How To Protect The Ocean

This summer, people are boarding whale watching boats and seeing humpbacks feeding in sight of the Manhattan skyline. Fifty years ago, that same water was an open sewer, and every toilet on Manhattan's West Side flushed straight into the Hudson River, untreated. Andrew tells the story of how the whales got here, and why it took most of a century. He starts with the cause: sewers built to empty into the rivers, roughly 590 million gallons of raw sewage a day by the early 1900s, and floating scre

Plastic keeps getting made, it never goes away, and almost none of it gets recycled. Dr. Judith Weis, Professor Emerita at Rutgers University Newark and Andrew's very first guest on this podcast more than 2,000 episodes ago, returns for her fourth appearance to talk about the second edition of her book, Marine Pollution: What Everyone Needs to Know. Judith walks through every major category of marine pollution: nutrients, metals, oil, pesticides, marine debris, pharmaceuticals, ocean acidificat

All week, Andrew has asked listeners to comment on and show up for California's marine protected area review. Today he answers the question that comes after: once the meeting ends and the news coverage stops, how do you find out if anything actually changed? He works through four practical questions every ocean advocate should know how to answer. First, where to find the current rules for any of the 124 MPAs in California's network (the California Department of Fish and Wildlife's own MPA pages

Earlier this year, about 65,000 people submitted comments on a federal deep-sea mining proposal near the Northern Mariana Islands, most of them opposed. The area under consideration nearly doubled anyway. So why should anyone show up to a public meeting about the ocean? Andrew Lewin makes the case with two marine protected area processes that earned broad public support by design. The first is the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park's Representative Areas Program, which rezoned the entire park betwe

In 2014, just two years after California finished its statewide network of marine protected areas, a marine heatwave known as The Blob settled over the Pacific coast and stayed for two years. Kelp forests collapsed up and down the state, and sea star wasting disease wiped out sea stars on a scale few scientists had seen. For a network built partly to protect kelp habitat, it was the worst possible first test. Andrew Lewin walks through what the state learned when it checked. California's first

In 1999, California passed a law ordering the state to fix its patchwork of ocean parks. For two years, almost nothing happened, and two attempts to get the process moving both failed. It took a 2004 public-private partnership, roughly $35 million in public and philanthropic funding, and a decade of work before the state had a real network of marine protected areas. Partway through that decade, more than 300 people from over 50 tribal nations walked into a public meeting in Fort Bragg to protest

California has a network of 124 marine protected areas, and in October the state's Fish and Game Commission takes up 15 proposals that could change it. The proposals came out of the network's first 10-year management review, an adaptive management process written into the law so the network could respond to shifting fish populations, a warming climate, and evolving public values. Anupa Asokan, founder of Fish On, explains what that review looked like from inside the room. Anupa is a marine scie

Sea level rise. It's a phrase everyone's supposed to be afraid of, and almost nobody can picture. A couple of millimeters a year sounds too small to matter, until you find out coastal wetlands have an exact, measured speed limit for how fast they can keep up, and the ocean is closing in on it. Marshes and mangroves have kept pace with a rising sea for thousands of years by building their own soil upward, layer by layer, as plants grow, die, and get buried in place. That strategy has a hard limi

A boat's wake looks harmless right up until you watch it happen over and over. Every wake a boat throws off chips away at a shoreline that took centuries to build, and it happens on calm days, sunny days, days with no storm anywhere near. A NOAA study at Snow's Cut, North Carolina found that roughly half of all boat wake heights on that stretch of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway exceeded the largest wind driven waves measured there, and boats moving at the slow, considerate seeming "plowing"

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