Every spring, nutrient-rich runoff from farms, cities and towns across the vast Mississippi River watershed flows into the Gulf of Mexico. There it grows a crop of algae that creates one of the world’s largest recurring coastal “dead zones” — an expanse of oxygen-depleted water that can force fish and shrimp to flee and kill sea stars, crabs and other animals trapped on the seafloor.

Few scientists know this phenomenon better than Dr. Nancy Rabalais of Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences. Beginning in the 1970s, Rabalais helped pioneer the long-term research that identified, mapped and explained the Gulf dead zone (though she doesn’t like being labeled “the mother of the dead zone”). She has also studied the impacts of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and received our Peter Benchley Ocean Award for Excellence in Science.

I spoke with Nancy recently along with my Rising Tide Ocean Podcast co-host Vicki Nichols Goldstein, founder of the Inland Ocean Coalition, around the same time that the New York Times wrote a feature article on her work.

David Helvarg: Nancy, let’s start with how you got from Texas to Louisiana and out onto the Gulf.

Nancy Rabalais: I came to Louisiana from Texas after I graduated with my PhD. It was time to move on, and I went to the university’s marine consortium in Cocodrie, Louisiana. I was basically on the water every day, first working in Barataria Bay and then offshore in Louisiana coastal waters. That’s where I’ve maintained my research ever since.

David: You were involved in much of the original research identifying what we now call the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. What exactly is a dead zone?

Nancy: The term “dead zone” is fairly ominous, but it describes an unfortunate situation in the Gulf. It results from high nutrient inputs from the Mississippi River. Those nutrient-rich waters stimulate the growth of phytoplankton in the surface waters. Some of the phytoplankton are eaten by zooplankton and fish, but what isn’t eaten sinks to the bottom. There it decomposes, and that decomposition uses up the oxygen in the bottom waters. Eventually you end up with oxygen-depleted water, which is what is commonly called a dead zone.

Vicki Nichols Goldstein: How large is it?

Nancy: The low-oxygen area can cover much of coastal Louisiana from the Mississippi River Delta almost to the Texas-Louisiana border. It generally begins several miles offshore, where the water becomes deep enough for stratification — the layering of the water column — and can extend 40 miles or so offshore. It is one of the largest coastal areas of low oxygen in the world. The Baltic Sea has a much larger area, but the northern Gulf is among the largest.

David: When did scientists begin seriously documenting it?

Nancy: My first research cruise was in the 1970s. The director of the marine lab at the time, Dr. Don Boesch, had come from Chesapeake Bay, where there was a similar problem. He knew low oxygen was also occurring in the Gulf and suggested that I start documenting where it occurred, what time of year it occurred and how severe it was.

There were people before us who had documented low oxygen. One of them was my husband, Gene Turner — although I don’t want to call him “historic.” He might take exception to that. But those researchers did not have dedicated funding to focus on it over long periods of time. Our work was among the first that could systematically study the dead zone through both time and space.

Vicki: I live in Colorado and run the Inland Ocean Coalition, so I’m always trying to help people understand that what happens inland affects the ocean. Where are all these nutrients coming from?

Nancy: The area is enormous. The Mississippi watershed stretches from places like Tennessee and western New York in the east to parts of Montana in the west, and as far north as the Dakotas and into Canada. That watershed drains a huge portion of the United States, and it brings water from many different areas. Some tributaries carry more nutrients than others. The Ohio River, for example, has very high nutrient levels, in part because there are many population centers along it.

Urban areas tend to contribute point-source pollution — something coming out of the end of a pipe, such as sewage or industrial wastewater. But the majority of the nutrients come over the land. They run off fields and landscapes into streams and waterways and eventually reach the Mississippi River.

Vicki: So, agricultural fertilizers, pesticides and other pollutants?

Nancy: Yes. Fertilizers, pesticides and other contaminants can all get into the river and eventually reach the Gulf. Some will be taken up or modified along the way, but a great deal of what enters the river system ultimately makes its way downstream.

Vicki: If David and I actually went diving with you in the dead zone, what would we see?

Nancy: At the surface the water might look semi-clear, although there’s almost always phytoplankton that gives it a green or sometimes brown coloration. Suppose we were in 60 feet of water. As you descended, maybe halfway down, the clearer water would become cloudier. By the time you reached the bottom, it would be fairly turbid and there wouldn’t be much light. There can still be enough light for some algae on the sediments to photosynthesize, but the oxygen generated down there is fairly minimal.

David: As the oxygen disappears, fish can swim away. But creatures such as brittle stars, clams, burrowing crabs and shrimp may not be able to escape.

Nancy: Right. Mobile organisms will move with the changing oxygen conditions. They may move toward shore or farther offshore. But organisms that live in the sediments can’t necessarily escape. Starfish, burrowing crabs, burrowing shrimp and other bottom organisms may die if the oxygen gets low enough for long enough.

Vicki: Do you see dead animals washing ashore?

Nancy: Every now and then we have something called a “jubilee.” If winds come from the north, they can push surface waters offshore. That allows the bottom water to be pulled toward shore. Fish can become trapped in that low-oxygen water, and sometimes they die and wash onto the beach.

David: And it was called a jubilee because people would come down and collect all the fish.

Nancy: Exactly. “This is great. Look at all the fish we’ve got.”

David: For 20 or 30 years we’ve been having this conversation about nutrient pollution. A lot of what’s running off farms is essentially waste. If fertilizer doesn’t reach the roots of the crop and instead washes into the Mississippi, it isn’t helping the farmer.

You would think precision application, GPS and other technologies could reduce fertilizer use, reduce runoff and save farmers money. Has that happened?

Nancy: Some farmers absolutely do use those techniques. The land is their resource and they want to treat it well. Many farmers try to use fertilizer efficiently and avoid applying more than they need. But there are studies showing excess fertilizer use across agricultural areas relative to what is necessary to produce the crops. And over such expansive areas, changing the system becomes difficult.

Vicki: We also hear more about regenerative agriculture and organic farming. Are you seeing enough change to affect the Gulf?

Nancy: If there were a major change in agricultural practices across a huge area of the United States, I would expect to see an offshore response. But that kind of change would have to occur at a very large scale. I don’t anticipate it happening easily or immediately.

David: Federal commodity subsidies and the Farm Bill also tend to reinforce industrial agriculture centered on crops such as corn and soybeans. When the dead zone is smaller in a particular year, does that necessarily mean less fertilizer is reaching the Gulf?

Nancy: No. Sometimes physical conditions can make the dead zone smaller. For example, a hurricane can mix the water column. That mixing brings oxygen from the surface down toward the bottom and temporarily reduces low-oxygen conditions. So, a smaller dead zone does not necessarily mean nutrient inputs have decreased. It may simply mean the water has been mixed more thoroughly.

Vicki: It’s an interesting irony that a hurricane can temporarily improve oxygen conditions.

Nancy: Yes. It’s an unusual juxtaposition.

Vicki: When you look at a map of the Mississippi- watershed, the scale is remarkable…It really emphasizes how connected inland America is to the Gulf.

Nancy: It does. Most Mississippi River water entering the Gulf moves west along the Louisiana coast, although some moves east as well. The volume is so large that Mississippi River water can influence areas in both directions.

David: You also studied the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. Sixteen years later, can you still identify ecological impacts from that spill?

Nancy: It would be very difficult to pinpoint something happening now and say that it is specifically the result of the BP blowout. It has been many years, and those pollutants disperse and diffuse through the Gulf. They don’t remain on a single identifiable pathway…That doesn’t mean oil and gas development has no impacts. It means isolating the effect of one event so many years later becomes extremely difficult.

David: The dead zone is different because it is essentially seasonal and recurring.

Nancy: Yes. The sequence generally begins in spring. The water warms, river flow is high and there are plenty of nutrients. Phytoplankton grow in the surface waters and form blooms. Some are taken into the food web through zooplankton and fish.

David: A live fish is a happy fish.

Nancy: Exactly. But some of that organic material sinks to the bottom and contributes to oxygen depletion. Later in the summer, freshwater inflow often declines, nutrient inputs decrease, surface blooms decrease and there is less organic material sinking to the bottom. Eventually the low-oxygen conditions weaken.

Vicki: Has the dead zone had measurable economic impacts on shrimpers, commercial fishermen or tourism?

Nancy: It’s difficult to separate the effects of low oxygen from all the other things happening in coastal communities and fisheries. There are many influences on how many fish are caught, where fishermen work, how many tourists come to the coast and what people do when they get there. Commercial fishermen certainly complain.

David: Fishermen complain?

Nancy: All the time. Sometimes with reason. But they don’t necessarily identify low oxygen as the reason they aren’t catching fish. They may be more likely to blame another fisherman working their territory or some other problem.

Vicki: Where else in the world do we see major dead zones?

Nancy: Chesapeake Bay has one, with large algal blooms and very low oxygen in bottom waters. There are low-oxygen areas in the Adriatic Sea and in the German Bight, where rivers bring in nutrients that stimulate phytoplankton growth. Some fjords in Sweden, Denmark and Norway have naturally low oxygen because they are deep and don’t mix very well.

David: The Black Sea is another place where low oxygen can occur naturally.

Nancy: Right. Some systems naturally develop low oxygen because of their physical characteristics. But humans can magnify those conditions by adding nutrients.

David: You’ve spent so much time mapping the Gulf dead zone that people have sometimes called you the “Mother of the Dead Zone,” although I know you don’t particularly like the title.

Nancy: Maybe we’ve reached the grandmother stage.

David: But nutrient pollution is producing other problems too. Florida has experienced major harmful algal blooms, and we’ve increasingly seen them in California as well.

Nancy: Nutrients stimulate phytoplankton growth, and some phytoplankton generate toxins. Florida has experienced significant toxic blooms. We occasionally get them in Louisiana too, although they generally don’t last as long. Sometimes you see reddish water. Sometimes it’s pea green. When you see those colors, you know a lot of phytoplankton is growing.

David: We’re also seeing what you might call seaweed gone wild — massive Sargassum accumulations in Florida, Mexico and the Caribbean, and sea lettuce blooms in other parts of the world. It seems like we have a nutrient problem along many of our coasts.

Nancy: We do. Weather also matters. Summer water is warmer, and that encourages growth. If there are still sufficient nutrients available, seaweeds can proliferate. There are times offshore when you see rafts of Sargassum everywhere. Eventually that material also decomposes, and some of it sinks.

Vicki: Given everything we’ve talked about, what are the most important actions we could take to reduce the Gulf dead zone?

Nancy: Most of the solutions are inland. The immediate coastal margins of the northern Gulf contribute relatively few nutrients compared with what comes down the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri river systems. In fact, coastal marshes naturally remove nutrients. They take them up before they reach the open water. Seagrass meadows can do the same thing.

David: Of course, many Louisiana marshes are themselves disappearing. But in terms of the dead zone, the major solutions really are upstream.

Nancy: They are.

David: After all these decades of studying the problem, do you think people inland understand the connection?

Nancy: I’ve met farmers who are the gold standard — using satellites, GPS and careful fertilizer application because they see themselves as stewards of their land. But how much progress have we made in getting people to understand that what happens in an inland watershed ultimately affects the ocean? There is a lot more education now. And people inland often see the same processes locally. A favorite lake or fishing hole in Wisconsin, for example, can get too many nutrients. Algae grow, sink to the bottom, decompose and consume oxygen. Then you can get a fish kill. So, people may understand the process in their own lake or river. The harder mental connection is recognizing that the same water eventually travels downstream and contributes to what happens in the Gulf of Mexico.

David: And nutrient pollution can also affect drinking water, which has made it a political issue in places like Iowa and Kansas.

Nancy: Drinking water quality is a very big issue. Excess nitrogen compounds in drinking water are not good.

Vicki: That really captures the idea of the inland ocean. What happens inland shows up on the coast. We’re all connected by water, and that means our individual choices and our public policies matter.

David: Nancy, you’ve spent much of your career identifying a place literally called the dead zone. So, what do you love about the Gulf of Mexico?

Nancy: I love being out in the open water. When it’s calm, it’s especially wonderful. You look around and as far as you can see there’s water. It might be brown water. It might be green water. If you go far enough offshore it becomes blue water. It’s just this immense body of water. And when you’re out in the middle of that immensity, you feel very small. It’s an unusual feeling, and not that many people get to experience it.

Vicki Nichols Goldstein of the Inland Ocean Coalition and I are among the estimated 6-9 million active scuba divers around the world, and most of us depend on dive shops for our gear, training, travel and, often, our first introduction to life below the ocean’s surface.

But what goes into running a dive shop? And how do you sell the adventure and wonder of diving while also educating customers about the challenges facing our rapidly changing seas?

Those are questions we recently put to Natalie Shuman, co-owner of Sun Divers Roatan on the Mesoamerican Reef off Honduras. Natalie is a certified scuba instructor, co-founder of the Roa Girls Dive scholarship program, a board member of the Roatán Marine Park and an ocean conservationist who has managed to make stewardship part of her business model.

We spoke with her recently for our Rising Tide Ocean Podcast.

David Helvarg: Natalie, before we get to how you ended up living on an island in the Caribbean, what was your first connection with the ocean?

Natalie Shuman: I’ve been a water baby from day one, growing up on the shores of Southern California. I spent my weekends body boarding. One of my favorite pastimes with my cousin was swimming out as far as we could and waiting to see when the lifeguards would call us back. I’ve always loved the ocean. My mom will even pull out a report I wrote on seahorses in the fourth grade.

Vicki Nichols Goldstein: I love seahorses. So, what did you do after fourth grade?

Natalie: I was on a very traditional track. I went to college, got a degree in mass communications and went right into the corporate world. I found myself getting further and further away from the ocean. Then I met my husband, Shannon. I was actually an unhappy customer of his company, so we met when we had to discuss our account. I think he made it his lifelong mission to make me a happy customer after that. He told me, “I’m a scuba instructor.” I said, “Wow, scuba diving is one of those things I’ve always wanted to do.” It seemed otherworldly to me — almost like going to the moon, like being an astronaut. Then I tried it and was completely sold.

Vicki: And you fell madly in love with the ocean — and Shannon as well.

Natalie: Exactly. Actually, this whole thing was his crazy dream. He wanted to live on an island and build a dive center based on community. And I really wanted to get into conservation on the front lines. What better way than being boots on the ground — or fins in the water — through our own dive operation?

David: What I find special about Sun Divers is how you center diving and education around protection of the reef.

Natalie: Stewardship isn’t just a program we run. It’s really the foundation of our business model. Every decision we make — from the partnerships we build to who we hire to how we teach our courses — is guided by the questions: Is this good for the reef? Is this good for our people? Is this good for the community?

That’s why we’re a Green Fins member and self-audit for sustainability every year. It’s why we invest in coral restoration and support local NGOs. We try to create opportunities for our guests to become part of conservation instead of just observing it. I don’t think we’re really in the business of selling scuba diving.

Yes, people come here to experience a beautiful reef or learn a new skill, but what they’re really enjoying is connection — to nature, to themselves and to community. And the way we build that community is through conservation. We make it fun. People come back year after year and even time their trips so they can participate in our conservation events.

Vicki: Roatan is part of the Bay Islands National Marine Park. Explain how that works.

Natalie: Roatan is one of the Bay Islands, and we’re part of a national marine park. The guidelines and rules protecting it are developed through partnerships between local government and local NGOs. There are 13 co-managers who help enforce protection of the Bay Islands National Marine Park.

The Roatan Marine Park is one of those co-managers. Its primary focus includes marine patrols against illegal fishing and damaging activities on the reef. It also maintains infrastructure like mooring lines for dive boats and channel markers so boats aren’t creating mechanical damage to the reef. There’s also research, coral restoration, community outreach and alternative livelihood programs.

