
Oh, no, I would say bottles, but I don't know, it's cigarette butts.
What the number one beach polition, like by the number of items, not by like the mass of them. A cigarette butts, and it's those plastic filters at the end, and of course that's like all the chemicals from the cigarette. It's like a lot of them are trapped in that filter. So they're pretty toxic too, So don't just throw your cigarette butts in the sand.
Oh my god, they're like plastic cancer tampons.
That's the worst. It's pretty bad.
I mean, it is funny that culturally it's like, oh, I never drop a wrapper on the ground, but people like I just like a cigarette butt. Where where do they think that goes? Like raccoons are eating them? No, nobody wants those. That's really illuminating. I had no idea, and I wasn't sure if like plastic straws were like being a scapegoat for or if they were, But that's good to know.
I think they also are not necessarily escape books scapegoat, but symbolic, right because for most people they're completely unnecessary, like reapply your lipstick because that's your issue, or like whatever it is. I think there's a really important exception that needs to be made for the disability community. There
are people who need to use straws. And that's fine, because that would be a scapegoat if we're saying, like there are a few people who really need them because that's how they drink, that's fine, but I think so there's no need. Absolutely we should avoid making these blanket statements that that are problematic for folks who need them, but most of us really really really don't need them. And the way that drinks are made, they just like
come with straws in them. So I think even just the flip from straws automatically to straws only on request would make a really big difference.
What about those lids that are like, no worry, you don't need a straw, but they're more plastic.
I think that's ridiculous.
Okay, that's I thought.
I mean, this is probably like an uncouth opinion, but I thought that Starbucks like really punted on that one. I mean, it's already like, you know, adult sippy cups is like their whole thing, and I just just like doubled down on it.
I saw that I saw someone drinking out of that, and I was like, what is that like host of straw? And then I read something later that day that was like.
This is plastic. I was like, goddamn silly. Although the alternative which I do. When I have like an urgent need for an iced coffee and they try, I always order it in a paper cup, oh without a lid. Good to know. So that's my hack for that because obviously, like ice coffee is delicious, and I sometimes they'll get
enough sleep, so I get it. I just you know, there are ways to work around this or I think a really big other opportunity for that anyone can do, and that it shouldn't be just about individual responsibility, but like restaurants and cafes should do is ask you do
you want it for here? Or to go? Because if you go into a cafe and you look around, everyone's using like to go containers and they're all sitting there, and it drives me bonkers, I know, and I think it's like no one wants to wash the dishes, or they haven't actually built these cafes with enough dishwashers or whatever. So I think there's a shift that needs to happen there and just ask me do you want it for here? To go? Yeah?
I drank a cup of tea in a cafe before this that was given to me in a paper cup no lid, thank god, but still and I got it and I had it in my hand and I was like, oh no, yeah, oh I don't need this jerk. Okay, question about the garbage patch. Let's talk about the garbage patch.
BLAIRR.
Nelson and Eva both ask like, what's going on with the Great Pacific garbage Patch? Which honestly sounds like it sounds like not even a real thing. I mean, I know it's very real, but it's just like so fancify horribly named. And then what should we do about it? And like what are we and what's happening with like microbeads and tiny, tiny particulate plastic.
So for the Great Pacific garbage Patch, that's a thing. There's actually so the reason that it exists is because of ocean currents that sort of swirl around in these gyres and then collect things.
So a gyre is like a spiral or a whirl. It's kind of like a howlick of the ocean.
And so since there's plastic that gets concentrated into this patch, most of the plastic in that patch is really small, so it's like the size of your pinky fingernail. It's not like a bunch of bottles floating on the surface. It's not actually like an island you could walk across. And so I think the initial reporting on that was great because it got people to care about it, but it also created sort of a false image in our
heads of what it looks like. It's just it's a higher concentration of plastic in that part of the ocean, so it's actually like a little bit, which makes it a lot harder to clean up, right, because it is quite diffuse.
