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Mentors: Climate Change is Hopeless? Here's Why You Should Still Fight · How To Protect The Ocean

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What do you do when your role models in science tell you it's
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too late to fix climate change?
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Today, I wanna speak directly to the young scientists who listen to
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this podcast, who refuse to give up even when the people they're
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supposed to look up to already have.
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We're gonna talk about that on today's episode of the How
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to Protect the Ocean Podcast.
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Let's start the show.
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Hey everybody.
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Welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast.
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I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's
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happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, what you can do to
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live for a better ocean by taking action.
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On today's episode, I'm gonna be speaking right directly to young
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scientists who want to do something about climate change, especially
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within the ocean conservation world.
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Whether you're a scientist, even if you're an ocean conservationist
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and you're new to this.
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I want you guys to feel everyone to feel, Hey, I could do something, and I
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don't want you to let people talk you out of it, but I'm gonna give you some
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context on why they may be speaking to you and saying, Hey, by the way, this,
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what you're trying to do may not work.
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So I don't want you to feel down.
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I want to give you a little bit of context of why they're feeling that
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way, from someone who's mid-career and already starting to get jaded
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like this ocean conservation field.
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And I want you to just understand that.
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But first what I want to do is kind of talk you about how I
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got inspired to do this episode.
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I received an email from a young scientist, a young lady who kind
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of just told me what she was being frustrated in, and it was her mentors
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were telling her, Hey, you know what?
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We appreciate how gung-ho you are to try and do something about climate,
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but it's really not gonna work.
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kind of feel both sides to this 'cause I've been that young scientist who felt
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that way and who got told the same thing.
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And I feel like all young scientists get told that.
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But I'm also almost at the age where I'm like, I understand where some of these
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older scientists that are mentors who are just like, Hey, I wanna look out for you.
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What you think you're gonna do may not work out.
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'cause it's very easy to get jaded.
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It's very easy to get frustrated.
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And if you talk to anybody who's been in science for a long time,
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you're gonna see that they're more skeptical than anything else.
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Because as what happens is when you first start in ocean conservation, whether
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you're a scientist, whether you're ocean conservationist or anything like that, you
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are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, right?
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You're ready to go.
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You're ready to do this.
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You've been spoken to by scientists, maybe the very same scientists that
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you now work and look up to at some point in your life when you were in
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elementary school or middle school or high school, or even university.
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And you have been spoken to by some of the people there who have been
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providing environmental education saying, Hey, you're the difference.
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You're the future.
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It's up to you.
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We kind of screwed up the planet.
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It's up to you.
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And then you grow into that, and then all of a sudden you do university
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and you start to talk to professors.
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You look at what's in front of you and what all the different
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possibilities and different ways you can go through science or conservation
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or wherever you decide to go.
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And you're like, Hey, I can do this.
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Like, this is really great.
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I'm getting very excited.
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And you get into the real world.
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You're outta science and you might be into graduate work or even just as a research
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scientist or you know, entry level field.
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You're starting to work with some of your mentors and you're starting to interact
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with them at conferences and so forth.
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And you're like, yeah, I can't wait to get into this.
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I can't wait to do this.
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I can't wait to do that.
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And then you realize they're saying, well, hold on a second.
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Do you think you can actually change something?
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We've been doing this for 30, 40 years.
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Do you think you can actually do this?
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It crushes your heart.
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It just crushes it, and it makes you angry.
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It made me angry.
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That's how I feel.
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I am not speaking for the person who emailed me, but I'm like,
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it made me angry to be like.
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What do you mean?
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I can't do anything?
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Like this is why I got in.
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Everybody kept telling me like, it is up to me to do this and that's why I'm here
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and I'm gonna be part of the solution.
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I'm not gonna be part of the problem.
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And I wanna support scientists and I've done that as much as I can
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throughout my career, is to try and not dissuade other scientists and
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conservationists from doing things.
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And I think there's a lot of emotional weight when people get disillusioned
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by mentors or frustrated at the silence around the responsibility, but also.
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There's still that determination to fight.
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And you're not sure if, like, do you not listen to your mentors and do
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it anyway or is that a good thing or a bad thing for your career?
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Do you just put your head down and do your science and whatever that might be?
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That might be, if it does something, amazing, that's great.
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If not.
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Like, that's okay.
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And that's hard because a lot of young scientists are kind of told, like from
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a political standpoint, which a lot of the problems that we face in terms of
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trying to change things are political.
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When we're talking about climate change, there's things that need to
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happen at a legislative scale, whether it be federal state, or regional or
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like county or municipal governments, depending on where you live,
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that needs to happen.
