To save our oceans and our planet, we need leaders ready to challenge the status quo
Ted Danson
Ten years ago, I stood with then US Secretary of State John Kerry in the spectacular Sant Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC to discuss an issue that we both hold dear: the state of the world’s oceans.
Before that week in 2014, no one had gathered world leaders, funders, non-pro ts, and academics together under one roof to dedicate time to solving some of the greatest threats facing our oceans.
That all changed when Secretary Kerry created Our Ocean - an annual international conference that will meet this week, for the ninth time, in Athens, Greece.
International gatherings can be tricky and disappointing, often ending in stalemates on important decisions.
There is no kicking the can down the road at Our Ocean. There is real progress, ending each annual meeting with a healthier path forward for the oceans.
Since 2014, the Our Ocean conference has mobilized more than 2,160 commitments worth approximately $130 billion (€122.5bn) and protected more than 5 million square miles (13 million square kilometres) of ocean.
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Last year’s conference in Panama culminated in 360 commitments alone, including an announcement from the government of Panama that it would protect more than 54% of its ocean.
One of my favourite announcements was at the 2016 Our Ocean conference when Sec. Kerry helped Oceana, SkyTruth, and Google unveil Global Fishing Watch to the world - a rst-of-itskind technology platform that enables anyone to see and track the activity of commercial shing vessels in near real-time - for free.
Global Fishing Watch is now working to map all human activity at sea. What a powerful tool.
Over shed and overburdened
These commitments are essential because our oceans are up against many threats. Half of
global sheries are over shed and another 40% are shed to maximum levels.
Illegal, unreported, and unregulated shing is also a dire threat that depletes ocean resources, destroys habitats, and has even been tied to forced labour and other human rights abuses.
Nearly 33 billion pounds ( 15 billion kilogrammes) of plastic pollution enter the oceans every year - equivalent to dumping two garbage trucks full of plastic into the oceans every minute.
Nearly 33 billion pounds ( 15 billion kilogrammes) of plastic pollution enter the oceans every year - equivalent to dumping two garbage trucks full of plastic into the oceans every minute.
The oceans have also borne the brunt of climate change, absorbing over 90% of all the excess heat trapped on Earth, contributing to a slew of impacts like coral bleaching, warming ocean temperatures, and sea level rise.
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It’s safe to say we put the oceans through a lot. And it takes bold action to counteract these harsh e ects. Fortunately, Our Ocean is where we can chart a course forward.
From plastics to over shing, our to-do is grim and long
First, world leaders must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by stopping the expansion of new o shore drilling and transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Corporate polluters need to be held accountable for the pollution they create and the havoc it wreaks on the oceans, and that means reducing the production and use of unnecessary singleuse plastics.
But if we want to save the oceans and help feed the world, it’s not just about who catches the most sh but also who needs sh the most. We must ensure that local catch is supporting local people and not being turned into food for pigs or farmed salmon.
To rein in over shing, governments need to establish sciencebased management plans and catch limits at the national level.
But if we want to save the oceans and help feed the world, it’s not just about who catches the most sh but also who needs sh the most. We must ensure that local catch is supporting local people and not being turned into food for pigs or farmed salmon.
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We must also continue to make progress toward the global commitment to protect 30% of our oceans by 2030, an ambitious goal that will preserve ocean biodiversity for future generations.
In doing so, we should ensure these protected areas ban destructive activities like bottom trawling, which can bulldoze the sea oor.
Worldwide victories are happening
While these might seem like monumental undertakings, in just the last year we’ve seen so many victories for our oceans, including the creation of several new marine protected areas (MPAs) such as the Bajos del Norte National Park in the Gulf of Mexico, a new MPA protecting Chile’s iconic Humboldt archipelago, and two new MPAs right here in the Mediterranean.
Belize passed a historic “People Power” law that requires any decision to open its ocean to oil and gas drilling to rst be voted on by the Belizean people through a national referendum.
The European Union increased transparency at sea, creating a new database that discloses the activities of EU vessels shing outside of EU waters.
The EU also now requires all its shing vessels, including 49,000 small-scale vessels, to have tracking systems.
And with their new sanction system, the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean can now penalize States that fail to tackle over shing or illegal shing by their eets.
A new law in Peru strengthened protections for the rst ve nautical miles of its entire coast (one of the most productive ocean areas in the world) that is reserved exclusively for artisanal shers.
And in Brazil, following a 2018 law spearheaded by artisanal shers, the Supreme Court upheld a ban on bottom trawling along the coast of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where more than 20,000 families rely on artisanal shing for their livelihoods.
This is only a short list of recent accomplishments from around the world.
I would like to thank Secretary Kerry for being a catalyst for the wave of ocean action in the last 10 years since the rst Our Ocean conference. His vision for a restored, healthy ocean helped bring the world together to tackle these challenges head-on.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from him, it’s that there is still hope for the oceans and for the future of our planet. The world could use more leaders like him today.
Ted Danson is an award-winning actor and a board member of Oceana.
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isn’t fungible; you can’t use rangeland for crops, grow soy on an alp, or corn on a windswept Welsh hill. But you can use pasture to create nutrient-dense food; milk and meat, from otherwise undigestible grass.
This is the miracle of the rumen, a biological machine used for tens of thousands of years to support human populations and cultures where people would otherwise be unable to live.
Telling people what to eat rarely works. There is no pristine state of wilderness we can return to where humans don’t a ect the environment - unless you mean the Pleistocene.
Some would say that this is a bug, not a feature: get rid of ranchers, and rewild pasturelands to sequester carbon and restore biodiversity.
Instead of fodder, we could grow plants to replace the calories we currently get from meat and dairy and free up vast tracts for wilderness. Journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot has suggested just this, saying we could use precision fermentation to create arti cial meat and dairy culinarily identical to the real thing.
But it’s an urbanist’s pipe dream: impractical, unscienti c, and philosophically suspect.
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Telling people what to eat rarely works. There is no pristine state of wilderness we can return to where humans don’t a ect the environment - unless you mean the Pleistocene.
What do we do with families living o the land now? Tax them out of their homes, eradicate their culture? Or force them to live with re-animated cave bears and sabre-tooth tigers?
We need ruminants to keep our ecosystems healthy
Ironically, a great way to sequester carbon in soil is by using ruminants themselves.
Ruminants co-evolved with grasslands, a type of landscape with high carbon-storage potential. We need them to keep these ecosystems healthy.
Techniques like adaptive managed grazing can mimic the action of migratory herds such as bison, who grazed, fertilized, and moved on, building soil as they went, over millions of years.
There’s rarely been soil as carbon-rich as that the rst settlers found on the American prairie; thick, black, incredibly fertile, and 10 meters deep. All gone now, but to some extent retrievable.
So of all the climate solutions out there, maybe we should concentrate on the 97% of industrial emissions that come from fossil fuels, and leave the cows out of it.
Better still, we can change the way we farm them to create a positive climate, health and animal welfare impact.
Until then, the only ones who bene t from a focus on the climate impact of ruminants are the oil bosses.
Eurof Uppington is the CEO and Founder of Amfora, a Switzerlandbased importer of extra virgin olive oils.
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