I watch some videos and the plastics hauled from the ocean's range from like mountains of soggy fishing nets to tiny, tiny flecks of broken down bottles and toys. And the Great Pacific garbage batch is estimated to be between the size of Texas to the size of Russia, somewhere between there. Now, it may be the largest on the planet, but it's not alone. It has other garbage patch friends.
And there's one of these garbage patches in every ocean gyre. So there are five major ocean gyers, and there's a garbage concentration, our garbage patch in every single one. So what we can do about it is lobby for changes in corporate and government practices regarding plastic to prevent this one ton of plastic entering the ocean every four seconds. We can obviously change our individual behavior, and we can support confservation groups that are doing really practical things to
turn that around. So one of the there's a few groups that I think are really exciting. There's Lonely Well is doing really good work on the corporate level, gathering together partners for that to push there and working with the UN. The Ocean Conservancy started something called the Trash Free Seas Alliance that's also working with corporations and governments to shift and the status Quo surf Frider, which is an organization that's focused on the surfing community and activating
people who love the ocean to help protect it. They have been really active in campaigns against single use plastic. I think that's the term that we need to think
about as like single use plastic. There are certainly some like medical uses of plastic that I'm happy to have for, you know, for safety and sanitary reasons, but I think just like the disposability of everything all the time in our daily lives is problematic and actually creates this mindset of like, oh, I'll just get a new one or I'll just whatever, and it's like feeding this which is really unsustainable, consumerist, disposable mindset that I think is not
super great, not good. There's a lot of things we can do about it, so support groups like that, and there's also a lot of there's like cool low tech solutions that are out there. And my fra one is called mister trash Wheel, which is basically like you know those old fashioned like steamboats that had like a big water wheel at the back. It's basically like this huge water wheel and then behind it is a dumpster.
Oh so I just checked out a video of mister trash Wheel and it's the happiest I've been during the entire making of this episode. I was not prepared for how cute this garbage gobbling machine is. So picture a water wheel on one side, and then a domed canopy that looks kind of like a covered wagon, but with one end a big mouth fed by a conveyor belt of trash. Atop this whole structure two huge googly eyes giving this giant trash apparatus the look of this hungry,
floating earth saving cartoon. I want to hug it, even though it's the size of like a motor home and also probably very smelly and would eat me and throw me in a dumpster, but with good intentions.
And so you put this water wheel in a harbor or a river, and as pollution runs down the river, it gets sort of funneled towards this water wheel. And then as this wheel spins, it picks up bottles or tires or whatever is floating down and just like deposits it as it turns in the dumpster behind it. And then you take away the dumpster and like dispose of it properly in the dump And so you're preventing all this stuff from ever even getting to the sea. So
this is in Baltimore. There's mister trash Wheel and then there's Professor trash Wheel. So there's two. And they did like a big social media review where they like revealed that Professor Trasheel was a woman, which I was obviously amused. So stuff like that I think is really promising. And so instead of thinking about like cleaning up the middle of the ocean, there's so much that we can be doing closer to land and should be doing.
It's amazing that you're like, oh wait, we didn't have something to prevent that from going out there exists whole time.
Yeah, exactly, do we Yeah?
Oh my god Iolanthe wants to know how can we save the Great Barrier reef?
We could stop climate change? Okay, do you like the thing?
Cool?
Yeah?
What about sunscreens? I hear that's a factor.
It is a factor. And Hawaii just banned these sunscreens with these chemicals that are harmful to corals I can't remember the name of, like oxyxy spend spend.
They also screw up your hormones.
Yeah, it's fun.
So it's worth it to do a little more reading on chemicals like oxybenzone, which can lower testosterone in adolescent boys. It can leach into mother's breast milk and cause endercrine disruption among humans. So even if you have a personal beef against coral reefs and you don't care if they die, you might want to switch to mineral sunscreens just for the sake of your own gonats.