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And unfortunately, the people who are elected to those positions oftentimes
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are not ready for the commitment to fight climate change, either they're
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against climate change, but they want to take it from a realistic point of
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view, and so they're not fully there.
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And that's been frustrating not only for you, but also for scientists for decades.
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And I want to give you a bit of context of what these scientists have
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gone through that are now maybe in a position to be mentors or to be people
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that you know, you look up to, or that everybody looks up to, including myself.
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What's happened is, you know, now we're at a point where we're seeing
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in climate change, we're seeing the consequences that were predicted
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10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.
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Right.
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And nobody believes scientists, we're seeing it now.
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We're seeing the wildfires, we're seeing the droughts.
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We're seeing the increased hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones.
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We're seeing the increase in storm surge increase in everything.
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We're seeing bad things happen to good people and innocent people,
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and it's gutting to see it.
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And the amount of money spent on cleaning up those disasters is awful.
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And so what we're fighting now is we're like, we need to fight now more than ever.
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Every scientist knows that.
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Every conservationist knows that.
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But it's the realism about doing it, especially when you have governments
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of, you know, like you do in the states, even in Canada, where both governments
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are trying to figure out economically what's happening with their countries.
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And like for Canada, we're actually impacted by the decisions made in the
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US And so we have to make decisions that will be more about the economy
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than it is about the environment.
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Unfortunately, I've talked about this before.
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Those decisions aren't made together.
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Those decisions are made against one another.
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So if we're making changes for the economy, trying to stabilize our economy,
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because we're a natural resource country, we tend to go against the environment.
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And so that's obviously a problem.
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and so we're trying to change that.
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Now.
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We're like, why aren't we doing this now?
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It's the same words that scientists that are now the mentors and people you look
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up to used 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.
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Right.
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And their mentors did the same thing, but the problem was is back even
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20 years ago, and we still see it today, but it's really hard to do.
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There was denial.
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When I grew up in the nineties and early two thousands in my like university
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career, when I learned about climate change and I learned all the intricacies
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of science and how it's affecting like the ocean and how it's affecting freshwater
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and land and everything like that.
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And what is gonna happen in 20 years which was rightly predicted,
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people were just denying it.
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Oh, that's not true.
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These scientists are making it up.
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I don't know why they're doing it.
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They just want funding.
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It's all this BS and blah, blah, blah.
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We've heard it for 20 years, 30 years.
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And we know now that it was fossil fuel companies that were sort of feeding that
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misinformation through campaigns and like intricate campaigns and complex
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campaigns because they're the same bodies that lobby the government and that pay
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for people to get into government that support their campaigns to get into
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government so that they can make sure that their business is gonna do well.
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And so what you have to realize that all these companies that have been messing
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around with science, that have messing around with scientists, really, you
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know, fueling the misinformation, age has jaded the scientists for a long time.
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They've been attacking scientists online, they've been
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attacking scientists otherwise.
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Other ways they've been taking over, like funding for quote unquote
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biodiversity projects and all this stuff.
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It's been really like BS and they're doing it for greed.
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So in the email that was sent to me, this audience member, you know, found
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my podcast through this show that I entitled Climate Change and Capitalism,
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where I talked about how the greed of capitalism has really been the driver for
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companies taking over, the government, taking over legislation and so forth
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in such ways where they get legislation put in place to protect their business.
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You can look at any government right now that is really propelling.
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Oil and gas over renewables, and you will see that there's a fossil
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fuel industry that's doing that.
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Even with plastic pollution.
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We see fossil fuels industries involved overfishing.
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We see greed in terms of companies that are just trying to get as
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many fish as possible and sell them off as quickly as possible.
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They don't care about the legalities.
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They're gonna go to the high seas.
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And it's been a very difficult process.
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It's not artisanal fishers that are contributing to the overfishing.
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It is the massive companies that you're very hard to track that, you know, have
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fishing slaves and all this bias that happens on the high seas and elsewhere
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where they are getting away literally with murder and they're taking all
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the fish while they do it as well.
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So it's all greed that is happening here.
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And scientists have, you know, their job is to take science.
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I've talked about this before, where it's like scientists are like the first
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sort of line of figuring out trends, whether they're positive or negative.
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If they find a negative trend, then they try and take that trend and they
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go, Hey, you know, to the government or to whoever they publish it in a peer
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reviewed literature paper that nobody has access to 'cause they're super expensive
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to get because these companies who have these journal articles just want money.
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They don't really care about the actual information that gets
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out there for the most part.