David: By mechanical damage, you mean that with a mooring you can tie off without dropping an anchor onto living coral.

Natalie: Exactly. As people have recognized just how much damage anchoring can do, moorings have become much more common, especially in the Caribbean.

David: You’re also a board member of the Roatan Marine Park. How does that connect to your dive shop?

Natalie: Making sure our business is healthy is tied to making sure the reef is healthy. That’s part of the long-term sustainability and livelihoods not only of our dive shop but of the whole coastal community of Roatan. For me, helping make that happen means dedicating time to the marine park. We’re a governing board, so we help set its strategic vision and provide whatever counsel and expertise we can.

David: Describe the reef. What’s it like when you drop below the surface?

Natalie: Roatan is best known for wall diving and its topography. Most dives start on a shallow plateau, which makes them accessible to divers of different experience levels. Then you reach a wall that drops away and creates this majestic, humbling experience.

Sometimes you glide across the plateau and just let yourself fall down along the wall. It’s this cool, free-falling experience. We also have canyons to swim through, so there’s adventure and thrill. Roatan is called the crown jewel of the Western Caribbean. We’ve been hit with the same diseases and coral bleaching events as a lot of the Caribbean, but we’re fortunate that we still have relatively healthy coral and are seeing regeneration. There are grassroots coral restoration efforts happening here and a lot of people who care. We’re doing everything we can to educate tourists about how they can become part of the solution.

Vicki: And the fish populations are healthy compared with a number of other places. You’re limiting take except for invasive lionfish, which licensed people can hunt.

Natalie: One thing that surprised me when I first got to Roatan was that people here were early adopters of lionfish as a menu item. In other regions, conservationists had to do a lot of educating and cajoling to get restaurateurs to serve it. Here you’ll see lionfish on menus everywhere. That’s been helpful in reducing their populations because people can hunt lionfish and then sell them to local restaurants.

David: Divers can also have impacts through things as seemingly minor as sunscreen and mask defogger. You’ve been involved in trying to reduce those impacts.

Natalie: I’ve been fortunate to work with Vicki at the Inland Ocean Coalition, as well as with the Roatan Marine Park and Bay Islands Conservation Association, to develop Roatan’s Eco-Safe Sunscreen Coalition. When we first came here, it was very difficult to find reef-safe sunscreen. So, we decided to organize around creating a non-toxic sunscreen zone. We mobilized community members and local business owners around a petition for a law that would ban the sale of sunscreens containing six primary ingredients that research has found harmful to corals.

We’re hoping that legislation will pass soon. But our dive center and others don’t have to wait for legislation. We’ve already made reef-safe practices part of what we ask of our customers.

It’s the same with defogging a dive mask. There are products that have been proven safe for the reef, and that’s what we recommend. We don’t recommend baby shampoo or soaps that may contain chemicals that aren’t good for the reef.

David: In reporting around the world, I’ve noticed something interesting. A lot of fishermen, and even many residents of island nations, don’t know how to swim, much less dive. You’ve created a program called Roa Girls Dive?

Natalie: When I’ve dived around the world, I’ve noticed that many dive professionals are expats. You may not see many local people participating because of cultural beliefs about swimming and diving or because of socioeconomic barriers. And as a female owner and operator of a dive center, I’m also very aware of women’s participation in diving.

One way I wanted to give back and ensure that our dive community was truly inclusive was by creating a scholarship program for young women and girls from Roatan to learn to scuba dive. Our scholarship program has three goals.

The first is enriched lives. We see scuba diving as a healthy outlet, a great way to make friends and a positive activity to have in your life.

The second is environmental stewardship. You protect what you love. As an expat, I can’t vote on laws here in Roatan. But these women and their families can share their experiences and what they’ve seen underwater. They can become advocates for this amazing natural resource and for ensuring that Roatán grows in a sustainable way that doesn’t further damage the reef.

And lastly, we want to introduce these young women to professional pathways — whether that’s working in the dive industry or opening their eyes to other possible careers, like becoming a marine biologist.

Vicki: Whether it’s the young women in your program or visitors coming to Roatan, what do you hope people take away after diving with you?

Natalie: I hope every diver leaves with a deeper connection to the ocean and a desire to protect it in any way they know how. They say your vibe attracts your tribe. We become part of these divers’ lives and they become part of ours. Through this community we’re building and these activities we’re bonding over, people may arrive as tourists in a country and on a reef that’s new to them, but they leave as advocates and lifelong friends.

David: You protect what you love. It’s great to educate people about the ocean through books like my Forest of the Sea or through documentaries, but there’s nothing quite like actually immersing yourself in the other 71 percent of our planet. What advice would you give someone thinking about learning to dive but maybe uncertain?

Natalie: One common mistake is thinking you have to be fearless to dive. That really isn’t the case. It’s good to have a healthy dose of fear. It means you’re going to make sure you’re doing what you need to keep yourself safe. But you can channel that fear into curiosity. My advice is: slow down. Master your buoyancy. And remember that every dive is an opportunity to make a difference.

Vicki: What’s your favorite animal encounter? And what’s an animal people don’t appreciate enough?

Natalie: I love every living creature under the sea. But an experience that told me I’d come to the right place happened during my very first week living on Roatan. We came upon a pod of rough-toothed dolphins. There must have been about 50 of them. We jumped in and snorkeled with them, and it was incredible. They seemed very curious about us. They wanted to play. They were jumping out of the water, diving under us and spinning around us. I felt like it was a sign from the universe that I’d made the right move.

As for an under-appreciated animal, one of the unsung heroes of the reef here is the giant barrel sponge. People don’t realize how old some of these sponges can be or how important they are as filter feeders. They’re a critical component of the ecosystem and majestic and beautiful to look at. If you look closely, they’re also home to lots of little critters. So don’t underestimate your barrel sponge. Slow down and take some time to admire it.

David: That’s one of the things I love about diving. You look into a barrel sponge and see tiny shrimp and bright-colored fish, then look up and see a big trevally, shark or eagle ray. You’re constantly shifting from the micro to the macro, from the density of life in a tiny coral crevice to the vast blue beyond it. It’s otherworldly because it is another world.

Vicki: I have so many underwater photographs of barrel sponges because their shapes and sizes are amazing. But there’s one thing I can’t figure out. How do those little crabs get inside them? More importantly, how do they get out?

Natalie: We need a time-lapse video. I’ve seen plenty of crabs inside barrel sponges, but I’ve never seen one claw its way out.

David: Which is as good a reason as any to keep on diving.

Not too long ago we had weather and climate scientist Daniel Swain as a guest on the Rising Tide Ocean Podcast talking about a rapidly warming ocean, marine heatwaves, this year’s Super- El Niño, and why defending science has become part of defending democracy. Here’s an excerpt just for our Substack subscribers:

David Helvarg: Before we get into our rapidly heating ocean and its impacts onshore and off, give us some personal background. What was your first encounter with the ocean?

Daniel Swain: I grew up in Northern California, first in San Francisco and then a little north on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. I grew up in and around the ocean and ocean-connected bodies of water, sailing on San Francisco Bay in small boats like Lasers. For those in the sailing world, the Bay is a pretty big place for boats that small. You get decent wave action and some pretty strong winds.

Helvarg: If you can learn to sail a Laser on San Francisco Bay, you can sail anywhere. How did you evolve from that into climate and weather science?

Swain: I started out as a weather geek, even as a kid. When I went to UC Davis for an undergraduate degree in atmospheric science, I thought I might become a federal meteorologist with the National Weather Service. But at some point, I realized that some of the really big questions, both intellectually interesting and societally important, were at this weather-climate interface. We can predict the weather really well, but the climate is changing. What does that mean for the weather?

So, I came into climate from the weather side — day-to-day weather changes and operational forecasting. I still get to wear that weather-geek hat pretty regularly, even though today I would call myself a climate scientist. I exist at that boundary between weather and climate, which of course is not very distinct to begin with. It’s all the same fluid atmosphere and the same fluid ocean, just different densities.

I’ve been known to call the ocean, “the atmosphere, but upside down and wet.” That comes from an Earth-system perspective. The atmosphere, ocean, biosphere and cryosphere (frozen water) aren’t really distinct elements. That becomes more obvious with each passing decade as we try to predict and model these different Earth systems and discover we can’t do it very well unless we connect them. We can’t predict the atmosphere very well unless we connect it to the ocean, and vice versa.

Helvarg: So, let’s start at that large scale. People don’t necessarily think of the ocean as a driver of climate and weather, even though it covers more than 70 percent of the planet.

Swain: Exactly. We live on a water planet even though we don’t really think of it that way. Fundamentally, that is what Earth is. The fact that more than 70 percent of the planet is covered by water means that long-term variations in the atmosphere are largely driven by what’s happening in the ocean.

Climate change, as we think about it, is actually, to a first order, ocean warming. The majority of the accumulated heat is going into the oceans. Then it affects the atmosphere as some of that heat comes back out of the ocean and comes back to bite us on land. One way to think about global warming is that it is primarily a tremendous amount of extra energy accumulating in the oceans and then spilling over into the remaining third of the Earth that isn’t ocean-covered.

Vicki Nichols Goldstein: We know that about 90 percent of the excess heat is being stored in the ocean. Why can the ocean absorb so much heat compared to land?

Swain: First, because most of the planet is ocean. If you’re warming the whole sphere, most of that warming is going to involve the ocean simply because that’s most of the planet. But there’s more to it. Water has an enormous specific heat capacity. It can absorb an incredible amount of energy compared to an equivalent mass of soil or rock. It can also absorb that energy over a very deep layer.

On land, we talk about geology over millions of years — mountains building and collapsing, continents colliding and diverging. But over a few decades, that’s not happening to a meaningful degree. The ocean moves much more rapidly. An individual water molecule at the surface can end up in the atmosphere through evaporation or thousands of feet down in the deep ocean within a couple of years. The ocean is therefore very good at transferring energy from the surface to the depths.

It’s not just that the ocean covers 70-plus percent of the planet and absorbs a lot of the increased warmth at the surface. Through vertical circulation and currents, it transfers some of that heat downward and redistributes it across the planet — longitudinally, latitudinally and vertically.

The atmosphere overturns very quickly. A cumulus cloud can go from your house up to 20,000 feet in 20 minutes during a thunderstorm. The ocean takes longer, but significant movement can still occur over weeks, months and years. On land, comparable movement can take millennia to millions of years. That’s why the ocean and atmosphere are tightly coupled. They interact causally, bidirectionally and continuously.

Helvarg: People also have a hard time grasping how rapidly this change has occurred. Since we began burning fossil fuels just a few centuries ago, we’ve been changing the physical nature of the ocean — its temperature, chemistry, circulation, even its color. What does increasing ocean heat mean in terms of marine heatwaves?

Swain: Marine heatwaves really just mean anomalously warm ocean temperatures. Usually, we’re talking about the surface ocean because that’s what we can observe most readily and where these heatwaves are often most pronounced. We’re seeing them emerge with much greater frequency, intensity and spatial connectedness, year after year and decade after decade. Unfortunately, I don’t see that stopping.

We’re going to see continued acceleration in marine heatwaves for as long as planetary warming continues. And marine heatwaves can have a lot of staying power because the oceans evolve more slowly than the atmosphere. You get a blob of unusually warm water and, except under unusual circumstances, you can’t just blow it away with a strong wind the way you might end a heatwave over land. A large marine heatwave can take days, weeks or months to dissipate because there’s so much thermal inertia in the ocean.

Ironically, that persistence is also part of why the ocean helps us predict the atmosphere. The ocean varies more slowly. It has more “memory,” and therefore its variations can exert a persistent influence on the atmosphere. At a fundamental level, as the air warms, the ocean beneath it is going to warm too — although it will warm more in some places than others because of ocean currents, circulation and atmospheric conditions.

Goldstein: We hear a lot about La Niña and El Niño. What is actually happening during that transition?

Swain: El Niño and La Niña are parts of a broader pattern of natural ocean variability called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO.

El Niño is the warm phase. La Niña is the cool phase. Essentially, we’re talking about whether the eastern tropical Pacific, particularly the ocean off Peru and South America, is warmer or cooler than usual. That’s a region where there’s normally a lot of coastal upwelling, with cold water moving vertically upward from the deeper ocean. Despite being in the tropics, this keeps coastal temperatures relatively moderate.

During El Niño, that cold-water upwelling weakens as warm water from the western Pacific literally sloshes eastward, sometimes thousands of miles. The prevailing easterly winds that help drive the upwelling can also weaken or even reverse. When the eastern tropical Pacific warms substantially, that is fundamentally El Niño.

But the reason it matters globally is that ENSO performs something like a thermostat function in the global climate system. During La Niña, heat gets stored below the surface in the tropical Pacific. During El Niño, some of that accumulated heat is released from the ocean into the tropical atmosphere, where it spreads through the rest of the climate system.

Swain: Because El Niño unleashes stored energy from the tropical ocean, it increases the global average temperature. And in a warming world, when you put a big El Niño on top of long-term global warming, you increase the likelihood of new global temperature records. It also accelerates the hydrologic cycle.

The warmer the air, the greater the potential swings between extreme wet and extreme dry. Warmer air can hold more water vapor. It doesn’t necessarily do so everywhere, but it raises the ceiling on how much moisture can be present. That raises the ceiling on extreme precipitation events, but also on extreme drought and wildfire conditions in different places and at different times. Some parts of the world see increased flood risk during El Niño. Other places see increased drought risk. El Niño shifts weather patterns while global warming increases the potential magnitude of whatever those patterns produce.

Helvarg: Here on the West Coast, my experience with El Niño has generally meant more storminess. How strong is that relationship?

Swain: El Niño in general exerts a meaningful but sometimes hard-to-pinpoint influence on California because it’s just one of many relevant factors. But with a very strong El Niño, I think it’s a different story.

This is a message I’ve tried to communicate to people in emergency management and policy. Recent El Niño events haven’t always produced the canonical effects people expected. The 2015-16 El Niño, for example, was one of the strongest ever observed in the tropical Pacific, but we did not see extremely strong impacts in California. Some people took that to mean, “Well, what does El Niño really mean anyway?” My answer is: not much if it’s weak. But if it’s strong or very strong, it should significantly tilt the odds.

It can mean a significantly warmer California nearshore ocean. It can mean temporarily elevated local sea levels, increasing the risk of coastal flooding and marine heatwave impacts. And in winter it can significantly increase the odds of a wetter-than-average California winter, potentially even a very wet winter with increased flood risk.

But if you asked me for one single predictor in the global climate system that could provide three to six months’ advance notice of the potential for a very wet California winter, it would be a very strong El Niño.

Goldstein: What does that mean for mountain snowpack in California and across the West?

Swain: This is where things get tricky because precipitation means different things in a warming world. You can have a winter that isn’t particularly dry and still have very low snowpack because it’s simply too warm. Some places can actually be wetter than average and still have unusually low snowpack. So, a strong El Niño may increase precipitation in California, including the Sierra Nevada, and could bring needed water to parts of the Colorado River Basin.

But more precipitation doesn’t necessarily mean more snow (if it rains). We may see above-average precipitation in some mountainous regions while still seeing below-average snowpack. That can help alleviate drought, but it’s a very different picture from a cold, snowy winter.

Helvarg: Jumping from the Pacific to that other still-significant ocean, the Atlantic: Strong El Niños are supposed to suppress Atlantic hurricanes. Is that right? And why?

