Too Enthusiastic? How to Find Your Place in Ocean Action
Release Date: 11/03/2026
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...
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What the Sustainable Seafood Label Can’t See
How To Protect The Ocean
You bought the fish with the green check mark. Investigators with The Outlaw Ocean Project then checked the supply chains behind hundreds of seafood companies making sustainability claims, and more than half had a documented crime or concern somewhere upstream. In the final episode of our fish feed series, Andrew Lewin looks at what sustainable seafood labels cover and where their audits stop. Follow fishmeal from Western Sahara to ASC-certified sea bass farms in Türkiye that supply UK supermarkets, and from the Golden Lead plant in Gunjur, The Gambia, to a certified shrimp feed mill in...
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Ships Without License Plates: The Dark Fleet Behind Fishmeal
How To Protect The Ocean
In a single day in March 2024, Gambian navy officers arrested eight industrial trawlers. Seven were fishing in waters reserved for local canoes, four were using illegal nets, and every one had switched off its tracking beacon. That one patrol shows a problem playing out across the global ocean. About three in four industrial fishing vessels are not publicly tracked, and many of the boats supplying the fishmeal that feeds farmed fish are among the hardest to see. In this episode of How to Protect the Ocean, Andrew Lewin follows the boats that catch the fish behind fish feed. He covers how...
info_outlineDo 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 showed up to a Surfrider meeting in Tofino. A decade later, she's the campaigns and storytelling director at Surfrider Foundation Canada. You'll hear why following your curiosity beats waiting to find your passion, why you should look for groups that invest in people, why you don't need to be a surfer to join Surfrider, and exactly what it takes to start a chapter or student club where you live.
Links mentioned in this episode
- Surfrider Foundation Canada: https://canada.surfrider.org
- Start or join a chapter or club: https://canada.surfrider.org/get-involved
- Surfrider Canada student clubs: https://canada.surfrider.org/student-clubs
- Surfrider Atlantic Canada: https://atlantic.surfrider.org
- Surfrider Foundation (US chapters): https://www.surfrider.org
- Yesterday's episode: Lilly Woodbury, Surfrider Foundation Canada: https://www.speakupforblue.com/show/speak-up-for-the-ocean-blue/podcast-243/
Takeaways
- Offering to help for free often goes nowhere because organizations need trust and capacity to take on volunteers
- Big organizations mostly ask you to donate or sign; that can leave you feeling like a spectator
- You don't need a degree, a scuba ticket or a surfboard to contribute in a real way
- Follow your curiosity: showing up to one meeting or event can open doors you didn't know existed
- Look for groups that invest in people and help you build skills, not ones that just need tasks done
- People come for the impact and stay for the community, and that shared identity is how ocean culture shifts
- Your action this week: find one local group and go to one event. You don't have to speak; just listen
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