A New PBS Documentary Wants You to Care About Coral. Meet the Man Behind It.

A new documentary called Descent – Into the Blue starts airing on public television stations nationwide on September 1, 2026. It's narrated by Peter Coyote, directed by Rory Fielding, and one of its central voices is Mike Goldberg, co-founder of the Florida Keys coral restoration nonprofit I.CARE and owner of Key Dives in Islamorada. Andrew sits down with Mike for the full, unedited version of the conversation this week's four solo episodes have been building toward: 30-plus years running a dive shop, more than 10,000 dives, and a front-row seat to watching the reefs he built his life around collapse under a 2008 bleaching event and, roughly a decade later, Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease. His wife once told him to get out of the business before there was nothing left to sell. Instead, a PhD student who wandered in to fill a couple of scuba tanks became his co-founder, and I.CARE was born.

This episode covers ground the earlier ones in the week didn't get to. Mike explains how a chance lunch with Rory Fielding turned into the documentary, and what he hopes it does for people who've never thought about coral reefs, people, in his words, who "live in St. Louis" and have no reason to. He shares his own anecdotal read (his word, not a scientific claim) that this year's water temperatures would have triggered a mass bleaching event by 1995 standards but haven't, which he takes as a sign that the corals I.CARE has propagated over five and a half years are more heat-resistant than their parents. And he walks through, in his own words, exactly how I.CARE pays for all of it: a $2 add-on on every $100 dive across three Keys dive shops, his own personal 2 percent of dive revenue, and a fiduciary responsibility he says applies just as much to a $2 donor as a major one.

The conversation closes on money and trust, the two things every restoration group eventually has to answer for. Florida's state-level coral restoration funding is genuinely uncertain heading into next year, which makes I.CARE's mostly visitor-funded model and its habit of monitoring 100 percent of what it plants (a 47 percent one-year survival rate across 17 species, reported every year including through the 2023 bleaching event) matter more than it would in a calmer funding environment. Mike's own dive shop, Key Dives, also picked up four first-place wins in Scuba Diving Magazine's 2026 Readers Choice Awards for the US and Canada region, a business result Mike ties directly back to the restoration work. This is the fifth and final episode of a week built around Andrew's interview with Mike Goldberg, co-founder of I.CARE.

The Trailer: https://vimeo.com/1053261342

Takeaways:

• Descent – Into the Blue, a new documentary narrated by Peter Coyote, starts airing on public television stations nationwide September 1, 2026, and Mike Goldberg appears in it as one of its central voices.
• Mike's own read that this year's heat would have caused mass bleaching by 1995 standards but hasn't is his personal, anecdotal observation, not a peer-reviewed finding, a distinction he makes himself on air.
• I.CARE's funding model is built from small, mandatory, layered fees (a $2 dive add-on, Mike's personal 2 percent donation, an additional local-diver fee), not one large ask, and Mike frames all of it as a fiduciary responsibility to every participant.
• I.CARE monitors 100 percent of what it plants rather than a sample, producing a 47 percent one-year survival rate across 17 species that it has reported every year, including through the 2023 bleaching event.
• Florida's state coral restoration funding is genuinely uncertain right now, which is exactly why a visitor-funded, radically transparent model matters more today than it would in a more stable funding environment.