How To Protect The Ocean

No smell. No warning. Just a beach full of people who start coughing at the same time, grab their towels, and leave. That's red tide, and it feels completely random until you know what's actually happening in the water. Karenia brevis, the algae behind it, produces a toxin called brevetoxin that rides the wind and waves into the air along the shoreline, which is why people can start coughing with no visible sign anything's wrong. The 2017 to 2019 Southwest and Southeast Florida bloom cost the r

Green water. A smell that won't go away. Sometimes, dead fish washing up on shore. That's what too much nitrogen does to a coastline, and it's easy to hear stories like this and feel like the ocean is just losing. This episode is the opposite of that. Here's what most people don't know: a healthy stretch of marsh or mangrove can pull nitrogen straight out of the water before it ever becomes a problem. A single restored 100-acre wetland cut nearby ammonia by 62 percent and total nitrogen by 37 p

Every time this podcast talks about coastal wetlands, the conversation goes straight to carbon. Marshes, mangroves, and seagrasses pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and lock it in soil for centuries, and that story has earned coastal ecosystems a real seat at the climate table. Dr. Adam Langley, a global change ecologist and professor of biology at Villanova University and a research associate at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, thinks there's a second story hiding in that

For decades, the honest answer to "who pays to deal with plastic packaging once it leaves the shelf" was taxpayers, quietly, through municipal budgets that funded garbage trucks and recycling plants running at a loss, whether or not the packaging actually got recycled. That's the system extended producer responsibility (EPR) is built to replace: a legal requirement that the companies making and selling packaging fund what happens to it after a customer buys the product, not the city that collect

Ocean Conservancy's "Not Safe for Wash" campaign is built around a simple premise: the fix for washing machine microfiber pollution already exists, so the fight isn't about inventing new technology, it's about forcing a nearly two-decade-old idea into law. Its own May 2026 poll of 1,010 Americans found concern about microplastics up 32% since 2023, nearly 9 in 10 people concerned, and 81% in favor of requiring filters on new washing machines. The public isn't the obstacle. The real opponent is A

Every wash cycle sheds plastic. Last Monday, Andrew talked with Dr. Anja Brandon of Ocean Conservancy about microfiber pollution, and one question from that conversation stuck with him: has anyone actually fixed this yet? In this solo follow-up, Andrew traces a microfiber's actual path, from the moment agitation, heat, and detergent work it loose from a shirt, through the drain, into a wastewater treatment plant, and out the other side into biosolids, farmland, rivers, and the ocean, with a grow

Bacteria that eat plastic sounds like the fix everyone's been waiting for, and Andrew gets sent videos about it constantly. So on this solo episode, following Monday's interview with Dr. Anja Brandon of Ocean Conservancy, he goes looking for the real state of the science. The short version: it's promising, it's roughly a decade of real research deep, and it is nowhere close to running at the scale the ocean plastic crisis actually needs. The bacterium that started this whole field, Ideonella sa

Every time you run a load of laundry, your washing machine sheds plastic. Not metaphorically: synthetic clothing made from polyester, nylon, and rayon releases microfibers with every wash, and depending on the study, a single load can shed anywhere from a few hundred thousand to millions of them. Most of us have never thought about it, because unlike a plastic bag on the beach, you can't see it happening. In this episode, Andrew talks with Dr. Anja Brandon, Director of Plastics Policy at Ocean C

A new documentary called Descent – Into the Blue starts airing on public television stations nationwide on September 1, 2026. It's narrated by Peter Coyote, directed by Rory Fielding, and one of its central voices is Mike Goldberg, co-founder of the Florida Keys coral restoration nonprofit I.CARE and owner of Key Dives in Islamorada. Andrew sits down with Mike for the full, unedited version of the conversation this week's four solo episodes have been building toward: 30-plus years running a dive

Most coral restoration groups check on a sample of what they've planted, often around 20 to 30 percent, and report that sample as if it represents everything in the water. I.CARE checks on all of it. Every single coral outplant gets monitored at one week, one month, 90 days, then one, two, and three years, with no substitute and nothing left unaccounted for. That rule was built in by co-founders Mike Goldberg and Dr. Kylie Smith before I.CARE ever planted its first coral, and Mike frames it as a