From Small Towns to a Global Treaty
How To Protect The Ocean
"We'll never see that in our lifetime." You've probably heard it about the ocean. Andrew has heard it plenty, and admits he's said it too. For years it was the standard answer about protecting the high seas, the two-thirds of the ocean that lies beyond any country's borders. Then the High Seas Treaty was agreed, entered into force in January 2026, and passed 100 countries in September, Canada included. In this week's wrap-up, Andrew uses that win to show why a global plastics treaty can happen too, and how it gets built from the ground up. He walks through the ladder: a town like Tofino...
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The Straw Backlash: Why Guilt Doesn't Work
How To Protect The Ocean
"You can't care about plastic. Your phone is made of plastic." If you've ever heard that, you know what it's for. It's designed to make you feel like a hypocrite, so you give up. In this episode, Andrew goes back to one of the most famous moments in plastic pollution: the 2015 video of researchers in Costa Rica pulling a plastic straw from an olive ridley sea turtle's nose. A few months later, the same researcher pulled a plastic fork from another turtle. The straw video helped spark a global push against single-use plastics, and then the straw itself became a punchline. Andrew explains why...
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The Beach That Doesn't Need Cleaning Anymore
How To Protect The Ocean
Picture a beach cleanup. Two hours of hauling bottles, wrappers and foam off the sand. Now picture the same beach ten years later, where you walk the whole length and come home empty-handed. Not because nobody cleaned it, but because there's nothing left to clean. That's a real story, and it happened in Tofino, a surf town on the west coast of Vancouver Island. In 2016 its beaches were covered in plastic, and the local Surfrider chapter realized they could clean every weekend for the rest of their lives and it would never stop. So they changed tactics. They went to the businesses handing out...
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Too Enthusiastic? How to Find Your Place in Ocean Action
How To Protect The Ocean
Do you ever feel disconnected from ocean action? You sign the petition, you donate, you share the post, and you still don't feel like you're doing the work. Andrew knows the feeling. Fresh out of his undergrad, he emailed organization after organization offering to help for free, and mostly heard nothing back. In this episode he explains why that happens (it usually comes down to trust and how organizations take on volunteers), and how to get past it. He also retells the story of Lilly Woodbury from yesterday's episode: an environmental studies grad who kept hitting the same wall until she...
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Come for the Impact, Stay for the People: Inside Surfrider Canada
How To Protect The Ocean
Do you ever feel like ocean action is happening somewhere else? You sign the petition, maybe donate, but you're not really part of the work. Lilly Woodbury knows that feeling, and she found her way in by walking into a Surfrider meeting in Tofino in 2016. Lilly is the campaigns and storytelling director at Surfrider Foundation Canada. In this episode she tells Andrew how a small volunteer chapter helped Tofino and Ucluelet ban plastic straws, bags, cutlery and foam containers, and how Tofino became the first municipality in Canada to ban single-use plastic water bottles. Ten years in, she says...
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One Promise: How a Postcard Changed Behaviour for a Year
How To Protect The Ocean
Picture a kid at an aquarium in Durban, standing in front of the penguins with a pen and a postcard. She writes one sentence, a promise to change one habit for the ocean, and drops it into a little post box. More than a year later, researchers emailed visitors like her to ask if they'd kept their promise. About half could point to a real change they'd made. This week's episodes covered a lot: marine protected areas nobody can name, a reef that rebuilt itself, and why "fishing is bad" pushes people away. If all of that left you feeling heavy, this episode is for you. Andrew talks about...
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Why Saying "Fishing Is Bad" Backfires
How To Protect The Ocean
Picture a woman on a beach before sunrise, sorting the night's catch to feed her kids. Now picture a campaign poster that says "Stop eating fish." That poster just reached her. When conservation messages treat every fisher the same, the people with the smallest footprint stop coming to meetings, stop sharing catch data with scientists, and step out of the conversation entirely. Andrew walks through the Illuminating Hidden Harvests study from the FAO, Duke University and WorldFish, which found that small-scale fisheries land at least 40% of the world's wild catch and employ about 60 million...
