The Nursery Hack That Pays for Itself
How To Protect The Ocean
Coral nurseries need constant maintenance, and that maintenance is expensive and relentless. When Andrew talked to Mike Goldberg, co-founder of I.CARE, his answer wasn't to hire more staff. It was to let paying customers do it for the fun of it. Mike owns a dive shop in the Florida Keys, so the paying customers are scuba divers, and over the years he's built a funding model so small that nobody has ever really complained about it. None of that makes sense until you understand what coral actually is. It's an animal, not a plant or a rock: what looks like one coral "head" is really a colony of...
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He Almost Quit the Dive Business. Then a Coral Reef PhD Student Walked In.
How To Protect The Ocean
Mike Goldberg had over 10,000 dives and decades running a dive shop in the Florida Keys, enough time to have seen the reefs at their pristine best. Then came a coral bleaching event in 2008, and a few years later, Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, a still-unexplained outbreak that's killed coral tissue outright across more than 20 of Florida's roughly 45 stony coral species since 2014. At one point his wife told him directly: the reef isn't what it used to be, and it's not getting better. Get out of the business before there's nothing left to sell. He didn't know what to do about it. Then,...
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84 Percent: Inside the Worst Coral Bleaching Event Ever Recorded
How To Protect The Ocean
This year, most of the coral on the planet went through heat stress severe enough to bleach it. That's not a rounding error: 84 percent of the world's reef area, across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, and NOAA had to add three brand-new alert levels to its Coral Reef Watch scale because the existing one had no category for what was happening. In this episode, Andrew breaks down exactly where global coral reefs stand right now: how the fourth global mass bleaching event on record got declared, why NOAA waited until 2026 to confirm it had actually ended, and why every global bleaching...
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Everyone in the Tent: How Ocean Treaties Actually Get Made
How To Protect The Ocean
Holly Koehler has spent almost thirty years in rooms most people never think about: windowless UN offices in New York, the FAO in Rome, and what she calls "oftentimes very boring hotel ballrooms around the world," where countries hash out how the ocean actually gets managed. She's the Vice President of Policy and Outreach at the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), and before that she spent thirteen years at the U.S. State Department's Office of Marine Conservation, chairing international fisheries negotiations. In this episode, she walks Andrew through how a grad-school...
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Inside the System That Makes a Seafood Label Trustworthy
How To Protect The Ocean
Between a fishing vessel out on the water and a can of tuna in your grocery cart, there is a complex, little-understood system working to verify whether you should trust what is on the label. In this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast, host Andrew Lewin breaks down how that system actually works, and why the blue check mark on your seafood means something real. Andrew starts with the RFMO, a regional fisheries management organization: a treaty-based body where countries with a stake in a fishery legally bind themselves to cooperate on how it is managed. He walks through where...
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The Ship Has Reached the Shore: The High Seas Treaty Explained
How To Protect The Ocean
There's a video online of a room full of exhausted diplomats breaking into applause after nearly 20 years of work. One woman brings down the gavel and says, "the ship has reached the shore." That moment, in March 2023, closed out a negotiation that had already failed once in public. It became binding international law this year, and the fight over what it actually protects is happening right now. In this episode, Andrew traces the full history of the High Seas Treaty, formally the BBNJ Agreement (Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction): from the idea first raised at a UN Oceans working...
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Corals Nearly as Old as the Pyramids, and the Fight to Save Them
How To Protect The Ocean
Somewhere on the ocean floor right now, a coral colony has been growing since before the Great Pyramid of Giza was finished. One deep-water black coral off the coast of Hawaii has been dated at 4,270 years old, making it one of the oldest living skeleton-building organisms known to science. A single pass of a bottom trawl net can wipe out that kind of habitat in seconds, and it's a fight that's still being decided this very year at the United Nations. In this episode, Andrew breaks down why bottom trawling is such a hard problem to regulate. It's rarely the fish stock itself that takes the...