Swain: This is a good example of global warming and El Niño pushing in different directions. El Niño usually decreases Atlantic hurricane activity, mainly because of its effect on vertical wind shear rather than temperature. Tropical cyclones don’t like strong winds at upper levels of the atmosphere because those winds can literally decapitate storms — shear them apart. El Niño tends to increase wind shear in the Atlantic hurricane development region, making it more difficult for hurricanes to form and strengthen.

But there’s a big asterisk. If you have record-warm waters in places like the Gulf of Mexico, and a storm manages to develop during a brief period when wind shear is low, you can still get an extremely strong hurricane. So, a strong El Niño may suppress the overall hurricane season, while exceptionally warm ocean water can supercharge a storm that does manage to develop.

That’s a good example of natural variability — El Niño and the Southern Oscillation — interacting with the decidedly unnatural long-term warming trend to produce outcomes we haven’t seen very often before. It’s also why, despite all our advances in prediction and historical data, science still has a lot to learn.

Goldstein: That brings us to science itself. The Trump administration is changing Office of Management and Budget rules in ways that could make federal research funding reflect presidential priorities. How does that affect climate research and communication?

Swain: This goes far beyond weather, climate and oceans. It affects any domain requiring expert knowledge to make important decisions — from health to public policy to research funding. There has been a lot of focus on research funding, but it’s important to emphasize that this affects everything.

The degree of alarm in academic and research institutions is significant. Changes that politicize the federal grant system could make us vastly less able to understand how the world works and prepare for future contingencies — whether storms, floods, pandemics or geopolitical disturbances. It also becomes much harder for people in science to remain nonpartisan and simply focus on their research.

If funding becomes dependent on whether a research topic aligns with the political priorities of whoever happens to be president, that fundamentally changes the scientific enterprise. It is difficult to overstate how destructive and dangerous that could be.

Goldstein: That’s why people have to follow these issues, raise their voices and try to hold the line.

Helvarg: Democracy doesn’t guarantee that we’ll be good ocean stewards or base public policy on sound science. But without democratic means, it becomes far harder to move forward on existential challenges like climate change and ocean protection.

And if there’s one takeaway from our conversation with Daniel Swain, it may be that we need to stop thinking of climate change as something happening mainly in the atmosphere above us. We live on a blue planet.

The ocean is absorbing most of the excess heat we’re generating. It’s storing that heat, moving it around the globe and sometimes giving it back to us in ways that shape storms, droughts, floods, fires and increasingly extreme weather. The ocean isn’t just being changed by our climate. The ocean is the climate.

If you’re not subscribing to The Progressive you probably should be. They’ve been around since 1909 and I think I’ve been writing for them since at least 1999, including my latest story below on moving civilian nukes offshore:

If you’ve read works from Arthur C. Clarke and other science fiction writers of the 1950s, you may remember the once-popular sci-fi concept of underwater cities powered by nuclear energy. While we may still be a ways from living in those underwater cities, nukes at sea are a step closer to becoming a reality.

On July 22, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of the Interior signed a memorandum of understanding creating a framework to determine who will control civilian nuclear power projects on the 3.2 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf.

“Submerged reactor systems [on nuclear submarines] have been safely deployed in naval applications for decades, demonstrating their potential as a reliable source of energy,” noted Matt Giacona, the DOI’s acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and a former lobbyist for the offshore oil industry.

On the same day, the Department of Transportation and the Port of Long Beach, California, part of the largest port complex in the western hemisphere, signed a memorandum of cooperation to test small modular reactors for commercial vessels and port operations.

In fact, the idea of commercial nukes at sea was never limited to science fiction. In his 1966 book, Challenge of the Seven Seas, Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island imagined that the nation was just thirty years away from having nuclear-powered underwater resorts and submarine oil tankers tapping sub-arctic oil fields.

Any future visitor to some underwater resort, however, is likely to see fewer fish through their viewports. President Donald Trump just ordered three of the Pacific’s vast “no-take” marine monuments opened to commercial fishing. What they will likely see instead is endless seascapes made up of miles of globular oily sludge and an asphalt speckled seafloor, which is what more than 1,200 square miles of the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico now looks like following the 2010 BP oil spill.

This hasn’t deterred the Trump Administration from promoting offshore oil drilling for the entire west coast and off of Alaska. Along with the risk of toxic oil drifting down onto your underwater resort, you might also see some deep-sea mining sites with giant bulldozer-like robots or monster-sized vacuum tractors tethered to surface vessels off of American Samoa or in international waters if NOAA’s attempts to fast-track these mining permits is not halted.

The impetus for the memorandum on offshore nukes can be traced back to 1959, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program saw the launch of the NS Savannah, an almost 600-foot-long nuclear-powered cargo and passenger ship that was in service from 1962 to 1972. But the ship never proved to be commercially competitive, and today the Maritime Administration is in the process of removing the Savannah’s final radioactive components in order to decommission it by the end of 2031.

And while the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization (IMO) had long delayed action on the transition from dirty greenhouse gas heavy diesel fuel to non-carbon power, the IMO, under pressure from the EU, Island States, and others, is today pushing for a transition to non-carbon, including revived discussion of nuclear-powered shipping. Russia presently has eight nuclear powered icebreakers, as well as port operations.

Companies interested in expanding nuclear options include Westinghouse Electric, Holtec International and Valar Atomics that recently partnered with Nvidia on nuke-powered AI infrastructure. China has deployed the first underwater AI Data Center, six miles off the coast of Shanghai while Russia has a floating nuclear plant in the Arctic.

One company heavily invested in developing barge-based nukes and nuclear-powered commercial shipping is British-based Core Power. The company opened an office in Washington, D.C. five years ago and cut a deal with Westinghouse for the design and development of floating nuclear power plants. Since then, Core Power has filled its ranks with influencers including Robert Bryans, formerly chief of staff for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and John Richardson, the former chief of naval operations (CNO) for the U.S. Navy. A smaller company, Bluecore, based at the Port of Long Beach, put out a press release on July 21 announcing that it has delivered its first barge and electric test reactor to its port headquarters, just in time for the port’s agreement with the Department of Transportation.

At a nuclear maritime event in Houston last year, Core Power CEO Mikal Bøe promised a “U.S. anchored” program to bring floating nuclear power to market by the mid-2030s. Like AI data centers and crypto-mines before them, floating nukes may be the next big thing no one knows about until it happens. And that’s the kind of thing that riles up citizens when they’re not made a part of the process, as shown by recent AI data center protests across the United States.

Still, when it comes to the ocean, its potential remains unlimited—even if, like Trump, your view of its potential is as a gas station, mining site, place for floating power plants, and, of course, a garbage dump full of sharks out to get you.

Photo by Stuart Palley

This is adapted from my latest opinion piece for the LA Times where I’m a contributing writer: Along with ongoing coverage of the latest bombing, missile and drone attacks in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz and the oil-rich Gulf states, extreme weather events are also providing lead segments on evening news programs this summer. What you don’t see in much of the TV coverage, at least not since President Trump’s second term began, is any mention of climate change. Without that link, watching people like ABC’s David Muir on “the most watched newscast in America” ask network meteorologists to explain the conditions — but never the causes of their nightly footage of burning, flooding landscapes and traumatized people — is little more than watching disaster porn.

This self-censored reporting on the American networks — in sharp contrast with the BBC and other international TV news outlets, as well as some print and digital publications in the U.S. — also runs counter to an increasingly robust science that can now attribute to what degree climate change is driving individual extreme weather events including floods, droughts, storms and the wildfires ravaging France and Spain. Until very recently, many scientists said this was simply not possible — and climate change deniers continue to emphasize the uncertainty of causation in specific disasters. But the accuracy of this “attribution science” was confirmed in a newly released report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Instead of adding this information to their reporting, however, news outlets such as CBS and the Washington Post (both owned by Trump supporters) have fired their climate reporting teams. Even National Public Radio, as part of its cutbacks, has gotten rid of its chief climate editor along with its climate team.

If fearfully reduced media coverage of an expanding crisis with warlike casualty figures isn’t bad enough, many establishment Democrats are now practicing “climate hushing” in response to Trump’s pro-oil climate denial, playing down the disasters around us this summer to avoid a backlash in November’s midterm elections, on the dubious logic that swing voters are more likely to be alienated by climate talk than won over.

The brutal early-summer heat dome over Europe led to a wave of excess deaths across 27 countries, according to European sources — estimated at 10,000 to 14,000 killed. A similar heat dome is now breaking records across the U.S. from Bismarck, N.D., (105 degrees) to Miles City, Mont. (115 degrees). This as wildfire smoke from Canada and Minnesota has blanketed much of the nation in recent weeks. Such pollution is thought to contribute to nearly 16,000 deaths each year, according to a 2024 Yale study. Texas is experiencing its second summer of torrential rains and deadly flooding.

The West Coast is facing a marine heat wave similar to the one that began in 2013 and killed off 95 percent of Northern California’s kelp forests in a blow to the industries and cultures associated with them. At the same time, 85 percent of the world’s coral reefs continue to experience heat-related bleaching. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports the ocean is the hottest it’s been since accurate measuring began in the 19th century. This is resulting in increased coastal disasters such as Super Typhoon Bavi, which hit Guam and another U.S. territory, the Northern Mariana Islands, in early July before killing dozens of people in the Philippines. For more on marine heatwaves and the expected impact of this year’s ‘Super El Nino’ check out our latest Rising Tide Ocean Podcast with weather and climate scientist Daniel Swain.

We’re losing a climate war that we should, by now, be winning. With technological advances, global market forces have shifted dramatically in favor of a rapid transition off fossil fuels to now cheaper, cleaner solar, wind and other carbon-free energy systems.

While all nations are hurt by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran — and the blockade of oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz — those like China and Spain that have already invested in the clean energy transition have suffered less from oil and gas interruptions. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has promised a French company a billion U.S. taxpayer dollars to cancel its offshore wind projects along the U.S. East Coast and pledge to invest instead in oil drilling (and spilling and global warming).

Coal and oil were great energy systems for the 16th and 19th centuries. But we know how to do better for less today. We don’t have to continue overheating our planet or leave deadly floods and choking wildfire smoke as this generation’s legacy. The only thing stopping us is politics. By defending democracy and using its tools including voting the Ocean this November, we the people can still win the climate war — even if today’s politicians and TV networks won’t admit it’s happening.

A few weeks ago, my daughter and I went to Paris, France, to visit family and celebrate her high school graduation. As a marine scientist working on the front lines of climate and oceans, I was hoping for a break from the doom and gloom. Instead, I found myself inside the biggest climate story of the year.

We knew it would be hot, over 90 degrees Fahrenheit. When I checked the forecast before we left, I told my daughter to pack shorts and tank tops. But we were not prepared for what followed—a ten-day inferno.

On June 24, the day after we arrived for a sixteen-day visit, France hit its hottest national average on record. This was heat unlike any I’d ever experienced—hotter than the Sinai in Egypt, where I took a diving trip with my father after high school; hotter than Miami, Florida, where I did my graduate studies in marine policy; hotter than New York City in the summer, where I grew up. The heat did not even let up at night. It was still in the nineties well after 9 p.m., and buildings built to hold in the warmth in winter quickly turned into ovens.

That week, France recorded its hottest day ever, then broke that record again the next day. The Louvre and the Eiffel Tower restricted visiting hours. We heard about young men drowning in the Canal Saint-Martin, steps from my aunt’s apartment, where we had watched crowds gathered on the banks for days, as the death rate in the city rose 62 percent over a six-day period, mostly among older people.

Across the channel, London, England, was having its own reckoning with the European heat dome. A London Climate Action Week panel on adapting to extreme heat was cancelled— the venue, like most buildings in the city, had no air conditioning, and organizers couldn’t risk going forward with the event, an irony that was profoundly disturbing.

Europe is warming faster than any other continent, and France’s June temperatures blew past what even the most radical climate models had recently projected.

Meanwhile, the ocean off my home coast in California had been quietly running its own fever. Scientists in La Jolla had already logged thirty-six days of record-breaking water temperatures this year, a marine heatwave building since the summer before, with no El Niño effect to blame. Scientists are now watching a potential Super El Niño forming in the Pacific, which could drive even more heat into the ocean system.

A few days after I returned home, I surfed my favorite local spot. The cold, foggy morning—complete with what we call “fog rain”—was a blessed relief after two weeks of sweating in France. But the water felt unsettlingly warm. Normally the cold seeps through your wetsuit the moment you paddle out, and numbs your hands. This time, it felt almost tropical.

And, again this summer, smoke from wildfires in Canada has blanketed major U.S. cities in hazardous air; it’s one more sign of the fires, floods, and heat now compounding across the country.

Over the past decade, Northern California has lost 95 percent of its kelp forests, largely due to marine heatwaves, the ocean’s version of the heat I’d just experienced in France. As a diver and surfer, I’ve watched kelp forests disappear in front of my eyes for the past ten years. It’s what drove me to work on a documentary about it, Sequoias of the Sea.

Every second breath we take comes from the ocean. It absorbs the bulk of the excess heat we generate, and buffers the extremes we’re now living through.

The ocean, in short, is the best climate solution we have. But, tragically, Congress is now gutting the agency that protects it. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is facing its second straight year of billion-dollar cuts, including to the marine sanctuaries and fisheries science that keep our coastal waters and ecosystems healthy.

Climate change isn’t coming. It’s here and millions of people are experiencing it in their daily lives. Get involved in your local climate organization. Insist on climate sanity. Vote for the ocean.

I first spoke with Aaron Egar while writing my book, Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp, so I was particularly delighted that oceanographer Joy Leilei Shih and I were able to interview him again recently given that he’s one of the world’s top kelp scientists and advocates.

Based out of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, he is founder and program director of the Kelp Forest Alliance and the lead author on three major scientific kelp reports that have come out over the last 4 years. He’s also winner of several prestigious prizes, including one for emerging leaders in science. So, here’s our talk that you can also find on the Rising Tide Ocean Podcast.

David Helvarg (DH): Aaron, before we get entangled in the kelp maybe you can tell us how you first connected with the ocean?

Aaron Egar (AE): I think the ocean has always been this kind of ever-present background in my life, and it slowly, kind of like the tide perhaps, increased and crept forward, forward and forward. Growing up it was just there, and you start to dip your toe in the water, then you dive in the water, then you start snorkeling, then you start scuba diving, then you start building your career around it.

The west coast of Canada is where I grew up, around Vancouver on a small coastal community, and you could see it (the ocean) from our house. So I was trying to figure out what to do with my career and how I could protect the place that I grew up in, really cherished and valued, it imprinted on me.

And then thought maybe science. Science could be the way that I could protect, manage, improve the environment that, that I cherish. And so I went down (that) pathway and then partway between masters and PhD I realized, yes, we need the science, but we need a lot more than the science. We need people to care about kelp forests. We need politicians to write laws. We need businesses to adapt their practices to invest in kelp conservation. And so now I’ve kind of merged from kelp scientist to kelp conservationist, kelp hugger, someone who tries to bring together all these different parts of society that are linked to the ocean, to kelp forests, and have them work together to help our kelp.

Joy Leilei Shih (JLS): A lot of times people think kelp forests are restricted to small portions of coastlines or regions, but of course, kelp forests are found all over the world. David and I live in California, so we’re most familiar with the kelp on the West Coast of North America. But there are kelp forests on every continent. What are some of the same challenges kelp forests around the world share with each other, and what are some of the differences?

AE: I think that is the really beautiful part about kelp forests, is that we have them in so many different geographies and cultures, and people connect to them in different but very similar ways. But across the world’s kelp forests, they’re facing three kinds of main threats. First, as our oceans are getting warmer, kelp is a cold-adapted species, so they don’t like that increase in temperature, and that can push them over an edge so they’re no longer able to reproduce or survive or create the next generation.

