Speak Up for Blue Podcast Network

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

ABOUT THIS EPISODE This week on World Ocean Radio we are reading from a Scotland Nature Agency presentation that describes the benefits from Nature, defined by four actions: provisioning, regulating, supporting, and acculturating; and the benefits from the sea, actions defined similarly as provisioning, maintaining, and supporting. WORLD OCEAN RADIO World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations wo

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

Dr. Clova Mabin never set out to become a shark educator. She grew up on Scotland's windswept, freezing beaches with no TV until she was 13, which meant a childhood spent outside with her nature-loving father, and an honors degree in zoology from the University of Edinburgh that ended up focused on bird behavior, not the ocean, simply because no marine supervisor was available. A three-month marine conservation placement in Madagascar gave her a first taste of the field. A chance meeting with a

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

This week on World Ocean Radio we are revisiting the Global Footprint Network and the concept of "overshoot", the number of days by which citizens and corporations of any nation consume the natural resources that are sustainably available for that year. And we're describing numbers as measured through a series of graphs that visualize trends by category, up or down, of human enterprise worldwide. World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no

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

About this episode This week on World Ocean Radio we are revisiting the Global Footprint Network and the concept of "Overshoot"-- the number of days by which citizens and corporations of any nation consume the resources that are sustainably available. About World Ocean Radio World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations worldwide. Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory and host of Wor