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The Reef That Built Itself Back: Coral Recovery After Bleaching
How To Protect The Ocean
In 2023, a marine heat wave settled over Palmyra Atoll, a remote ring of coral islands about 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, and stayed for more than half a year. Some of the reef’s most vibrant corals turned white. Joe Pollock of The Nature Conservancy, who monitors the reef, admitted he didn’t know if it would come back. Three years later, he put his face in the water and found the reef floor covered in baby corals. In this episode, I break down why Palmyra recovered when so many reefs struggle. It comes down to an intact food web: parrotfish that graze algae off the reef, a bubblegum-pink...
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Why Nobody Can Name a Marine Protected Area
How To Protect The Ocean
Quick test: name one marine protected area in your country. If you came up blank, you're in good company. When an aquarium in Durban, South Africa surveyed its visitors, fewer than one in five could name a single MPA. Andrew Lewin explains why that silence is one of the biggest threats MPAs face, because a place nobody can name is a place nobody defends when it gets weakened, shrunk or quietly reopened. This episode follows South Africa's long road from protecting 0.4% of its mainland ocean to 5.4%, and the communicators who realized the science and consultations were done but the public was...
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Can You Name One Marine Protected Area? Dr. Judy Mann-Lang on MPA Day
How To Protect The Ocean
Most people can't name a single marine protected area in their own country. Dr. Judy Mann-Lang found that out the hard way when she asked aquarium visitors to name one and they named the aquarium. With South Africa's new MPAs stalled on a minister's desk and oil and gas lobbyists in the room, she realized the ocean needed public support that didn't yet exist. That gap became MPA Day. Judy spent 30 years at uShaka Sea World in Durban, moving from education to CEO to conservation strategist, then five years with the Two Oceans Aquarium, earning a PhD on how effectively aquariums communicate...
info_outlinePicture a woman on a beach before sunrise, sorting the night's catch to feed her kids. Now picture a campaign poster that says "Stop eating fish." That poster just reached her. When conservation messages treat every fisher the same, the people with the smallest footprint stop coming to meetings, stop sharing catch data with scientists, and step out of the conversation entirely.
Andrew walks through the Illuminating Hidden Harvests study from the FAO, Duke University and WorldFish, which found that small-scale fisheries land at least 40% of the world's wild catch and employ about 60 million people, roughly 90% of everyone who works in fisheries. Then he lays out four principles for a better approach: support the fishers already doing it well, aim pressure at the industrial systems with the biggest impacts, show communities how marine protected areas can feed their fisheries, and make the good choice easy at the moment of purchase.
That last principle brings us to Vancouver, where chef Robert Clark and Jason Boyce of the Vancouver Aquarium created Ocean Wise, a simple symbol on the menu that grew into a national sustainable seafood program. You'll leave with one question to ask every time you buy seafood, and a clearer picture of how that question pulls the whole system toward better choices.
Links mentioned in this episode
- Illuminating Hidden Harvests (FAO, Duke University and WorldFish, 2023): https://cgspace.cgiar.org/items/97623876-241e-4122-bac2-76e82180b292
- Ocean Wise Seafood: https://ocean.org/seafood/
- Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch: https://www.seafoodwatch.org/
- WWF SASSI (South Africa): https://wwfsassi.co.za/
Takeaways
- Blanket "fishing is bad" messaging lands hardest on small-scale fishers and pushes them away from science and conservation
- Small-scale fisheries land at least 40% of global wild catch and employ about 60 million people, around 90% of fisheries workers
- Nearly 53 million more people fish to feed their own families, and about 4 in 10 small-scale fisheries workers are women
- Co-management covers only about 20% of small-scale catch, leaving lots of room to bring fishers into decisions
- Accountability belongs with how large industrial fleets are permitted, monitored and held to the rules
- Healthy marine protected areas can help fisheries through spillover into fishing grounds
- Programs like Ocean Wise, Seafood Watch and SASSI make sustainable choices simple at the counter
- Your action: next time you buy seafood, ask where it came from and how it was caught
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