And then second, we have the loss of top predators that would eat sea urchins. Sea urchins are these spiky herbivores that love to eat kelp forests themselves. And so, when we take out the things that eat sea urchins, like big predatory fish or lobsters (or sea otters), then the sea urchins can just grow and grow and grow and grow and expand in number.

And then lastly, we have urban development as we modify our coastlines, develop them, turn what were sort of healthy living reefs into fixed structures that increase sediment pollution in the water, and that’s just having a really negative downturn on kelp forests.

DH: Without swift climate action to abate the warming of oceans, do other forms of restoration efforts stand a chance in the long run?

AE: They do in some places. The kind of optimistic thing about kelp forests, at least in my opinion, is there’s no future without them. We’re not going to lose all of our kelp forests. We might lose some or they might shift, but kelp is very adaptable. And so even in the future that we’re facing, we will find different populations of kelp forests that we can restore, or we can make sure persist in (certain) areas and provide the same level of benefits and biodiversity that they’re currently doing, or perhaps a, a slightly different version of them.

So, I would never say we could give up on restoration, but there are times when you want to consider what you’re restoring and where, and it might be a better idea to pause if that population is just not adapted to the new warm(er) temperatures, and it’s, you know, perhaps a wasted effort you’re out planting a population that will just die in the new conditions.

JLS: That makes sense. And I don’t want to get too technical, but one of the best tools for coral restoration is taking advantage of genetic diversity. Some more heat tolerant species or coral with more heat tolerant symbionts are being used for more successful restoration efforts. Is there current consideration for using kelp species better equipped to tolerate heat, or maybe species less vulnerable to urchins or anything along those lines?

AE: There is, and it’s really exciting because kelp forests, unlike coral, their generation(al) time is incredibly fast (They live an average 1-7 years). So, if you find a certain trait or characteristic in one population and you want to select for that, you can do that quite a few times over just 10 years, whereas, with coral it might take a, a fair bit longer.

Sometimes it’s not even (about) finding different species but just finding different populations within those species. So, take the east coast of Australia, for instance. We have one species, Eucheuma radiata, or golden kelp, that lives all the way up in Brisbane, which is pretty much just tropical, 25-degree water (77 F), and then all the way south down to Tasmania, which is as cold as you’re gonna get in Australia, 8-10-degree (46-50 F) water.

Same species, just different adaptations. So, we think we can start to find these gene sequences that are responsible for that adaptation within these populations, and then use that to adapt to new conditions.

DH: Let’s talk about the first major study you led that really had global impact that this rainforest of the sea, that kelp forests have a value you estimated around half a trillion dollars a year. What gives it this great value?

AE: It was an interesting exercise because people kind of intrinsically knew that kelp forests were valuable, or at least the people who were aware of them, and that they’re necessary for the health of the ocean and the benefits that people take from the ocean. But as you say, this was the first kind of attempt to put a dollar value on that global contribution to the economy.

And so, we looked at the things that you can most easily classify into dollar values, things like the fish that you catch that are grown in the kelp forest, or the nutrients that are removed from the water that would otherwise have to be paid to be removed, or the value of carbon that would be captured from the atmosphere and might be traded on a carbon market.

And so, pound for pound, the nutrient removal is the most valuable service because removing excess nitrogen from water is incredibly expensive, and so the kelp forests are able to take that up. That saves a lot of money on land. And then second was fisheries in terms of, of dollar values, and there’s just a rich diversity of fisheries (salmon, cod, herring, rockfish) tied to kelp forests around the world from different sportfish, lobster, abalone, all linked to kelp forests in varying ways.

And then interestingly, carbon. Again, pound for pound, kind of a similar sequestration amount to seagrass or terrestrial forests in terms of how much carbon per hectare or per square mile (is) sequestered. But the dollar value wasn’t as high just because we don’t price the value of carbon that high. You know, you might get $50 a ton for CO2 removed from the atmosphere (on the carbon market).

(DH): DH: When I was visiting a mussel farmer up in Maine for the book, he is growing kelp all around his floats (pens) because he said it had a halo effect, that it was removing the excess carbon dioxide from ocean acidification, so that his mussels’ shells were stronger.

And of, of course, kelp’s also the mother seed for the whole 40 million ton a year seaweed growing industry or at least a good portion of it. Plus, as you were saying, the marine wildlife we eat. I open the first chapter on a salmon river in Alaska because people don’t realize salmon are dependent in their life cycles on those kelp forests.

AE: They really are the threads of our cold-water oceans. They’re linked to all these species that we don’t necessarily realize depend on or interact with kelp forests.

Over a third of our world’s coastlines is dominated by a kelp forest, and that’s essentially the coastline outside the tropics. And that’s an incredible diversity of coastline from Japan to Argentina, South Africa, Northern Europe, the Western United States, parts of the Eastern United States and Canada, Southern Australia, New Zealand.

Also, sub-Antarctic islands or the West Antarctic Peninsula, up in the Russian Arctic, Canadian Arctic. All kelp forests (are) doing kind of similar things. And, you know, we’re talking about the economic value, but there’s all these (other) values of kelp forests that people can’t and perhaps shouldn’t put a dollar value on for cultural connection to those species or those healthy oceans.

Or the recreation value that we derive from going kayaking near a kelp forest or seeing the animals that depend on them, or just knowing they exist...This one-third of the world’s coastline is propped up and supported by these rainforests of the sea.

And, the diversity of kelp is incredible. Now, you get kelp that are 30 centimeters high to 30 meters high, and some have gas-filled bladders, and some have really rigid kinds of trunks. It’s incredible. You just need to peek behind the curtain, and then you start pulling on the thread and everything is connected to it.

DH: It’s funny, people know about rainforests, they know about coral reefs. You say coral reef, people say Great Barrier Reef. You say rainforest, they might say Amazon, But very few people know ‘the Kelp Highway’ or ‘The Great Southern Reef’ or ‘The Forest at the end of the world’ or ‘the Great African Sea Forest.’ What’s your theory on that? Why are people unfamiliar with kelp forests?

AE: I blame Jacques Cousteau primarily. You know, when people were first being introduced into the underwater world, scuba diving originated in warm water, probably because it is easiest to go diving in warm water.

But that was people’s first kind of anchoring with the ocean, were these early documentaries that took people in coral reefs, and that just kind of became the shortcut in people’s minds, like, oh, ocean equals coral reef, and then that just sort of proliferated forward. And it is, you know, a bit trickier to go diving in the kelp forest.

You might need a wetsuit or a thicker wetsuit or even a dry suit in some really cold places. And so, there’s this slightly higher barrier to entry, and you have people who go on vacation to Fiji or the Caribbean or Indonesia, and they go diving on a coral reef because it’s easy, (maybe) it’s affordable. But they have a kelp forest in their backyard that they’re not necessarily aware of, and so there is this kind of disconnect between that proximity and that awareness.

We’re starting to, I think, to turn that tide through things like documentaries, photo awards, wonderful books written by people such as yourself and make people aware that they don’t have to fly 10,000 kilometers to see an underwater metropolis.

DH: And you’re right, it’s, it’s easy, warm, and clear to visit a coral reef, but they’re such fragile little animals, you can’t touch anything. Kelp diving’s like a full contact sport. You’re in there and it’s interactive.

AE: Yeah, it’s like a four-dimensional experience. You can really get pulled into the kelp. You know, you can free dive, pulling yourself down to the bottom (on the kelp’s stipes or trunks) and just kind of sit there in total silence and look up through the canopy as the sun bounces around between the blades and all the little critters make their way in and around you. It’s an incredible, incredible experience and, you know, anyone who loves scuba diving needs to try it.

JLS: As we just established, people generally will dive or snorkel recreationally in warm water more than they will in cold water habitats like kelp forests. Do you find that visual art, like your photography, helps to build awareness and support for an issue like kelp conservation that might otherwise be out of sight for the general public?

AE: I think it absolutely does. You know, I think there can be a bit of fatigue with photography and conservation of, you know, the same issue (like coral or whales) photographed over and over and over again. But with Kelp Forest, it’s introducing people to this ecosystem, this living being, this web of living beings that they’re just totally unaware of, and it becomes like a light bulb moment where they just go, “Wow, I never knew this existed,” or, “If I did know it existed, I thought it was, like, sushi, but it’s actually this thriving ecosystem web of life that, that again is just right next door to where I live.”

And so, we hosted the Kelp Forest Photo Awards two years ago and that was a really incredible experience because we got so many different entries from 18 countries around the world highlighting that diversity. So even people that thought maybe they knew kelp realized that they didn’t know it in its true, extravagant, diverse forms.

And so, photography has been really powerful that way, and storytelling with photography or videos as well in introducing people and telling the stories about the people who rely on these ecosystems (such as Blue Frontier’s ‘Sequoias of the Sea’ documentary).

And perhaps it’s even more special underwater because, you know, we’re limited in the time we get to spend, whether it’s your free diving breath or your scuba tank or just getting too cold, you have to come out sometime, and it’s usually, you know, not more than an hour or two, maybe three if you’re really in a comfortable snorkeling wetsuit. So the photograph becomes that thing that you can take with you.

DH: With coral and kelp being sort of the ebony and ivory of large marine ecosystems, And these marine heat waves, like we’ve had in California, ‘the blob’ that came in 2013 and took out 95% of our bull kelp, the increased heat seems to be the major factor as threats to kelp forests go.

AE: It is a major problem, and it again goes to illustrate this interconnectedness we have between the kelp itself, the problems that they face, and the sort of solutions and benefits they provide to people. So, we can kick the fossil fuel habit, and that will go a long way. But then we can start thinking about those warm adapted populations that might be able to do better in the new conditions, or improving the general health of the kelp forest so when a marine heatwave does come along, it’s more resilient, it’s better able to survive.

So, we need to come up with portfolios of solutions, and that’s improving the water quality, that’s increasing the amount of sea otters or of lobsters (herbivore predators), or (just) reducing the number of urchins. And so, when these marine heatwave events do happen, the kelp is in better health and is able to persist better than it might have been able to otherwise.

DH: You’ve advocated for marine protected areas to keep healthy kelp forests intact plus you also just put out another major report. You were the lead author on one that looks at global restoration efforts going on around kelp forests, and maybe you could tell us a little about that report and what you found?

AE: We absolutely need to protect what we have and what we can, and we need to restore what’s been lost because the reality is that protection alone isn’t enough, and marine protectors are wonderful and play their part but in places where kelp forests have disappeared…we need to think about how can we get in there, how can we intervene and restore these systems. And so you can plant kelp, you can seed it, you can remove sea urchins. And the paper that we just published was this first really collaborative grassroots review of the state of kelp restoration conservation in thirty-eight regions around the world, essentially everywhere that we have a kelp forest. There were one hundred and thirty-eight authors that contributed to the paper and produced this sort of up-to-date synthesis of what’s happening where, when, why (and) how related to kelp.

In some places it’s doing really well, like southern Argentina or Iceland, you know, their kelp forests are quite healthy. Other places we have crisis regimes like California and Tasmania, where we’ve lost these big bits of the population, ninety-five percent of bull kelp in Northern California, ninety-five percent of giant kelp in Tasmania and people are working a lot more on active restoration efforts. Other places have big state-led programs. Japan and Korea have really invested in national kelp restoration programs that are scaled up across the country, well-funded, regularly funded for multiple years, and connecting local fishing groups to participate in those efforts.

So, there’s just so many different ways that people care for or link to or interact with kelp forests. And what we try to do with this paper is bring all of that together and, and tell those stories.

JLS: You launched the Kelp Forest Alliance as well as the Kelp Forest Challenge. Is there an international governing body that can help implement global restoration efforts and the Kelp Forest Challenge, or will it mostly be dependent on volunteers and local efforts knit together?

AE: We’ve got it so an individual can volunteer their time or their skills or their knowledge to help conserve or promote kelp forests, or businesses can get involved with their resources or networks to help promote kelp conservation, or governments as well. So there’s all sorts of ways for people to link in or larger organizations to link in.

DH: There’s a global demand to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030. What are the numbers attached to the kelp challenge?

AE: The Kelp Forest Challenge is a mission to protect and restore four million hectares (15,000 square miles) of kelp forest by 2040, and raise $14 billion for global kelp conservation, also by 2040.

DH: Which again, is to protect $500 billion a year in goods and services.

AE: It’s an easy math trade-off when you really do the numbers, and you understand just how much coastline these ecosystems are supporting.

DH: So, all you need is the constituency that can encourage governments to act.

AE; I think we’re getting there. California’s looking at its own kelp act, kelp management plan, and conservation target. The same is happening in Norway. We’re starting to kind of plant the seeds in Australia, South Africa, the UK, Canada. And, and making it happen..and we’ll hopefully have more come on board.

DH: So, what do you when you’re not attending conferences or putting together scientifically authoritative papers? What’s your pleasure in the ocean?

AE: Well, the ocean just is my happy place. I live by the ocean, so I see it almost every day on a run or a swim. Spending time in the environment really is my way to unwind, and it’s the motivation for the work I’m doing.

DH: It’s, it’s like Isak Dinesen wrote, “The cure for anything is saltwater: sweat, tears, or the sea.”

Based on Chapter Two of my book Forest of the Sea I just wrote a sea otter article for Sierra magazine. But if you have not read it online (see link) you can read it here. Just another advantage of subscribing to ‘Our Blue Frontier’ substack and reason to suggest all your friends do the same. Also you should listen to the Rising Tide Ocean Podcast whose many interviews are often transcribed and edited down for Our Blue Frontier readers. And now onto those voracious otters:

Sea otters are the largest of the weasel family and the smallest of the marine mammals. Lacking blubber, they have some of the finest, densest fur in the world to warm them. They constantly groom it to add insulating air bubbles, plus they have a firebox metabolism—they can eat up to a quarter of their body weight every day. Sea otters are the keystone predators of North America’s kelp forests, consuming sea urchins that otherwise would overgraze the kelp forests, converting them to urchin barrens. We need otters to thrive.

But they are in trouble.

The animals were nearly exterminated by English, Russian, and American traders selling “royal fur” to China during the 18th and 19th centuries. Their numbers crashed to 1,000 to 2,000 by 1900, then recovered under various forms of legal protection to some 120,000 animals today. Ninety percent of them (the larger northern sub-species) are afloat in Alaska. Sea otters today are considered a major marine mammal recovery story, if still a fragile one.

“Otters are a creative and adaptable species, notes Tim Tinker, a wildlife biologist at Dalhousie University in Canada and one of the world’s leading sea otter authorities. “They can vary their diet. I don’t see the (global) loss of kelp or HABs (harmful algal blooms) as an existential threat at the level of the fur trade, but with massive changes (in the ocean) taking place there are limits to what even sea otters can control.”

Other otter experts agree there’s no immediate danger of population collapse, but there are many worrying trend lines.

“I think there might be fewer otters (in Alaska) than five years ago,” says Brenda Konar, a coastal ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who studies kelp forest and sea otter interactions. “Rafts [where the otters congregate in the kelp to keep from drifting] aren’t as big as they used to be.”

Killer whales

In the 1990s, scientists began seeing orcas chasing and eating large numbers of otters in Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain. Jim Estes, who first identified the “trophic cascade” connection between otters, kelp, and urchins, concluded that the killer whales were now eating seals and sea otters because their traditional prey, the great whales, had been decimated by post-war Japanese and Russian whaling.

Orcas went from targeting the largest to thousands of the smallest of marine mammals. In 2020, Russian researchers found a dead female orca with seven sea otters in her stomach. More recently, orcas have begun chasing and eating otters in Kachemak Bay just outside Anchorage. There’s even a YouTube video of an otter jumping onto a boat to escape an orca.