Basically, we should only be using mineral sunscreens like with zinc and like that make you look weird and pasty, like that's the one you want or just what I do is like I just wear long sleeves, are sitting in the shade when I've had too much sun. Also super effective.
The mineral ones are great for summer goths.
It's a great way to do that. One hundred Yeah. So I think it's great that Hawaii is leading the way on that. So that makes a difference. I mean, fishermen that I've talked to in the Caribbean said, when then cruise ships come in and all the tourists like slather on all the sunscreen and then jump in the ocean and go snorkeling, it looks like this oil slick of like shiny iridescent stuff on the surface, and they're like, obviously this is bad for the fish and the corals.
So it's a problem in places where there are high densities of people more so. But there's tons of great options of mineral sunscreen. So just look for things with zinc in them.
Okay, And my question here, what's going to bone the ocean more? Is it going to be the acidification, the plastics or the rising temperatures.
I can kind of cheat and just say climate change, because the acidification and the warm rising temperatures are both effects of climate change as a sea level rise, which is doing some crazy stuff to coastal ecosystems too, so not to mention to our homes and our infrastructure. So yeah, I think climate change is the number one. Plastic is pretty insidious. And the rate at which we're just like taking things out of the ocean overfishing, it's pretty wild.
But the ocean can is incredibly resilient, so it will be fine without us. Like if we really screw this up and kill the ocean, which means we're killing the planet, which means we're killing ourselves. When humans go extinct, the ocean will be fine. It'll be different, but it'll be fine. So it's really like our survival that we should be worried about, right, And so for those who need a more self centered motivation or oshi conservation, and there you go, save the ocean to save yourself.
Paula Herrera asked, were the boys in my middle school right? How much of the ocean is actually whale sperm? I don't think that's quantifiable.
Correct, That is not a number that I have heard, although they do have enormous penises.
Hey, mom, Dad, fast forward, like thirty seconds. Okay, okay, So writing this in a coffee shop, I made sure to angle my screen before hesitantly typing into Google how big are whale dicks? And in huge font the answer popped up twelve inches. I was like, oh, okay. Then I realized that was the diameter. The length is ten feet. Also, whales can pee up to two hundred and fifty gallons a day, sometimes floating on their backs and just becoming
tinkling geysers. Ayana delightfully topped that fact with.
This, but barnacles. Barnacles have the largest penis to body size ratio of anything because they have to have sex without moving. They're like stuck on rocks and they literally have to like penis comes out of one barticle, like finds another barticle, like knocks on the door. They like open their cell, like, let this penis in. Can you even imagine?
My God, you're in like a long distance relationship.
Yeah. The only way to get a touch is like send your dick over.
It's a good dicagram.
Basically, thousand babies.
Christa Avanpado, Jenny Kloda, and Ann Sophie Karen all pretty much asked about your job, like where would someone begin becoming a marine biologist or someone who works on like science policy, Like, how do people become you?
I'm I don't advise becoming me exactly, but I would love for more people to join Team Motion because there's really exciting work to do and it's a wonderful community of folks. I don't know if that my personal story is super instructive. I think there's a lot of different
paths to get to this type of work. I took the science path towards policy because at the time it seemed like there were a lot of lawyers going towards ocean policy but not a lot of scientists sort of meeting them halfway, and so that's the direction I took. But you can go straight into law and policy, you can do communications. We obviously have a lot we can
do to better tell the story and engage people. There's a lot of really amazing art happening around community engagement for oceans, and this organization that I mentioned, TBA twenty one and their academies supporting a lot of really amazing ocean art places like Pioneer Works where we are now that are integrating the science studio with the arts exhibitions
here are really important to changing the cultural narrative. So I guess I would say it depends like what are you passionate about, what are you good at if you want it, and then how can you do that in service of the ocean. So whether that's art or science or law or communications writing, I think there's an opportunity to rewrite our relationship with the ocean. I've done more.
