Picture a quiet lake in a boreal forest in northwestern Ontario. No cottages on the shore, no factories upstream. In 2001, a team of government scientists started adding a tiny amount of the synthetic estrogen used in birth control pills to that lak…
This summer, people are boarding whale watching boats around New York and seeing humpback whales feeding in sight of the Manhattan skyline. Gotham Whale, a Staten Island citizen science nonprofit, has now identified 500 individual humpbacks in New Y…
More than 2,000 episodes ago, the very first guest on How to Protect the Ocean was Dr. Judith Weis, talking about her book Marine Pollution: What Everyone Needs to Know. This week she's back for her fourth appearance, with a fully updated second edi…
This week on How to Protect the Ocean, we followed California's marine protected area review from the history of the network to how public process builds support. Along the way, the call to action was simple: submit a public comment, or show up to a…
Earlier this year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management received about 65,000 submissions on a proposal to explore deep-sea mining near the Northern Mariana Islands. Most opposed it. In March 2026, the area under consideration grew from 35.5 millio…
California finished building its statewide network of marine protected areas in 2012. Two years later, the Pacific handed it the hardest test it could. A marine heatwave known as The Blob moved in along the coast in 2014 and, combined with El Niño c…
In 1999, California passed a law ordering the state to fix its patchwork of ocean parks. Nobody did much with it for two years. When the state finally got the process moving, it took a decade, cost roughly $35 million, and at one point put more than…
California has a network of 124 marine protected areas. In October, the state's Fish and Game Commission takes up 15 proposals that could change it. The review behind those proposals was meant to be a chance to make the network stronger, fairer, and…
A boat's wake looks harmless right up until you watch it happen more than once. Watch one roll out from behind a passing boat and hit a marsh bank, and it looks like nothing much happened. Come back to that same bank a year later, and a chunk of it …
Sea level rise is a phrase everyone's supposed to be afraid of, and almost nobody can actually picture. Someone says the ocean is rising a couple of millimeters a year, and the natural response is: so what? That's not a number that means anything on…
No smell. No warning sign. Just a beach full of people who suddenly start coughing, grab their towels, and leave. If you've ever wondered what that actually is, it's red tide, and it feels like a mystery right up until you understand the mechanism b…
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 if you've been following ocean news lately, it can feel like one more thing to be anxious about. It isn't. This…
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, a service now valued at roughly $191 bill…
Every grocery run comes with a bill nobody sees on the receipt. The bottle, the clamshell, the six-pack rings, all of it has to go somewhere once you're done with it, and for decades the honest answer to who covers that cost was taxpayers, quietly, …
The technology that stops a washing machine from shedding plastic into the ocean already exists. Getting a law that requires it is a different fight entirely, and it's one that's already been lost once. This episode digs into Ocean Conservancy's "No…
Every time synthetic clothing gets washed, it sheds tiny plastic fibers. Depending on the study, a single load can release anywhere from a few hundred thousand to 18 million of them, each one roughly 100 times thinner than a human hair. Last Monday,…
Bacteria that eat plastic sounds like exactly the kind of fix the ocean needs. It shows up in viral videos, it comes up in casual conversation, and after Monday's episode with Dr. Anja Brandon of Ocean Conservancy, who half-joked about a future home…
Every time synthetic clothing is made, worn, or washed, it sheds tiny plastic fibers called microfibers. Nylon, polyester, and rayon are all forms of plastic, and today's clothing is made from more synthetic material than ever before. Depending on t…
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 built, in Fielding's own words, like a five-movement symphony…
Most coral restoration groups check on a sample of what they've planted, often somewhere around 20 to 30 percent, and report that sample as if it represents everything they put in the water. I.CARE, the Islamorada, Florida coral restoration nonprofi…
Coral nurseries need constant maintenance. That maintenance is expensive, and it never really stops. When Mike Goldberg, co-founder of the Florida Keys coral restoration nonprofit I.CARE, ran into that problem, his answer wasn't to hire more staff. …
Mike Goldberg has logged over 10,000 dives and spent decades running a dive shop in the Florida Keys, long enough to remember the reefs at their pristine, wall-to-wall best. He's also watched them decline in real time. His first widespread coral ble…
This year, most of the coral on the planet went through heat stress severe enough to bleach it. According to NOAA and the International Coral Reef Initiative, 84 percent of the world's coral reef area, spanning the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Ocea…
Most people picture ocean conservation as scientists on research vessels or advocates holding up protest signs. Holly Koehler spent almost thirty years in a very different setting: windowless UN meeting rooms in New York, offices at the FAO in Rome,…