“I’ve been working in this area for 26 years and don’t remember that ever being a thing,” says Konar. “Killer whales have to eat too. I just wish not otters in Kachemak.”

Oil and sharks

The smaller-sized southern sea otter population of just over 3,000 has not increased significantly in several decades. With 80 percent of them concentrated in California’s Monterey Bay area, one of the greatest fears is their getting wiped out by an oil spill.

“An oiled otter is toast,” says Tinker, explaining that they rapidly die from ingesting the oil on their fur if they don’t first die of hypothermia. Forty percent of all otters in Alaska’s much larger Prince Williams Sound died of oiling after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Disregarding the law that forbids drilling within the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary where these otters reside, the Trump administration has proposed opening the entire West Coast to offshore oil drilling.

Otter expansion outside Monterey Bay has been limited by the success of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. With the return of tens of thousands of seals, sea lions, and elephant seals, the white shark population has thrived. As otters move north or south to try to colonize new territories, curious sharks will give them exploratory bites that usually prove fatal.

“The rate of mortality becomes over 50 percent,” notes Jesse Fujii who runs the sea otter rehabilitation program for the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has been exploring plans to bypass the sharks and relocate otters farther north to eventually reconnect the southern and northern populations, a proposal that has drawn opposition from some commercial fishermen and support from coastal tribes, kelp ecologists, and environmentalists.

Diseases and HABs

The bird flu death of a southern sea otter in California—along with 18 other animals including elephant seals—was confirmed by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy earlier this year. The bird flu virus has now been transmitted from poultry to wild birds and marine mammals. An outbreak in an elephant seal colony in Argentina in 2023 killed over 17,000 animals.

However, unlike elephant seals who are often in the company of seabirds, there are only a handful of otters known to grab and eat grebes and other seabirds, and so the likelihood of transmission remains much lower, though surveillance is ongoing.

Lethal diseases more common to sea otters include Toxoplasmosis (linked to cat feces) and Sarcocystis (ditto for opossums) that then get washed offshore.

“You have a buildup in the soil [of the parasitic eggs] so there’s higher risk with big storms and flushing events,” notes Tinker. The 2026–27 winter, expected to include a historic El Niño, will likely mean fiercer storms and flooding (flushing) along much of the West Coast’s sea otter habitat.

Algal blooms are also on the increase globally according to the United Nations, as are harmful algal blooms (HABs) involving toxic algae. Those trends will increase as oceans continue to warm due to climate change driven by fossil fuels and increased nutrient runoff from agriculture and urban pollution. In California, a number of otters have ingested domoic acid, a neurotoxin linked to HABs, resulting in tremors, seizures, and death for dozens of them (about 20 percent of all dead otters found on area beaches).

Sea otters are one of those “charismatic megafauna” critters like whales that generate hundreds of millions of dollars in tourist revenue from Japan to Canada to California. A 2023 study by the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Center for the Blue Economy found that the small town of Moss Landing, California, where some 120 marine weasels reside, generates $3.2 million a year in “sea otter tourism.”

A study in Canada found that reintroduced otters in British Columbia’s waters added not only $42 million in tourist revenue but also saw a 20-fold recovery of kelp forest habitat. While there was a $7 million loss in the shellfish and crab fishery (to hungry otters), there was a tripling of lingcod and other kelp-forest-dependent fish (such as salmon, cod, and herring) so that the fishing industry also came out ahead financially.

On a bluff at the Hopkins Marine Station on Monterey Bay, I watched a large raft of some 80 to 100 otters lounging, diving, and interacting on the outer edge of the kelp beds as half a dozen sea lions went leaping past. Some of them had their paws linked (it looked like they’re holding hands) while others groomed themselves, rubbing their heads and pretzeling their bodies in the water.

It was only 6 million years ago that two new species evolved that would have a profound effect on the world’s kelp forests and their inhabitants—humanoids and fish-eating otters. One would evolve into an intelligent, adaptive tool-using creature, and the other became us. Now, our decisions determine much of our blue marble planet’s fate. As Tinker noted, “There are limits to what even sea otters can control.”

In May, the 12^th Peter Benchley Ocean Awards were held at the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. They’re named after the author of ‘Jaws,’ who spent most of his remaining life as a leading shark and ocean conservation advocate. Following his passing in 2006, I and Blue Frontier partnered with Wendy Benchley, his widow and adventure partner, to create the awards. Today they’ve been revived by the Aquarium Conservation Partnership. With more than 80 winners to date, they’ve become known as ‘the Oscars of the Ocean.’

The eight 2026 award winners include Julie Packard of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, President José Manuel Bolieiro of the Azores, Congressman Jared Huffman, Dr. Diva Amon, the ocean business Bureo, Marce Gutierrez-Graudins, the documentary ‘Ocean with David Attenborough,’ and youth winner Koji Sanananyaki. In our latest Rising Tide Ocean Podcast I highlight key parts of the winners’ acceptance speeches. Here is my edited transcript:

David Helvarg (DH): President Bolero of the Azores, an autonomous region of Portugal, was the winner for excellence in national leadership for establishing an extensive marine protected area around his Atlantic islands, part of a global effort to protect thirty percent of the ocean by 2030.

President José Manuel Bolieiro: From our nine volcanic islands, we stand quite literally in the middle of the ocean. And so, we feel every day both the beauty and the vulnerability of the sea that surrounds us, the life that surrounds us. That geography imposes a responsibility. If we live from the ocean, we must also live for the ocean.

In recent years, the Azores have undertaken an extremely ambitious effort, the creation of the largest network of marine protected areas in the North Atlantic. We have now safeguarded thirty percent of our surrounding sea, covering almost 300,000 square kilometers.

And this is our concrete contribution to the global 30 by 30 targets. This achievement was not made from an office or a single speech. It was built through dialogue and co-creation with fishers, scientists, youth, and the civil society. It reflects years of consultations, sometimes difficult conversations, and a shared conviction that a healthy ocean is not the enemy of prosperity, it is its foundation.

And central to this journey has been the Blue Azores program, born from an innovative partnership between my government, the Oceano Azul Foundation, and the Waitt Institute. Together, we have aligned political will, philanthropy, science, and community engagement around a single vision: to protect, promote, and value the marine natural capital of the Azores, and the natural capital of the world.

DH: Another winner for excellence in policy was Congressman Jared Huffman of California, a longtime ocean and climate champion who will become House Resources Committee chair if the Democrats take back the House in November.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D CA): The Monterey Aquarium is an institution that has really done more than just about anyone else that I can think of to deepen public understanding of marine ecosystems and inspire generations to fight for their protection.

So, I represent California’s North Coast from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, and that means I have the benefit of representing and living on one of the most spectacular, ecologically rich coastlines anywhere on Earth. Ocean conservation is not just some narrow environmental issue for me and the communities I represent.

It is who we are. It is our way of life. And the health of our ocean is inseparable from the health of our communities, our economy, our climate, and ultimately our future. We draw our cultural identity from the ocean, and yet this is a hell of a time we are living through, a moment when our ocean is under assault from nearly every direction.

Our warming seas and ocean acidification infiltrating every level of the food chain, biodiversity loss is accelerating, and there are all these industrial pressures that are intensifying all of these stressors. And the science is telling us right now, this is a moment when we need stronger protections against all of these powerful forces, and yet it’s also a moment where those industrial pressures are pushing to drag us in the other direction, in the wrong direction.

This fight has absolutely permeated Congress. For the past 15 months, I’ve been leading Democrats in an epic battle against attacks on our natural heritage and our bedrock environmental laws unlike anything we have ever seen. And one of the cornerstones of our work has been protecting our coasts from reckless offshore drilling and dangerous fossil fuel expansion. This, this is a very real threat to open up the entire West Coast and the Arctic and many other places to a massive expansion of fossil fuel development, trying to fast-track drilling projects that threaten coastal communities, marine ecosystems, and the climate.

And it’s a moment for us as Californians, I think, to step up and lead because our beautiful coastline, and really the coastlines for everyone around the world, are so much more valuable when they are covered by kelp forests and sea otters. We know where the value really is. It is not in fossil fuel development.

But our challenge is not just to stop bad ideas. We also have to keep promoting our affirmative vision of restoration, resilience, science-based conservation. We are trying to strengthen coastal resilience programs, combat marine debris, plastic pollution, and working to reauthorize the Magnuson (Sustainable Fisheries) Act. We need to do that in a way that gives us climate-ready fisheries management, the ability to defend marine protected areas, of course, and expand ocean and climate science at a time when so many are trying to defund it, dismantle it, undermine it.

It’s kind of axiomatic that a healthy ocean and a strong economy go together, at least it should be, and all of this work is about pursuing those two goals as part and parcel of one another. But as much as we can point to the things we’re proud of, that we’ve accomplished together over the years, our progress is not guaranteed right now in this moment.

And every gain that we have made in protecting our oceans is right now contested. All of it is contested. Every safeguard is vulnerable. Every scientific truth seems to have an army of lobbyists trying to bury it right now. Advocates, educators, filmmakers, explorers, business leaders, public servants (thanks to) all of you, people who understand that protecting the ocean is not optional it is essential.

DH: The Sustainable Business Award went to the Bureo company that turns plastic fishing net into clothing and other products. It was presented by last year’s winner, SC Johnson corporation’s CEO Fisk Johnson, and accepted by Ben Kneppers.

Fisk Johnson: You know, as a lifelong diver, I’ve had the opportunity to see how ocean ecosystems have deteriorated over the last sixty plus years, and I’m so appreciative of all the good work (to restore them).

But as a lifelong diver I also, always, remember the first sentence of Jaws. “The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.” And what makes that line so unforgettable is the sense of something ominous moving just out of sight.

You know, Peter Benchley and his great work gave us a fictional menace to fear in the water but the threat we face today in our oceans is real, not imagined. And it is of our own making, not nature’s. Today, one of the dangers in our oceans is plastic pollution. It’s insidious, it is pervasive, it is persistent, and it is devastating. Bureo is directly reducing marine plastic pollution by removing one of the more harmful sources, discarded fishing nets, and transforming that waste into new products.

Since twenty thirteen, they’ve collected more than eight million kilograms of fishing nets, turning a major source of ocean waste into a valuable resource. Through partnerships with companies like Patagonia their Net Plus material is now being used across the outdoor and apparel industry, replacing virgin plastic in millions of products and providing that scalable solutions are possible.

In doing so, they’ve given us a model for how business can drive ocean renewal by aligning environmental progress, economic opportunity, and community partnership. Efforts like these are important, but they also reinforce how much more innovation is needed across industries. We need to find better business models, not only for plastic nets and bottles, but for a whole range of plastic products that might find their way into the environment and ocean.

Ben Kneppers: As a young kid growing up in New England, I was enamored with the movie ‘Jaws.’ It was iconic for my generation. But we were terrified of sharks. I remember anything in a small boat near a harbor mouth, I was convinced I was gonna be swallowed whole by a shark. And spoiler, I’m still here, so that didn’t happen.

But I quickly got over that unrealistic fear, and I’ve spent the last thirty years of my life in or around the ocean. Kind of all over the world and really learned to respect those majestic creatures, and certainly sharks are that. And, you know, taking those formidable years to spend time in and around the ocean, we really learned that there are killers out there, and the killers are in the form of ghost fishing nets.

And that was something that my (Bureo) team and I learned about. We saw the plastic, we saw bottles and other types of material on beaches, but when we found out about the abundance of fishing nets being dumped or burned or left, it was something that we knew we had to do something about that. And we began that journey really targeted on that single mission.

We saw plastic as this really complicated, ubiquitous problem all over the world, and we said, ‘What if we could do one thing? If we could just focus on fishing nets?’ And thankfully, the government of Chile gave us an opportunity to set up, in 2013, the first fishnet collection in that country that would go on to set the tone for us to become obsessed with this issue.

And that really brought us to coastlines around the world. And with this journey, we’ve really taken on this responsibility that it is about the material that we collect and put back into products, but it’s also about setting an example for the next generation about the ways that things can be done responsibly, not extractivly.

And this path really has resulted in over eight million kilograms of material, which is a huge number for us, thinking about that material being kept out of the environment. But a bigger impact is we’re replacing the need for fossil fuel inputs. And so, it’s not just the plastic kept out of the ocean, but it’s the material that we don’t need to extract and the plastic that we don’t need to create in the first place.

DH: Science winner Diva Amon is a well-known deep-sea ecologist from Trinidad and Tobago and a leading voice in addressing the risks associated with deep sea mining.

Dr. Diva Amon: So many people think the deep ocean is a far away, dark, cold, scary place, but the reality is just so different. It is the largest ecosystem on the planet. It provides more than ninety percent of all the habitable space on Earth. It comprises a significant portion of national waters and is connected to the coasts and the sea surface. And with most of the deep oceans still unexplored, there is no place on the planet that we know less about, and yet it is extraordinary.

There are corals as old as the pyramids, glow-in-the-dark sharks, and blind white crabs that farm bacteria that they eat on their arms. It regulates our climate. It supports our fisheries. It is an integral part of our culture and the well-being of local communities around the world. And something really incredible is that the international deep sea floor forms part of the world’s common heritage, and that means that it belongs to all of us.

It belongs to everyone yet it is remarkable that so few of us have this sense of ownership and connection to this vast and important part of our planet. But it also creates, of course, enormous responsibility because the deep ocean is in peril. When we explore, we find new species, but we also find our trash.

And it’s not just pollution and climate change. It is our exploitation of the deep ocean that is increasing at an astronomical rate. And there are new threats like deep sea mining, which is being pitched as essential for sustainable development, incorrect, or critical for defense, also incorrect. And there are so many unresolved questions of equity as well.

Who does the science in the deep sea? Who makes the decisions and on what basis? And who carries the burden when things go wrong? And if we proceed without fully understanding what we are stepping into, we will lose parts of our planet before we know, understand, and value them. But the tides are changing, and there is so much to be hopeful about.

Small island developing states like mine are already on the front lines of the ocean crisis, and we should also be on the front lines of discovery. And in just a few weeks, we will be. I’ll be leading what I believe is the first locally led deep sea expedition in Trinidad and Tobago, and possibly the Caribbean. And so we’re going to be shining a light on ecosystems that may be as iconic and important as the Okavango Delta, or the Himalayas, or the Grand Canyon. And these are ecosystems that are entirely our own and discovered for the first time by our own people, which is very exciting. The ocean is global, and so its stewardship or should of course be as well.

DH: Sir David Attenborough’s chief project researcher, Kate Streather, explained the purpose of his media award-winning documentary, ‘Ocean.’

Kate Streather: For this film, the ambition was to tell the story of the ocean in a new way that would inspire audiences worldwide. We wanted to create a truly cinematic, scientifically accurate story that would show the ocean as never seen before, revealing truths previously hidden and deepening public understanding of our connection to the ocean.

Every creative decision, from the film’s narrative structure, to the cinematography, and our release strategy, was guided by a singular mission to drive global action for ocean recovery. As Sir David says so powerfully in the film, “If we save the sea, we save our world.”

DH: Koji Senananayake was this year’s youth winner from the island nation of Sri Lanka.

Kojitha Senananyake: My story begins in Sri Lanka, a small island nation in South Asia, where the ocean has been my second home for as long as I can remember.

While the ocean supports the livelihoods of many in our country, this close relationship can sometimes lead to indifference, as seen by the litter scattered on our beautiful beaches. My own awakening occurred when I was around nine years old, when I saw a turtle washed up on shore that had suffocated on a plastic bag.

That experience and my love for animals compelled me to act. So, I began taking small day-to-day actions to protect the environment on an individual level. After starting with simple actions, I want to broaden my impact even further. Therefore, in twenty twenty-three, when I was sixteen years old, I turned to climate advocacy and launched Sea Green, which uses creativity to foster ocean awareness and climate action, starting at a very young age.