I'm doing more and more writing now because I feel like there's just not enough literature out there about our changing planet and how we relate to it, not in like a depressing way, but just in a like what does it mean to be a human in this day? And that was probably not super helpful. But there's lots of different like fellowships and internships and positions in all these organizations. So an organization like the Ocean Conservancy needs you know, it's it's a big NGO or Oceania or
World Wildlife Fund or Wildlife Conservation Society. They all have the major conservancy Conservation International, they have global ocean conservation efforts. And to run an organization like that, you need secretaries and janitors too, who are committed to like keeping that going. You need accountants, you need lawyers, you need policywers, you need science experts, you need people running social media. So it's it's all those things. You need caterers, I mean,
and boy do we need better sustainability in events. So I think there's there's a million ways to get involved and to do it either full time or to start like an adjacent business or join something that's related to it. So hop on in.
Yeah, like that's great. Find what you're good at and then approach it that way. Yeah, that's instead of trying to shoehorn yourself into.
Because not everyone wants to be a marine biologists and some people think scuba diving is scary, and that doesn't mean you can't be helpful. I would be the worst lawyer.
Like when I see pictures of you, like doing policy and you're in a boardroom with like a bunch of people in suits and you all have folders, and that to me is scarier than like being under the ocean in a vast like so fundings like that, to me, I'm like, oh, oh god, there's so many terms that you have to know, like the fact that you have an.
As forages I might be learned.
So yeah, you know, and I think you touched on this before, but in a nutshell Mariner cosplay, Neil Williams, Sarah Meredith smear tactics all kind of want to know, like in a nutshell, what can the average person do in their life to just help. I mean, I know, limiting single use plastic, do not dump a bunch of garbage into the ocean.
That's a great place to start litter. I've got a list actually on the Ocean Collective website. There's a resources page where you can learn more about all this stuff. There's a page on protected areas and on fishing, and on climate and on pollution, and there's lots of articles and facts you can meet about all that. But there's also a list of like ten things you can do.
So this full list is up at Oceancollective dot co and there's no e on collective.
But number one is to vote OHO and because because politicians are off the hook on a lot of environmental stuff, because their constituents aren't making demand of them. And believe me, I know there's a lot of other issues people are dealing with in the political sphere right now. But if we don't hold our politicians accountable for the state of the environment because they have a lot of ability to change the rules of the game and give the earth
a better fighting chance. So I think I think that's the number one thing is to be politically engaged when there are bills that come up on you know, funding ocean cleanups or research into ocean a certification, or funding protection of marine parks, like, we should be chiming in and saying, yes, this matters, Yes we want to end
over fishing. There's a possibility there's a bill that could change the way that fishing is managed, and people need to be weighing in and saying, excuse me, you want to roll this back and allow people to overfish by law. That doesn't seem to make much sense to me, and so it seems counterintuitive, But political engagement is the number one.
And then obviously we can all be more careful about choosing sustainable seafood and bringing it up at the establishments that we care about and asking for it, reducing our single use plastic, reducing our carbon footprint. Because climate changes having such a big impact on the ocean. We can choose resorts when we go on vacation that are more ocean friendly or sustainable in general. There's no reason to leave your values at home when you go on vacation.
This goes against literally every thing Las Vegas was built on, which is why it's great advice.
Yeah, and so the list kind of goes on from there. I think I maybe got five or six.
Yeah, So I cross checked this with the take action section of the Ocean Collective site, and the remaining items were get informed, you're listening to this great job. Choose other sustainable foods and farms, not just seafood. You can clean up the coast, you can donate to an ocean cause. And she has some recommendations on the resources page and to help spread the word. So tell people about this episode if you feel like it. Okay, now, what do you do if you're crying into a bowl of fish
chowder right now? And when it comes to sustainable seafood, is that kind of something that is said to make us feel better or is there really.