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A Summer Internship, Thirty Years, and One Career for the Ages
How To Protect The Ocean
A grad student faces a simple choice: write another term paper, or take a summer internship. She takes the internship, gets assigned to sea turtles, and thirty years later she is in the room for some of the most consequential ocean policy agreements ever negotiated. This episode traces that career from the beginning, and it starts with a realization that shapes everything that follows: sea turtles do not read maps. They cross every border humans have drawn, which means protecting them requires countries to cooperate, not compete. Andrew walks through the arc of this career step by step. It...
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Deep Sea Mining Exposed: Inside the Fight to Save the Ocean's Last Frontier
How To Protect The Ocean
Deep sea mining is no longer theoretical. In this episode, Andrew sits down with Matthew Gianni, co-founder and Political and Policy Advisor of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, for an in-depth look at what's actually happening on the seafloor and in the negotiating rooms deciding its fate. Matthew spent years as a commercial fisherman, including five years as a deep sea trawlerman off the Central California coast, before moving into ocean conservation with Greenpeace International and eventually co-founding the DSCC to fight destructive bottom trawling on seamounts. That history shapes...
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5,000 New Species Prove the "Ocean Desert" Deep Sea Mining Claim Is Wrong
How To Protect The Ocean
In September 2021, Time magazine profiled Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company (TMC), and his push to mine the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a stretch of international seabed between Hawaii and Mexico. In that profile, Barron called the CCZ "the most desert-like place on the planet," arguing that mining the deep sea does less environmental harm than mining a rainforest because there's supposedly so little life down there to disturb. That single line has been repeated for years as justification for deep sea mining. Andrew puts it to the test. The science tells a very different story. A...
info_outlineCoral nurseries need constant maintenance, and that maintenance is expensive and relentless. When Andrew talked to Mike Goldberg, co-founder of I.CARE, his answer wasn't to hire more staff. It was to let paying customers do it for the fun of it. Mike owns a dive shop in the Florida Keys, so the paying customers are scuba divers, and over the years he's built a funding model so small that nobody has ever really complained about it.
None of that makes sense until you understand what coral actually is. It's an animal, not a plant or a rock: what looks like one coral "head" is really a colony of thousands, sometimes millions, of tiny individual animals called polyps, each one secreting a bit of limestone-like skeleton that builds up, generation after generation, into the physical structure of a reef. Most reef-building corals also host a photosynthetic algae, zooxanthellae, living in their own tissue, a genuine partnership that gives coral its color and most of its food energy, and whose loss under heat stress is what "bleaching" actually is. Corals also make more of themselves two completely different ways: asexual fragmentation, where a broken piece reattaches and grows into a genetic clone, which is exactly what coral gardening recreates on purpose, and sexual reproduction, where colonies release eggs and sperm in a synchronized event that produces genuinely new, genetically diverse offspring.
I.CARE's whole nursery operation is built on deliberately harnessing fragmentation, and this episode walks through how that biology turns into a funding model. The pop-up nursery concept, originated by Florida Keys restoration pioneer Ken Nedimyer, lets I.CARE keep coral and sponges just feet from where they'll actually be outplanted instead of stressfully hauling them from one central nursery. And the money behind it comes from small, mandatory, low-friction fees layered together: a $2 add-on on every $100 dive across three dive shops, Mike personally donating 2% of his own dive revenue on top of that, and a local-diver membership fee, all stacked so no single piece feels like a big ask. This is episode three of a four-part week built around Andrew's interview with Mike Goldberg, airing Friday.
Takeaways:
- Cutting a fragment off a healthy coral doesn't hurt it, because a coral colony is really thousands of genetically identical animals, not a single organism the way a fish or a mammal is.
- Coral restoration nurseries are deliberately organized versions of something that already happens naturally when a storm breaks coral apart. The innovation is doing it on purpose, at scale, with a plan for where each fragment ends up.
- The most labor-intensive part of coral restoration, offshore nursery maintenance, got solved with a business idea, not a science one: make it something paying customers want to do anyway.
- I.CARE's funding model isn't one big ask. It's several small, mandatory, low-friction fees layered together, each small enough that nobody has pushed back.
- A conservation program can double as a competitive business advantage. Mike ties Key Dives' award recognition and its restoration work together as the same story.
Website: https://icareaboutcoral.org/
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