With this goal in mind, I wrote two books, designed three jigsaw puzzles which show the beauty of the world we live in, and designed a board game titled ‘Seascapes,’ which highlights the biodiversity of the ocean. I then distributed and continue to donate these resources to students, and I’m proud to say that over ten thousand children currently have access to these resources through their school libraries.

I believe no one should be left out of this climate journey irrespective of their circumstances, so I converted these books to braille and donated them to the Deaf and Blind School of Ratmalana, and also Sahana, which is the National Council of Mental Health in Colombo.

DH: Marce Gutierrez-Graudins, the founder of Azul the Latino Ocean Justice Movement, was winner of the Excellence in Action Award.

Marce Gutierrez-Graudins: 15 years ago, Azul started as a very small effort, just what fit in my backpack. This effort, which just started as a new way to ensure that conservation included my family, our communities, and really all the communities that are dependent on the ocean, is still here today somehow. In this time we’ve learned that science tells us what’s at stake, science shows us the way, and it gives us the solutions, but really it is people and the pathways we create for them, we co-create with them, that make those solutions a reality.

Because at the heart of our work, the heart of Azul’s work, is a deep belief that we must create these real opportunities, real pathways for communities to take action, and that’s what we’ve done for the last 15 years. At Azul, we weave together science, culture, policy, and organizing to create waves of community-led action.

We work to make engagement possible, to make advocacy feel possible, comfortable, meaningful, and to ensure that people see themselves as leaders in shaping the future of our ocean. And yes, it has been a very, very difficult year across the world, in our country. But even in these moments, I remain stubbornly hopeful.

And, you know, as an organizer, I can’t mention bad things without giving you some hope. So, I want to share with you the lyrics of a punk song, because of course there’s nothing more punk than resistance, right?

The sleeping voice resounds within the flowers of every dawn ready to fight. The sleeping voice will awaken once more, and it will bring the life and that new world that among the storms we learn to dream. I call all of you to continue to resist and defend, more importantly, to dream and build for the future.

Together, we will continue to prove that when communities lead, we don’t just protect the ocean, we transform the systems that shape it!

DH: And the Ocean Hero Award went to Julie Packard, the founder of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and its recently retired CEO. She was introduced by New England Aquarium President Vikki Spruill, and former National Aquarium CEO, John Racanelli.

Vikki Spruill: Julie’s passion for the ocean runs deep, but it’s matched by this incredible steadiness of purpose and a grounded sense of what matters the most, including her love of family.

John Racanelli: Julie has taught me so much about so many things, but there’s three key words that keep coming back to mind: leadership, vision, and compassion. And really, especially, I think the movement in modern aquariums began with this institution and your leadership of it.

Julie Packard: When I think about when we started, first had the idea to build an aquarium here at the shores of Monterey Bay, and, and I think about how people were thinking about the ocean back then (1984), of course, it was really different and so much progress that’s been made (since).

Yes, it’s been a few decades, but change takes time, and it’s so inspiring to realize how the awakening to the ocean has happened over this time and carrying it forward, and that makes me really happy. So, I also was reflecting, thinking about the tenet here at the aquarium, which is we built this aquarium about this place, and the old adage about acting local and thinking global.

Monterey Bay is an amazing example of the ability of the ocean to be resilient and to be reborn after an incredibly, pretty much decimated state. And, as we know, it’s kind of not such happy times in our nation and in our world right now. But the rays of hope for all of us, they always begin with people where they are caring about something and taking action on its behalf.

And here in Monterey Bay, of course, we have living proof of that. That’s one of the things that’s so wonderful about running an aquarium here on the shores of Monterey Bay because we can interpret all the life here that’s amazing and then go out the door and you can see the fruits of the labor. And I always tell people when they come here, we have 40 million people living in the state, and I say, ‘This didn’t just happen, that the coast of California looks so great and there’s so much protected space and that we have an amazing network of marine-protected areas and that our marine mammal populations are flourishing and that all kinds of endangered species are recovering. It happened because people cared, and they voted to get great people in office, and they voted for the funding to make those changes happen, and they voted to move things forward on behalf of what they cared about.

DH: And that of course is where it starts. In challenging times like these we can all use some inspiration to become engaged citizens on behalf of the ocean. And that is what our 2026 Peter Benchley Ocean Award winners provide us - the belief that in taking solution-oriented action we can change the world.

To hear the soundtrack of this go to our Rising Tide Ocean Podcast

To hear the entire two-hour awards ceremony, go to: peterbenchleyoceanawards.org

The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall in Washington has turned pea green with algal growth — as shallow bodies of still water tend to do in summer when temperatures rise. President Trump’s $14-million no-bid “American flag blue” paint job was never going to stop that. It may in fact have contributed, as being darker than the previous pool bottom it absorbs heat more readily.

Algal blooms are on the increase globally as the oceans and other bodies of water continue warming due to fossil-fuel-fired climate change and increased nutrient runoff from agriculture, deforestation and urban pollution. Some of these — known as harmful algal blooms — involve toxic species and can affect wildlife, drinking water and industry.

The global increase has contributed to massive piles of sargassum seaweed smothering beaches in Florida and the Caribbean and “green tides” of sea lettuce coming ashore in southern China. In March, the United Nations reported that harmful algal blooms are continuing to increase in distribution, frequency and effects, sparking fish and marine mammal die-offs and causing human harm either through toxic seafood or direct exposure.

On the other hand, we can thank algae, the first complex life form on Earth, along with cyanobacteria, for giving us our atmosphere in the Great Oxidation Event of 2.5 billion years ago. Algae also became the ancestor of all the world’s plant life that, like it, photosynthesize, taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. And while some people, with their bipedal air-breathing terrestrial biases, like to call the rainforests “the lungs of the world,” marine microalgae including phytoplankton generate about half the world’s oxygen while macroalgae in the form of some 12,000 species of seaweed, along with sea grasses, mangroves and salt marshes, may contribute another 20%.

I recently visited the Jepson Herbaria at UC Berkeley, which houses one of the world’s finest collections of pressed and preserved algae. Touring its “cabinets of curiosity,” as curator Kathy Ann Miller calls them, I got to see large-format folders of seaweed whose varied appearances might evoke the work of artists ranging from Escher to O’Keeffe to Seuss. Today they are also contributing to molecular and DNA studies helping track and understand our changing ocean including the rapid decline of macroalgae kelp forests that make up some 30 species of seaweed and contribute $500 billion a year to our global economy, according to a 2023 study in Nature Communications.

This includes food security: Kelp is essential habitat during the life cycles of salmon, cod, rockfish and herring, as well as 1,000 other species including sea otters, wolf eels and leafy sea dragons. Many species of seaweed are themselves edible. Kelp also provides storm and erosion protection for much of the world’s temperate coastlines, generates oxygen and is an ingredient in a vast range of human products.

Algin, which makes up 40% of kelp’s cellular structure, has since the 1920s been used as a stabilizer and emulsifier for food, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. While most people still think “pond scum” or “ick” when you say “algae,” we are using it every day in our toothpaste, lipstick, shampoo, cupcakes and processed foods like chicken nuggets and other “restructured meats.” It is also, appropriately enough, in heartburn medicine.

With the world’s 1.5 billion cattle contributing 11% of greenhouse gasses through their methane emissions, a 1% mix of a particular red algae in animal feed has been found to reduce those emissions 50 to 90%. It’s now being used in Australia and elsewhere. A carbon-negative algae biorefinery I visited on the Black Sea in Turkey is also producing jet fuel for Turkish Airlines and omega-3 nutrient supplements from microalgae while getting its feedstock carbon dioxide from a cement manufacturer that would otherwise be emitting it into the atmosphere. With the emerging promise of bioplastics, construction materials, new medicines, CO2 scrubbers and burn treatments, the future of algae is blooming in many good ways.

So, let’s be more grateful for the presence of algae in our lives — just not in our nation’s Reflecting Pool. For more on Algae in the form of Kelp Forests check out my new book, “Forest of

the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp.”

From June 1-4 during Capitol Hill Ocean Week in Washington D.C. I joined oceanographer and Blue Frontier board member Joy LeiLei Shih as she guided our four Blue Frontier Youth Ambassadors on a trip to Washington, DC. We later recorded their impressions for our Rising Tide Ocean Podcast which is edited down here for Substack.

During our time there they attended various ocean panels, forums, and events, including my Forest of the Sea book talk at Busboys and Poets. But mostly our 4 youth leaders worked the halls of Congress, educating their elected officials on the issues they’re involved in as activists and advocates including protecting sea turtles and opposing plastic waste, over-consumption and preventing whale strikes by large vessels. They had some dozen meetings over three days on Capitol Hill and in the House and Senate offices, including meetings with Senators Padilla and Schiff (California), and Schatz (Hawaii) and Representatives Raskin (Maryland), Huffman and Liccardo (California).

Before we interviewed the four of them: Avery, age 13, Jack, 13, Liam, 14 and Kiana, who’s 16, I asked Leilei to talk about how our Youth Ambassador Program was launched.

Joy Leilei Shih (JLS): I came up with the idea for this program in 2022, shortly after I became a mom, and two things happened; Suddenly, I had the most important reason in the world to protect our planet, beyond my natural inclination to do so, (and also) I was transitioning from being perceived as a youth voice myself into my more professional roles… so I thought I could give back and elevate the next generation of youth and teach them how to effectively advocate for the oceans.

So, to date, we’ve had seven youth ambassadors, and they are so impressive, knowledgeable, and passionate. And this program gives them the opportunity to learn some of the most powerful and effective ways to use their voice, talking directly to their senators and congresspeople on Capitol Hill, where it all happens, and influencing policy and laws that will directly protect the oceans for themselves and future generations.

This mentorship program officially lasts a year. Next (after D.C.), these youth ambassadors will organize a community project to support their ocean interests and continue to build on their confidence to create future opportunities for themselves.

David, you and I actually collaborated the inaugural year of the Youth Ambassador Program in 2023 (when we were in DC to promote the ‘Ocean Climate Action Plan’ Blue Frontier had helped launch) and it went so well that year, when I thought it was time to take the program to the next level, I knew I wanted Blue Frontier to be the new home of this Youth Ambassador Program.

And, gosh, last week was absolutely incredible. As you mentioned, so many senators and congress people made the time to directly meet with these youth, and they were so impressed, how they spoke with passion and knowledge, armed with solutions, and clear in their asks. We covered topics like plastic pollution, protecting watersheds, marine mammal protection, screening of ports, ending offshore drilling, and carbon sequestration. So, that’s a little bit about our program.

David Helvarg (DH): (to Youths on Zoom)” I’m curious, before we get into your actual experiences in DC, how did the four of you first hear about the Youth Ambassador Program in order to apply?

Liam: I found out about the program from Jack, who is my best friend from my previous school that I just graduated from and I just wanted to be part of it too.

Jack: And I really just heard about it through my dad and I thought it sounded interesting, so yeah.

Kiana: I heard about the program through my high school counselor who found it for me after I told her about my interest of the ocean.

Avery: When I was trying to get (sea turtle) signage up in some of the beaches around Ko Olina (Oahu Hawaii), I had to reach out to a few people, and that’s when I got in contact with Leilei, who encouraged me to apply to the program.

DH: Leilei can you introduce us to who we’re talking to here?

JLS: Sure. Avery is from Kapolei, which is in Hawaii. She’s an advocate for Honu, which is the Hawaiian word for green sea turtles. She started an educational project called Pu’ulu Honu that brings together students, families, and visitors to protect not only Oahu’s turtles, but all of the Honu in Hawaii and beyond through education, community service, and stewardship.

Kiana is from Oceanside, California. She’s passionate about ocean advocacy told through indigenous stories…She’s also an artist, so she uses (plastic) pieces from cleanups to create mixed media arts as a visual tool to help people realize the impact of their discards.

Jack is from Silver Spring, Maryland and has already dedicated his young life to leadership and civic engagement through Model United Nations, serving on the junior council for the magazine The Week... He grew up between the Chesapeake Bay and Monterey Bay, as well as the coast of Maine, so he’s seen how single-use plastic spreads through wetlands, creeks, and into the ocean.

And Liam is also from Silver Spring. He’s an avid surfer, white water kayaker, and ocean enthusiast. From a young age, Liam participated in family beach cleanups as an essential part of every beach vacation. He’s also been part of the Model UN, where he was nominated to speak at the UN General Assembly in front of more than 6,000 participants, advisors, and parents.

DH: I assume this is all your first time doing citizen lobbying? What were your impressions?

Avery: Well, I think it was a really interesting and cool experience because, you know, I’ve never gotten the opportunity to speak to, like, my senators and representatives. And I also thought it was really cool that they actually cared about what we were talking about and not just throwing the idea off or disregarding us. They were actually interested in what we had to say!

DH: And when we were in Senator Schatz’s office, I think you actually started talking about some potential programs for funding for your turtle warning signs (for tourists to keep their distance and not feed or harass the green sea turtles).

Avery: Yeah, we also wanted to include content, educational content for airlines or, like, restaurants and just different tourism-heavy places, because that is the best way to spread education.

DH: Anyone else?

Jack: I thought it shows, like, how accessible speaking up for your environment is, and how anyone can make a difference if you just put a little effort into it and I’m so grateful to have had Leilei to help us out with (setting up) a meeting with Jamie Raskin, my local representative.

Kianna: I really appreciated the experience. It was super unique, being face to face with these people. In the past, I’ve reached out through emails and I’ve never really gotten any responses or anything. But, actually asking for things and seeing them write it down and putting like words with their actions was just really valuable for me to see that change can happen. It’s just something you might have to do face to face to push these people to actually do something about the issues.

DH: I should point out that you were meeting with your own representatives because you’re their constituents. And because of where you’re located (California, Hawaii, Maryland), you tended to be meeting with House members and senators who are sympathetic to you, also understanding that the majority of the House and Senate today are not as sympathetic to your issues.

Kianna: Yeah. And sometimes I think it’s harder as youth to communicate with these adults because it’s like we’re younger, and we don’t have as much experience as them. And seeing some people who are older than us,who have lived through these experiences I think (they may) not necessarily care as much, I think it really affects us because we are the ones who are gonna continue living on this planet longer than them.

And it seems like as the youth today that we almost care more about what’s going to happen because it is our future, and I think once they see that, they can connect more with us and understand that they have lived on this planet but now it needs to contribute to the next generation.

JLS: Is there any advice you would want to say to other youth who are interested in advocating for the oceans?

Liam: I’d say one of the biggest things you can do is spread awareness about these problems. Protesting is another good thing to do. Anyone can make a sign and go out on the street. And, you know, go to your local representatives and talk to them about these specific topics. Like Jack and I just did a presentation in school to spread awareness which helped our classmates know about these (ocean) bills and the effects on our waterways and stuff like that.

DH: I’m curious what, was the reaction of your classmates when you said, “Oh, we were up in Washington talking to senators and congresspeople about ocean bills.”

Jack: A lot of people were surprised, but at the same time a lot of kids didn’t really know who the people we were speaking to were.

DH: They’re not teaching ‘Civics’ anymore (in U.S. schools) so you don’t know who your Congress members or your senators are

JLS: Is there anything you’d like the general public to know about oceans and anything they should do to help protect oceans and our planet, beyond what you’ve shared so far?

Avery: I think, like what Jack and Liam were talking about, if you just do a little bit to make a difference it makes a huge difference, because ultimately the most effective solution to all these problems is just awareness. And if, like, visitors to beaches or tourists can understand these problems and really want to do something about them lots of change can be made. And I just think that if you can really pay attention to all these problems that people are trying to bring up, then there can be a real difference made.