No that's real? And I think with aquaculture where that kind of industry kind of got a rough start, but they are figuring out sustainable practices. There's a lot of the most exciting work in that space for me is around integrated farming or vertical ocean farming, or called three D ocean farming, And it's about growing oysters and mussels and clams and all these different kinds of algae together in a simplified ecosystem that kind of creates habitat for
other things to swim through as well. Algae is super super healthy and underrated sea vegetables, as they are now sometimes called in hip spots, So eat more algae. Farmed shellfish you can eat with impunity as much as you want those oysters, muscles, clams, because they actually just filter the water, so we don't have to catch wildfish to feed the farmed fish, which is a problem with some
other species. Although they're also innovating feeds from like plant proteins and insect proteins to feed fish now, so that industry is coming along well. So what I personally eat is those things I eat seaweed, I eat farmed shellfish, and I eat sardines and anchovies because those tiny fish
they reproduce quickly, there's lots of them. Those tend to be more sustainable than like tunas and swordfish and sharp and those things that like take a long time to reproduce, they don't make a ton of babies, and they tend to be really heavily targeted by fishing. So from the big picture, i'd say that, But then again, like if you're working, if you're in a local community, if you know you're fishermen, if you're part of community supported fishery
like the vegetable boxes CSAs community supported agriculture. They're now doing that for local fisheries, which is cool. You can get like whatever the fisherman caught, you can get a share of the catch.
This, by the way, is also a great excuse to just casually use the word fishmonger in conversation.
Fishmung jes, fishmonger, fishmonger. And there's also an app that's helpful, which is from the Monitary Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program that you can download.
So that's not I wasn't sure if that was just focus focus and like, no.
That's real. There are things that we can feel comfortable eating. But I think the question is also like how many meals a month or a day should we expect to be wild animals, because we would never expect to be eating like lions and tigers and you know, antelopes as our primary source of protein on land. But that's what
we're expecting from the ocean. I mean, tuna are so high up the food chain, and swordfish and all these things, and so I think we just need to change the mindset that we can live sustainably off of wild animals from the ocean that are at the top of the food chain. Yeah.
I guess we see the words seafood buffet together too much.
It's not what I mean, it really does.
Yeh.
That's the wrong the wrong impression of what's out there.
And I think that's part of the problem is that the price of seafood hasn't skyrocketed in tandem with the
with overfishing. You'd think that when something gets more rare, it gets more expensive, but we haven't seen that as much with seafood because it's often really heavily subsidized by governments are helping to pay for fuel or boats or whatever to send more people out fishing, and so you can still get a can of tuna for like what one or two bucks, And so if you if that's the case, why would you think that it's a problem. It's so cheap, there must be a lot of it.
And so I think until the price of things reflects their value and their rarity, then it's going to be really hard to have these conversations that sink in because because that price is such a strong signal.
Right, yeah, can you imagine if a can of tunea was like seventeen dollars?
Yeah.
I can't stop picturing Mariah Carey instagramming herself eating tuna from a can with like a golden fork and other people seeing it. Just like, man, I will never know that kind of life, so aspirational. So now I always ask these questions at the very end, what about your job sucks the most?
What is the worst email? Really? But it's the same thing that sucks about many jobs. I spend way too much time answering email. Yeah, just an end listen, But it's I mean, that's also the way that I'm able to have colleagues all over the world and avoid video chats, which I really hate. So so yeah, but so it's a blessing and a curse.
And what do you love the most about your job? Or the ocean?
I love jumping into the ocean, and I love the look on people's faces when they understand something about it, and it's not like I think the joy and happiness the ocean brings us is amazing and I appreciate that too.
But when like a teenager comes up to me and explains to me that parrotfish are important because they eat algae and poop sand, and they have this like intense look on their face, like I'm explaining to you how this ecosystem works, and like we all to be on board with this, Like that's what brings me the deepest joy is so like the confidence and the engage, like the engagement in solutions that people have when they learn something about it. So that's something that really inspires me.
