How To Protect The Ocean

Every scientist makes advocacy choices every day, whether they admit it or not. The questions you ask, the communities you engage, the issues you spend your time on, and the moments you stay quiet all push the world in one direction. Oceana's Chief Scientist, Dr. Katie Matthews, argues that staying silent on an issue you care about quietly props up the status quo, and in ocean conservation the status quo is usually the problem. Recorded between meetings while Katie was in Panama, this conversat

Ocean science only protects the ocean when people outside the lab hear it. Dr. David Shiffman, interdisciplinary marine conservation biologist and author of Why Sharks Matter, returns to the show to preview the symposium he organized for the International Marine Conservation Congress: Ocean Science and Conservation Communication: What's New and What's Next. Andrew is one of the presenters. Dave explains why IMCC stands apart from other scientific meetings, with government officials, practitione

Ask most people what the lungs of the planet are, and they'll say forests. Marine biologist Emily Cunningham would point you to phytoplankton: tiny drifting algae that produce about half the oxygen made on Earth. That gap between what the ocean does for us and what we think it does is why she wrote her first book. Our Ocean to Save: How to Protect Our Greatest Climate Ally is Emily's answer to the question she hears more than any other: "What can I do to help the ocean?" Not a list of don'ts, b

Have you ever had an idea for your community, like a beach cleanup, a water fountain, or a patch of shoreline that needs some love, and thought, "If I just had a little money, I could make this happen"? That kind of funding is hard to find. In the UK, there's a charity built for exactly that. Sea-Changers was founded about 15 years ago by Helen Webb and Rachel Lopata, two divers with no background in marine science who watched the places they loved underwater start to decline. Instead of starti

"We'll never see that in our lifetime." You've probably heard it about the ocean. Andrew has heard it plenty, and admits he's said it too. For years it was the standard answer about protecting the high seas, the two-thirds of the ocean that lies beyond any country's borders. Then the High Seas Treaty was agreed, entered into force in January 2026, and passed 100 countries in September, Canada included. In this week's wrap-up, Andrew uses that win to show why a global plastics treaty can happen

"You can't care about plastic. Your phone is made of plastic." If you've ever heard that, you know what it's for. It's designed to make you feel like a hypocrite, so you give up. In this episode, Andrew goes back to one of the most famous moments in plastic pollution: the 2015 video of researchers in Costa Rica pulling a plastic straw from an olive ridley sea turtle's nose. A few months later, the same researcher pulled a plastic fork from another turtle. The straw video helped spark a global p

Picture a beach cleanup. Two hours of hauling bottles, wrappers and foam off the sand. Now picture the same beach ten years later, where you walk the whole length and come home empty-handed. Not because nobody cleaned it, but because there's nothing left to clean. That's a real story, and it happened in Tofino, a surf town on the west coast of Vancouver Island. In 2016 its beaches were covered in plastic, and the local Surfrider chapter realized they could clean every weekend for the rest of th

Do you ever feel disconnected from ocean action? You sign the petition, you donate, you share the post, and you still don't feel like you're doing the work. Andrew knows the feeling. Fresh out of his undergrad, he emailed organization after organization offering to help for free, and mostly heard nothing back. In this episode he explains why that happens (it usually comes down to trust and how organizations take on volunteers), and how to get past it. He also retells the story of Lilly Woodbur

Do you ever feel like ocean action is happening somewhere else? You sign the petition, maybe donate, but you're not really part of the work. Lilly Woodbury knows that feeling, and she found her way in by walking into a Surfrider meeting in Tofino in 2016. Lilly is the campaigns and storytelling director at Surfrider Foundation Canada. In this episode she tells Andrew how a small volunteer chapter helped Tofino and Ucluelet ban plastic straws, bags, cutlery and foam containers, and how Tofino be

Picture a kid at an aquarium in Durban, standing in front of the penguins with a pen and a postcard. She writes one sentence, a promise to change one habit for the ocean, and drops it into a little post box. More than a year later, researchers emailed visitors like her to ask if they'd kept their promise. About half could point to a real change they'd made. This week's episodes covered a lot: marine protected areas nobody can name, a reef that rebuilt itself, and why "fishing is bad" pushes peo