DH: And Avery, I think what was very effective when you presented to either the staff or the elected people, was when you talked about that you used to feed the sea turtles yourself before you knew better. So, it’s not like making those people (who feed or unknowingly harass the Honu) into the bad guys.

Avery: Yeah, exactly. They just don’t know any better, and that’s why I think signage is such a good idea, because it’s not like going out to them and yelling at them, because, ultimately, they’re not going to want to fix anything if they’re being yelled at. They’re gonna get defensive, and then they’re just not going to want to listen to us. So, I think if we let them know that it’s okay to make mistakes and it’s okay to have done it before, but just to change in the future and improve. I think that could be really powerful

Kianna: Something I think that people should take away from all this is just to educate yourself. Like, in this time, we have access to so many things with the internet and books and all those sorts of things. And once you’re able to educate yourself, you can spread your knowledge to others. Like today, we have social media, and that’s the way we connect with people. Like, if you can take what you learn and create a social media platform off of that and continue to educate everybody else, at the end of the day, when we’re educated as a nation, we can convince those people who have the power to actually do something to help our planet.

Kianna: Because I create art with plastic, um, I actually intern at my local library and there’s a lot of younger kids there. And something that I really like to do with them is I’m able to teach a class every couple of months where I get to bring in my artwork and show the kids, and they get so excited and think it’s really cool. And I get to bring in the plastic pieces I collected through my Just Surf Club, where we do beach cleanups. And I get to see them create things and learn about how plastic affects the ocean. And I always get so excited at the end because all the kids are like, “Oh, I wanna pick up plastic from the beach and make my own art at home,” and that really touches my heart.

DH: Kianna, you described one of your pieces to a couple of the offices. Maybe you could describe that piece that you’re particularly proud of.

Kianna: Yeah. Um, one of my favorite pieces reflects my heritage. I’m a quarter Okinawan and because of the military bases there and their presence, there’s a lot of pollution that affects the people living there and also the marine life. So, I created a piece with a military base made entirely out of plastic, and there’s, pollution and stuff around it. And on top of the base is a girl, and she’s in a kimono, which is traditional Okinawan wear, and most of it is plastic

Liam: Um, Jack and I, at our school, we started something this year called the Barrie Trail, Barrie being our school. And, we have some woods by our school, and we’re creating this trail where it’s just, like, a place where people can walk in the woods, in the nature, and feel more connected to our planet. And there’s also trash along a creek that runs by the trail. And, we also just pick up trash and stuff.

Avery: I have a club. It’s called Pu’ulu Honu. We’re working on turning it into a nonprofit organization, and currently it’s just at my school. But I feel like if I’m able to expand it to other schools around the island (Oahu), that would be really helpful because my idea is that each school should be in charge of a specific (turtle or monk seal) beach. And if we all can work together to take care of our own little part a lot can happen.

JLS: I have sort of a fun question for everybody. What was your favorite part of being in the nation’s capital, whether it was related to our advocacy work or not?

Avery: For me, my favorite part was to get to meet so many different people, like all of you youth ambassadors, that you guys actually care about all these different ocean issues, and how passionate you guys are to talk to them (members of Congress and their staff), and how brave you are. Because it’s kind of scary and nerve-wracking to talk to these senators, and it just seemed, like, so easy, and I felt like that was really cool to be able to meet other people that are just as concerned about keeping our earth safe and our oceans safe in the future.

Jack: The reality struck when I was walking down the hallway in one of the buildings that we were in and saw JFK’s (senate) office, and that really hit me, that we’re walking in the hallways, in the rooms, where big decisions get made and important people are, and that we were there, and we were talking with these people, and we were making an impact, and anyone can do that.

JLS: Avery and Kiana got a picture in front of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s portrait. That was very cool

Avery: Another cool thing for me was when we went into the Capitol, there was a big statue of Kamehameha, the first king of Hawaii, and I thought that was really cool that they included that even though Hawaii’s so far away from DC, and they chose to include him, and I thought that was really special.

JLS: Jack, did you have a favorite part of the whole trip?

Jack: I mean, this is something I’ve been talking about before but, I guess my favorite part might’ve been how Congressman Jamie Raskin took time out of his day to meet with us because I was expecting to only meet, like, members of the staff, not the congress people or senators. It was nice to see that he cared about meeting with us.

DH: We, we were surprised too. I mean we were briefing you that we’d probably only meet with staff members, but that’s cool because the staffers are really the ones who make decisions (on certain issues). And then all these House members and Senators kind of popped out, because they really wanted to be with you and meet youth activists. I think you also give them a sense that they’re getting something done if young people are engaged with the issues that they engage with, you know, turning the tide for our future and give them some hope also.

Jack: Thank you, for having us.

Avery: Yes, thank you David and Leilei for this amazing opportunity. It was just so amazing to be able to do this.

JLS: And I just want to thank all of you and say congratulations for such a wonderful week during Ocean Week on Capitol Hill.

While I was on my ‘Forest of the Sea’ book tour my ‘Rising Tide Ocean Podcast’s co-hosts Vicki Nichols Goldstein and Natasha Benjamin interviewed Cathrine Breed, also known as ‘Cat,’ an endurance athlete, explorer, and storyteller, whose journey began as a competitive swimmer, two-time Pan American gold medalist and US national swim team member now planning to swim the length of California’s Golden Shore for her Swim California project. – I’ve edited down the interview for Our Blue Frontier Substack.

Natasha Benjamin (NB): You stepped out of the pool and found a home at San Francisco’s legendary Dolphin Club, diving headfirst into the vast, unpredictable world of the open water, and you’ve been rewriting the record books ever since. We’re talking about a world record from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge, the first ever circumnavigation of Lake Tahoe, the fastest female length of Lake Tahoe and more. Catherine you’re also the founder of Sea Dreamers, a community connecting young women to ocean-based activities, built on the belief that we protect what we love…So we usually start every podcast asking what was your first connection with the sea?

Catherine Breed (CB): My first connection to the ocean was just being kids in the ocean when we flew to New Zealand as a family and we spent around two or three weeks exploring the North and South Island meeting the communities. And then I remember we went back maybe a year later, and Ellen MacArthur had just been the first woman, I believe, to sail solo (actually fastest solo) around the world. And so that was my first introduction to the ocean and to just women doing incredible things. And from there the ocean memories were of my sister and I always playing and exploring and jumping in the waters and trying to get as close to all the sea creatures as we could.

Vicki Nichols Goldstein (VNG): When did this become a real serious part of your life?

CB: Swimming in the ocean was never a passion of mine. I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna go swim in the ocean’ when I was a kid. But then pool swimming became very serious, and when that really started taking off, swim meet weekends are a full Thursday night through Sunday night activity.

VNG: So, what was the transition from pool to ocean?

CB: The transition happened during my years at Cal (UC Berkeley), I had the privilege of having a really great coach, and she instilled in us the love of the ocean, and loving swimming first, and being a strong woman, and if you do those two things, then the fast swimming will come. So, I was focused more our relationship with the water, with this place, this medium that we clearly loved from when we were little, tiny kids. So, when I graduated, I personally wasn’t burnt out on swimming, but I knew I didn’t want to race in a pool anymore. And so, I got introduced to the Dolphin Club and the San Francisco Bay swimming community, and I did a bunch of local swim races with the Dolphin Club, and they were like, “You’re pretty fast, and you don’t seem bothered by the cold. You should do the English Channel.” And I said, “That’s insane. Why would anyone swim 21 miles?” You know, I still had that 5K (pool racing) in the back of my head and like I hated three miles.

But with enough peer pressure and encouragement, and when you surrounded with people who are doing similar things, you’re like, “I might as well try.” And so, in 2017, I swam the length of Lake Tahoe, and I just had a really great first experience. And so that was kind of that, that transition was, it just kind of naturally happened.

NB: Describe for folks who maybe jump in the pool every once in a while, what do you think about for hours and hours and hours (swimming through the sea)?

CB: You know, sometimes I wish I had a little internal recorder that could record my thoughts because I truly don’t know what I think about for 10 or 12 hours. How it kind of goes is there’s a lot of energy in the beginning. The swims are usually at night, and being in the ocean at night is very scary. So, I would say adrenaline is very high. I’m trying to calm myself down. I’m doing my preparation. The boat’s getting everything ready. It’s usually very quiet. It’s not an event with big fanfare. I get in the water, and I just start swimming.

And my goal that first hour is to settle into a pace and kind of dial that adrenaline down and just get to the first feed (eating while in the water), which is about an hour. And then throughout the 12 or 14 hours that I’m swimming, there’s pieces where I’m maybe thinking about training sessions I’ve done, or I’m thinking about the people who supported me and got me to this place, or I’m thinking about my stroke rate or my speed, or I don’t know. I think mostly I just kind of black out. Like, I get into this very cathartic flow state that’s just one stroke after another.

NB: Before we get to Swim California (her Summer 2026 plan to swim the length of the state north to south) tell us a little bit about the Farallones swim? I was there at the beginning and the end. That was quite a journey. It was the record in terms of time. And seven other people have done it correct?

CB: I was number seven.

NB: You were number seven. Okay.

CB: Imagine like a ‘Shutter Island’ (movie) or ‘The Shining’ that type of location 30 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge. You get out there and it’s covered in fog, and it’s misty, and something about it feels eerie because if you know anything about the Farallones, you know it’s called Devil’s Teeth, not just for how the rocks jut out of the water, but also for what lurks beneath, which are great white sharks. But the islands also have a very large sea lion population and sea birds and so the sounds and the smells are really overwhelming. So, just imagine everything in the ocean that you don’t want to be around on this island.

So, its very scary, and that’s why only seven people have done it, even though it sits there and taunts us, you know, those of us that swim in the San Francisco Bay, you just know how intimidating it is. Not to mention, it has everything hard about marathon swims. The distance is hard. You have cold water, which is hard. The sea life is difficult, and a major thing is the currents. And so, if you time it wrong or if you swim a little bit too slow and you miss that flood (tide) coming into the bay, you can’t finish. It’s impossible.

The swim started at 10:45 PM. I slid into the water very quietly and the countdown was a whisper. We were all just, “Eight, seven,” and then it was, “Go.” And we just, in our heads, it was if we’re just quiet and we’re not disturbing the water, we’re not going to wake up whatever is underneath us, which is not true. But in our heads...

NB: And I just want to remind people that you were not in a wetsuit and the water temperature was?

CB: It was around 55, 56 (F).

VNG: Cold.

CB: Yeah, really cold. And we set off, and that (underwater shallow) shelf lasts around 500 yards or so, and once the shelf drops, then our belief was that the danger would drop off quite a bit, because the food source (seals) is on the island, so predators (white sharks) are gonna hang out where the food source is.

So, things started to loosen up a little bit. As the swim went on, I was constantly just hitting things in the water, like little jellyfish or whatever, and I could never get into that cathartic, focused state. And I think because I couldn’t get into that state, I really let negative emotions creep in, like, ‘I’m cold, I’m cold, I can’t do this’ And pretty soon I found myself in a bait ball. So, there was a large group of little sardines or fish in the water, and when there’s fish, you’re gonna have sea birds going for them. So, there were sea birds swimming all over the place, and there were jellyfish everywhere, and I kept getting jellyfish in my suit to the point that I actually did a mid-swim change to put on a tighter bathing suit. And what was really a mind trip was the eyes of the sea birds, when the boat lights illuminated them, thy looked like buildings on the shore.

VNG: Wow.

CB: And so, I’m 20 miles away from San Francisco. I’m not looking at the city, but you see all these little tiny eyes lit up, and it looks like a cityscape. And so, for almost all the way through the night I have a mind trip of, “Oh, I’m almost there.”

“No, you’re not.” “Oh, I’m almost there.” “No, you’re not.” And I spent most of that swim just in this really bad mental state And I truly couldn’t have done it without my crew encouraging me to keep going, keep going, keep going.

VNG: So physically, you were very cold, and you were able to work through the cold. It never really got to your core?

CB: It’s funny. in 2019 I swam from Ireland to Scotland. That water is 50 to 52 degrees and I spent 11 hours in that water with no wetsuit, and I was fine. I got out of the water and I was, like, hot. So, for me, 56, 58 should have been okay, and I know on these swims you are gonna get cold, you’re going to get claw hand but I think I let myself get fixated. I was shivering but shivering isn’t hypothermia. If I stopped shivering or had mumbles that’s when we would be concerned, but that never happened. I was coherent, speaking clearly. I was just shivering, and became fixated on the shivering, but I was still able to move forward.

NB: How do you think about Northern California waters and sharks?

I’m a surfer and you think about sharks, but as soon as you get in the water, you turn it off, and you can’t really think about it. We know they’re there, and sometimes we see them, but most of the time we don’t, but we know they’re there. So, you turn it off. You make the decision on getting in the ocean, and as soon as that decision is made There’s no point in fixating on it anymore. I really feel like once the swim starts and I can settle that adrenaline down, that initial shock of like, “Oh my God. I’m in the ocean. I’m doing this,” I put it out of my mind, and I feel very at home in the ocean, very comfortable.

VNG: So, let’s, let’s go to your (upcoming) swim, the California Coast Swim. When do you start? Where do you start? How many miles will it be? And how long do you think it’ll take you?

CB: The ‘Swim California’ details is it is approximately 900 miles. I do know our coastline is 823 miles as the crow flies, but the reality is, with swimming, you never go in a perfectly straight line.

I’m starting July 1st-ish. It could be minus a couple days if weather’s bad, and I’ll start right on the Oregon border. And I will swim approximately five hours a day, which should get me anywhere from 10 to 15 miles per day. That really depends on the current. And I have estimated it will take around four months.

And one of the things (it will do) is elevate coastal stories. I love this coastline so much, and someone else coined the phrase that it’s my love letter to the coast.’ It’s like one of my favorite places to be… But something that’s important to me is that I’m not going to do justice to the conservation efforts that are happening, because I’m not the resident expert. And so, Natasha really came in here in an important way of helping with the partnerships between local conservation groups…so that they can tell the story of what they’re working on and get people involved locally. It really goes back to the nonprofit I founded, ‘Sea Dreamers’, where I’m a woman, I’m doing this thing in the ocean, I’m also learning about conservation. And so, if you learn about something and you’re empowered to, to do it, and you fall in love with it you’re going to fight to protect it.

You can’t bring an agenda into the ocean. And you can’t bring pride or a plan, and you can’t bring that when you’re surfing or sailing or swimming. And you just have to be there and surrender. And one of my favorite things is surfing at Ocean Beach (San Francisco) at sunrise, and the waves come when they come, and hopefully you catch a few.

But really, the main reason you’re there is to just to fill your well and, like, be present. And so that’s something I get out of the ocean, but I think I need to learn a little bit more about what I can personally give back to it.

In the most recent episode of Rising Tide (the ocean podcast) Vicki Nichols Goldstein and I talked with Paul Greenberg, author of the best-selling book ‘Four Fish’ and more recent works including his latest novel ‘A Third Term’ in which George Washington takes on Donald Trump. So obviously, he has range. He’s also a writer-in-residence at the Safina Center, founded by our friend Carl Safina. He’s received many honors and teaches in NYU’s Animal Studies Program.

David Helvarg (DH): Paul when did you first connect with the ocean?

Paul Greenberg (PG): Oh, it was pretty early on. I was about three years old when my parents divorced, and we started having these divorced dad weekends. My dad suddenly had us, my brother and me on the weekends and I think he had this thought that a man should take his sons fishing. The problem was he didn’t know how to fish. So, he took us out on these party boats, a pay-per-fare situation. And my father would say,’you meet a better class of people there.’ It’s a pretty rough crew, usually people actually fishing for food and there was always a poker game at the front of the boat. My father went for the poker, and I went for the fishing.