Right, It's great when you can see that shift from an ownership of the ocean like it's ours to exploit versus like, uh, a responsibility to ocean, do you know what I mean? Like absolutely, you know, like a familiarity and an investment in it, you know.
Yeah.
But and now where can we find you and your company? Like give us give us some links so we can gently stock.
Yeah, I'm very easy to stop. I think if you put like Iana and marine biologist and you'll find me. And that Ocean Collective is the name of the company, and there's no E at the end of collective because that is a heavy metal band in Australia and obviously we needed all the social handles we consistent, So it's Oceancollective dot co is our website, and we're at Ocean Collective on Twitter and Instagram. Cool and then personally and you can find me at Iana Eliza on Twitter and
Iana dot Elizabeth on Instagram. I think the online ocean community is actually a really cool aspect of the job as well, because nerdy ocean jokes are amazing.
There's so many puns to be made, so anyone.
I actually I haven't ever know ifile full of ocean pods? Do you really this is the thing I have? Do you have?
Do you have to highlight one and just pop in the end of an email?
No? I actually try to avoid them. I like, I'm amused by the list of them and how many there are that you wouldn't know until you're writing an email about the ocean, and then you'd be like, all right, let's dive into this people and like figure it out, like don't be afraid to get your feet wet, Like let's just like figure out how we're gonna and I'm just like, I don't know. You can't do that because it's confusing if you're actually talking about the ocean.
Does anyone ever write back? I see what you did there, just always not yet ort not yet. Well, I'm excited for your book to come out to thank you so much for the work that you do. I'm sure the ocean would.
Thanks for your great questions and all of your patreons questions.
There's so many questions. I mean, I had to consolidate into categories.
So many people were like, whoo yeah, so thank you for doing this, My pleasure anytime.
Awesome. Okay, So we have come to the final credits of this sad, romantic saga, but with a glimmer of hope for maybe a happier sequel. So find doctor Anna Johnson all over the internet. Watch her amazing ted talk, her public speaking check out Ocean Collective. Also check out her brand new podcast Hello, how to Save a Planet,
her nonprofit Urbanoceanlab dot org. You can buy her anthology book All We Can Save, which is due out September twenty second, And there's going to be links to those wonderful things in the show notes and just tell the world about the episodes so we can stop losing sleep of the ocean and just start making better choices. Now, go talk to your fishmonger. You can sign up for a beach or river cleanup. You can donate five bucks to an ocean charity, or start reading up on plastic use.
You got this, You're so well armed. Now, you got this. Now to support the podcast, you can sign up to be a patron if you want at patreon dot com. Slash Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com, and there's a grip of back to school stuff up as of today, so collegiate crested shirts and things to put
you in kind of an autumn frame of mind. Thank you Bonnie Dutch for all your new designs, and Shannon Feltis for helping run the site and for putting on the sold out Campologies event in Portland in a few weeks in September. Thank you Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo for being admins to the Facebook Ologies podcast group. And thank you as always to podcastmonger Stephen Ray Morris for
editing and helping produce this. The music was written and performed by Nick Thorburn who also did serials podcast seme he makes other great music in the band Islands and in solo efforts. Okay, so if you stick around to the end of the episode, you know I tell you a secret. And this week's secret is.
That The original secret was about how I'd never seen the Harry Potter movies but I took a quiz to see what house I was in and it said Gryffindor and I was like, I don't really know what that means, but okay, But I decided to put a new secret out because Jaki Rowling is treading out to be a realtord in a transphobe, which is it's just an epic bummer, and I can't abide by that.
So the updated secret is that I still haven't seen a.
Harry Potter movie or read a book, but I feel a lot less bad about that now.
Also, it's five fifteen in the morning. I am about to leave for Lax to board a flight, and it's my first flight since COVID started. So I got a mask, I got a face shield, I got gloves.
Okay, but right
On the form, as relations have form