So, I kind of ended up teaching my father how to fish because I would spend a lot of time talking to the mates, talking to the captains and I learned a lot of stuff from them. And my father, meanwhile, was playing poker, so when he came to the rail, he didn’t know what he was doing. So, any time a child feels empowered to be the knowledge holder, that’s very exciting and it only encouraged me (to continue fishing).

DH: So, to fast-forward, how did your fishing through your youth lead to a broader interest in writing and oceans?

PG: So, the writing thing kind of came through a different angle. My father was a psychiatrist, but he also wrote a lot of film criticism. The Jewish ideal is that your son becomes a doctor, but my father really wished he hadn’t become a doctor. He wished he’d become a creator and so rather than pushing me down the road of medicine, which his mother pushed him down, he was much more interested in our developing talent in the creative sphere. So today my older brother is a screenwriter and he writes, like, Halloween H2O or Children of the Corn Part 3. And so, there was sort of this desire to write. And I worked quite a number of years for a nonprofit called Internews. I worked in the former Soviet Union actually developing independent television stations in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it, all this stuff accrued a kind of life of its own, and I ended up writing a novel based on that. I married a Soviet woman right out of college that was, as Paul Auster would say, the future ex-Mrs. Greenberg. And so, I wrote this novel loosely based on that.

DH: What was it called?

PG: It’s called ‘Leaving Katya.’

And then somebody at The Boston Globe Ideas section named Jennifer Schuessler, said, ‘I heard that you like to fish. Would you like to do a thinking piece about fishing?’ And I thought whenever you have two fish that occupy the same niche, like for an angler, one becomes the good one and one becomes the bad one. So, like, if you’re fishing in the top waters in New England, the Striped Bass is the good fish and the Bluefish is the one that gets in the way and ends up in the garbage can. So, I wrote this sort of think piece and it turns out it actually goes all the way back to Izaak Walton, who wrote a book called ‘The Complete Angler’ in the 17th century. It was considered the first fishing manual. But it turns out, that book is actually an extended allegory and he speaks of the salmon being the noble regent and the pike being the tyrant. And the regent, he was implying was Charles I, and the tyrant, the pike, was Cromwell who eventually had Charles beheaded.

DH: Behead like many of our fish ...

PG: Exactly. So that piece did really well. Marty Baron was the editor-in-chief of the Boston Globe at the time. And when the story ran, he walked down to my editor’s desk, and he said, “This is the kind of story I want in my newspaper,” which was thrilling. As a sidebar, the next story, my editor was like, “You got anything else?” And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. I’d like to write something about the Brown University Semiotics Department,’ because I studied semiotics at Brown. And so, I did this piece on semiotics, and I thought it was really good. And after that article ran, Marty Baron came down to my editor’s desk, and said, ‘I never, wanna see the word semiotics in my newspaper ever again!’

DH: And remind us what semiotics is.

PG: It’s the study, semiotics from semio, meaning a sign. It’s sort of like deconstructing texts, be they films or books or whatever, to find the hidden meaning (literal messages and cultural contexts). It’s got a strong Marxist component. And a lot of serious people came out of the semiotics program, like, Rick Moody, Jeff Eugenides and Ira Glass. Glass had a funny story. When he graduated with a semiotics degree, he came down from the podium with his diploma in his hands, and his father had taken out an ad in the Baltimore Sun, a fake ad, and he gave it to him. The ad read “International firm seeks semiotics grads for high-paying positions.”

So anyway, it was actually influential in how I ended up thinking about the ocean because there’s a lot of really superficial work being done about the ocean. And what semiotics helped me to understand is that humans, at the end of the day, when it comes to the wild world, are reductionists and simplifiers, which is the essence of our problem with the planet, that we don’t tolerate complexity very well, especially in our food systems. And so, this desire to simplify things into things that we recognize on a menu or that we recognize in a supermarket aisle compels us to do away with the rest of the natural world.

There was a very important piece of reading I did early on. There was a, a scientist named Galton who was actually a cousin of Darwin’s. And he wrote a very influential piece about the domestication of animals. He listed these seven or eight criteria that an animal needs to be successfully domesticated, and then he has this great line, “All the rest of the of the worlds of animals are destined to be wiped off the face of the earth because of their inefficiency or their inability to accommodate humankind.”

I’m paraphrasing, but that was it in a sense, and I was like, “Whoa.” Then keep in mind, this was written in the Victorian era. And while I don’t agree with him that the rest of the world should be wiped off the face of the earth, I do think that we tend to domesticate what we can. And to some degree, ‘Four Fish’ was the story of what we chose to domesticate and how the wild fights for its survival in the face of both extirpation in the form of fishing and hunting but also domestication has its own problems that it inflicts on the ocean.

Vicki Nichols Goldstein (VNG): I love that cover (book cover of ‘Four Fish’ that shows their images stacked one over the other). I think it’s great, and it’s really about how humans manage or fail to manage these shared resources. And you picked four iconic ones; salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna, not really as food, but almost like a case study, I think, in human decision-making. So, what do you think these fish reveal about us and why did you actually pick those four?

PG: I was trying to go from a place most people knew about, and I looked to some degree at what were the most consumed seafoods. Well, salmon is the most consumed fish that we eat, and then after that is tuna. And when I say salmon, when I say tuna, there are multiple species that fit under this kind of flesh archetype. Cod again, if you look at the sort of third most consumed seafoods or fourth, it’s in a basket of what the industrial world calls the white fish market. And, cod is just one of a bunch of different white fish. So, by using that, I was able to look at both, the epic destruction of cod, which those of us who are fishy know about from Mark Kurlansky’s book (‘Cod’). Which by the way, I just wrote the introduction to the 30th anniversary (edition).

And the fourth fish, the sea bass…That was actually a kind of exercise in semiotics because what I thought was interesting about that chapter was you have this word ‘bass,’ right? And there’s this disjunction between a common name and a scientific name. A scientific name indicates the precise genus and species, whereas a common name is very slippery and it passes over all kinds of fish. And what I thought was interesting about the bass thing, unlike the other three, it’s really not what I would consider it a top-flight fish that you would see on every single menu (but) It does represent so many shifts and swapping of one fish for another that there was a good narrative to tell.

My way into bass originally was that my stepmother came to me one day and she said, I’ve discovered a new fish, and I just love it, and I order it all the time.” And I said, “What is this fish?” And she said, “It’s a branzino.” And, you know, we are all old enough to remember a time when there were no branzino in the market... and, branzino, it’s also known as the European sea bass. It’s actually quite closely related to the American striped bass. They actually are from the same genus. I spent a lot of time talking about the taming of the European sea bass, the branzino, and how that came to market, because that was an interesting thing that had to be figured out.

But there’s also an interesting thing that previous to writing ‘Four Fish’ I’d done a piece for the New York Times Magazine about Chilean sea bass.

DH: I was just gonna say, Patagonian toothfish (that got renamed Chilean Sea Bass).

PG: Chilean sea bass is another fish that gets named bass even though they’re not even related on a family level to American striped bass or European sea bass. They’re actually, you have to go all the way up to a level, an order (of being) to find a commonality between Chilean sea bass and striped bass and European sea bass. And one of the things I do in my lecture when I talk about the sort of swapping of the bass is I show all the different things that get called sea bass. Like for example, out in California, the California white sea bass is actually closer to a weakfish, but it’s called a sea bass. But anyway I show a slide of a ring-tailed lemur and my son, and I show that where they intersect is at the level of an order, which is where Chilean sea bass and striped bass come into play (intersect).

DH: So, what’s your present engagement?

PG: My latest project is I’m going to Sicily in July to look at the swordfish fishery. Everyone got excited about bluefin tuna and saving them, and really, we’ve had quite a bit of success in turning bluefin tuna around, but meanwhile the swordfish has really been thrown under the boat under the bus.

DH: Under the boat. You’re correct.

PG: And there’s a lot of really interesting stuff going on with swordfish. There’s an all-woman harpoon crew out of Messina. There’s longlining. The fish are getting smaller and smaller, just like they did here. But I also want to look at this more spiritually as I get older. I mean, I’m 58, so I was in my late 30s, early 40s when I wrote ‘Four Fish,’ and, you know, it was at a different part of my life. This swordfish project has me thinking a lot about Hemingway, it has me thinking about Hemingway’s suicide. It has me thinking about ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ and legacy. I think it was Kierkegaard who said, “How does this sit with my being?”

I think it’s clear that, while the environmental movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s were extremely important and got us really far, it didn’t change our essential psychology around the Earth. Like, the fact that so much is able to be rolled back in 14 months by one jerk (Donald Trump) means that its roots weren’t deep enough. So, this had me thinking what could I do that was sort of a deep roots approach?

VNG: What kind of questions should we be asking that we’re not to get us to that core question of why haven’t we gone deep enough?

PG: I think we took a bad turn by throwing the entirety of our weight into climate change. And it’s not that I don’t believe in climate change, it’s not that I don’t feel its effects, it’s not that I don’t think it’s extremely important, but from an electoral point of view, it’s a disaster. Here’s the ask (by some) when it comes to climate change. ‘I want you to change almost everything in your life so that your great-grandchildren, who won’t know your name, might live slightly better.’

DH: But that’s (of course) the wrong approach. The reality is we interviewed the AFL-CIO (trade union rep) in Rhode Island, because they were twice told to put down their tools (while working to finish completion of the ‘Revolution’ offshore wind project). Today solar and wind, including offshore wind is cheaper than coal, oil or gas. And so what Trump is actually fighting against is the free market, trying to shut down offshore wind (also onshore wind and solar). The argument should be it’s good for the economy, it’s good for your life.

PG: Exactly. And It should also be, like, a bazillion little things to make your community better…Taking out a dam will lower your flood risk, returning anadromous fish (like salmon and steelhead) to your neighborhood, and, planting urban forests. I wrote a book a few years ago called ‘The Climate Diet.’ It’s sort of about what you personally can do around climate. We need to find a whole host of arguments that, yes, address climate change, but for which it’s not the major thing (improving your life is).

VNG: You’ve touched on politics, oceans, environment, mindsets and mind shifts. What gives you hope right now?

PG: Actually, bluefin tuna give me hope. The fact that when I wrote ‘Four Fish,’ that was the last scene, the last fishing scene in ‘Four Fish.’ Almost the end of every chapter has me going fishing and usually I hook something. And in the last chapter I’m on this tuna boat off of North Carolina, and they’re shooting a fishing show, and they’ve got this professional angler, and he’s sitting in the fighting chair ready for the bluefin to bite. And there’s a huge flock of gannets and terns, and they’re just diving on this school of menhaden. And there’s porpoises jumping, and it seems really full of life, but there’s no tuna. There’s just nothing underneath it. I left the reader with that image, like a machine missing a gear.

But in ensuing years, thanks to people like Barbara Block (of Stanford University who tags and tracks Bluefin) and with incredible international cooperation, bluefin are now rebuilding faster than people thought they could. And they’re in the Pacific, Southern, and Atlantic (oceans) bluefin are all rebuilding really quickly…It’s kind of a cliche to say that the ocean is resilient but actually to see it happening with one of the largest megafaunas out there in the ocean, that’s really inspiring.

So, I always say when you add up all the fish that we take from the sea every year, it’s 80 to 90 million metric tons. It’s the equivalent of the human weight of China taken out of the sea every year. And you could say, on the one hand, that’s a tremendous savaging, raping of the ocean. How could we do this year in and year out? On the other hand, you could flip around and say, ‘Wow, the ocean continues to produce a human weight of China as a wild system each and every year.’ Oftentimes if l say ‘I’m writing a book about the ocean’ everyone will go, ‘Ugh, ugh, the ocean’s dead.’ But compared to terrestrial systems, the ocean’s a good deal healthier. There are no condos in the ocean. we haven’t emptied out the ocean to the degree we did with the Great Plains and replaced wild bison with cows…

DH: That ocean resiliency story is true if you just take the basic steps of protection and restoration. And we know is if we don’t try to fix it, we lose. So, Paul Greenberg thank you for offering options to fix it, for hope and good storytelling.

Holden Hardcastle, producer of Rising Tide the Ocean Podcast and founder and creative director of Fluid Studios (left above with me and Louie Psihoyos) based the following essay on a recent interview I had on the podcast with Academy Award winning Director of The Cove’ Louie Psihoyos whose most recent documentary ‘Plastic Detox’ is now airing on Netflix - David Helvarg

*****

“Life is fricking awesome. At every level from microscopic to the big. You just have to open up your eyes to it.”

— Louie Psihoyos, Rising Tide

Louie Psihoyos has photographed extinction. He has stood at the edge of a coral reef that will not exist in twenty years and pointed his camera at it anyway. He has documented the slaughter of dolphins in a hidden Japanese cove and turned that footage into an Academy Award. He has, in other words, made a career of witnessing the world’s most inconvenient truths — and somehow come out of it not broken, but luminous.

So when he says, on the latest episode of Rising Tide, that “There are no boring photographs, only kind of unimaginative photographers,” it lands differently than it would coming from anyone else. This isn’t a man who hasn’t seen the worst of it. This is a man who has, and still believes the world is worth the trouble of seeing clearly.

It’s a deceptively simple idea. Photographers chase light, technique, access — the machinery of the craft. But Psihoyos is pointing at something upstream of all that: expectation. The frame you bring before you ever raise the camera. If you walk into a tide pool assuming you’ve already seen a tide pool, you’ll walk out with a postcard. If you walk in understanding that what’s living in those few square feet of shallow water represents four billion years of evolutionary improvisation, you might walk out shaken.

That reframe — from scenery to revelation — is harder than it sounds in an era engineered to flatten wonder into content. We scroll past the octopus changing color, the murmuration of starlings banking against a winter sky, the time-lapse of a flower opening in six seconds flat. The algorithm delivers the extraordinary on a drip feed until the extraordinary becomes ambient noise. We develop, essentially, a tolerance for the astonishing.

Psihoyos has spent his career fighting that tolerance — in others and, one suspects, in himself. The discipline of staying awake to what’s in front of you is not a gift. It is a practice, renewed daily, often against considerable resistance. It requires, as he puts it, the willingness to reframe your expectations. To approach the familiar as if it were alien. To look at a fish the way you’d look at a creature from another planet — which, if you think about it, is more or less what it is.

There is something almost urgent in how he says it. Life is incredible. Not as consolation or as marketing copy for a meditation app, but as a reportorial fact, the kind you confirm by getting close enough to something living to feel it. The kind you have to keep re-confirming, because the world keeps trying to convince you otherwise.

The oceans are warming. The reefs are bleaching. Species are disappearing at a rate that will not be reversed in any lifetime now living. Psihoyos knows this better than most — his entire body of work has been, in some sense, a document of that unraveling. And yet the message coming off this conversation is not despair. It is attention. Because you cannot grieve what you never really saw, and you cannot fight to protect what you’ve already stopped looking at.

Pay attention, he’s saying. Not as an aesthetic posture but as an ethical one. Life at every scale — from the diatom spiraling in a single drop of seawater to the humpback whale navigating thousands of miles of open ocean by mechanisms science is still working to understand — is staggering. It does not need to be dressed up or filtered or made more dramatic than it already is. It needs only to be witnessed. Honestly, completely, without the buffer of boredom or habit or distraction.

That’s what good photography does. That’s what Rising Tide, at its best, does. It opens a window onto the world and holds it open long enough for you to actually look through it.

Open your eyes. The story — all of it, the beautiful and the broken — is right there.