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And they want tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of
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dollars from universities that will pay for those subscriptions.
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But people like you and I, unless they're open access, we don't get access to those.
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So we don't have access to those.
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So what happens is these organizations, like the NGOs and so forth.
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Forth, we'll get access to those or researchers will reach out to them
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because they have partnerships and they network and they get there and they get
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that information and all of a sudden that information comes to them and
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they're like, okay, like we have the information and we can spread it out.
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And that's how it works.
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We spread it out.
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And it goes all over the place so that people, individuals, and other
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organizations, all that kinda stuff, they make reports and stuff and then
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they go to the policy and they go to the policy people and they say,
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well, this is what we need to change.
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This is why.
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And they lobby the government and they put pressure on the government to
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be like, Hey, we need to get, change this because we are having trouble.
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And then what happens is you see those politicians who are backed by companies
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and corporations and so forth, look at it and be like, wow, this is actually against
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what we're about as a party or as a government and we need to look at this
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more carefully, and then they try and hide it and they don't vote on it and so forth.
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And so some of them do and some of them don't.
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It all depends.
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Or some will do the easy way and will go into, protected areas where
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there's nothing to worry about and for them, and they usually do it in around
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indigenous lands and so forth, and not
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around areas that are in the continental US or in Canada and so forth, that
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is more difficult to protect because there are more stakeholders involved.
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That's a short way of saying from a long story of how sort of conservation works
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and the frustrating part of conservation.
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Every generation goes through it.
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We all go through our young generation where we like, Hey, we're ready to go.
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We just graduated.
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We're ready to go.
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We're bright-eyed, bushy-tailed.
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We wanna fight against climate change and we wanna reduce
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climate change and so forth.
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Then we get to a point mid-career, we're like, oh,
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we've seen a lot of battles lost.
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We're getting a little more jaded.
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We're seeing more of the realistic point of view of how things are going,
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and they're not changing that quickly.
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And we're starting to see some of these things happen.
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Some of these disasters happen more and more and more, and then we get
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to a point now where it's like, we're seeing it usually every year and
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there's always something going on.
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There's always something bad happening from a nature perspective, and it's
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climate change and everything pulled back to climate change, and we're still
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seeing governments not to fight against climate change or like go completely
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opposite and deny it and say it's not really that big of a deal, or go in front
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of the UN and do all that kind of stuff.
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And so people get more and more frustrated and we just sit there and
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there are scientists who are sitting there and they're right in a way is.
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We are in climate change, we are almost past the tipping
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point where we can't go back.
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And there are governments who are still in power, whether they wanna
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make changes or not, who are still not making changes fast enough
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because we're seeing it more and more.
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We're seeing the changes more and more where we can't go back.
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A lot of them are saying, Hey, you know what?
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We're gonna have to get used to this and we're gonna have
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to go more into adaptation.
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And to be honest, that's what a lot of the fossil fuel companies want you to think,
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that there's nothing you can do about it.
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So let's just keep doing fossil fuels like we've been doing it before.
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Obviously that's not right.
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And there are governments, and every government is usually have mostly
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investing in renewable energy, but it's taking a long time to put them together.
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Takes a long time for it to come to fruition and come to into production.
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And so we're trying to figure that out, but we're not moving fast enough.
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So here is my, I guess advice of what you can do, and obviously this
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is not exhaustive, but this is what I would say is the best thing to do.
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So join or create a climate forward scientist collective.
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Now, there are some places out there already for Ocean.
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I'm part of a group it's a WhatsApp group that future swells a part of, and
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we do little things here and there to try and put together petitions and put
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together, you know, science communication pieces and stuff to get out there.
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and they do that.
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Their future swells.
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The organization that controls it.
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They tend to put these ideas together and they bring the people together.
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And we try and all put all that together.
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You can also join things like union of Concern scientists,
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scientists rebellion, ocean uprise.
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Those are always, always great as well.
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There's also, think it's Clean Creatives, I think it's
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called, which is like a science communication creative place, online.
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It's a Slack group that I've been a part of, and that's been great as well.
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So join or start one of your own.
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Those are always great.
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Start science communication projects on your own.
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So figure out what your network needs to know and put those together.
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You know, write, speak, post podcasts, do a video, whatever
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it takes to get the message out.
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Do it.
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Even if you do it on your own, it'll start to really grow your knowledge
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on what it works and what doesn't.
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And then it'll get your voices out because there are people who
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may listen to this podcast, but may prefer your voice better.
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and there are other people who don't listen to this podcast and may want
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your message better 'cause they might just connect with you better.
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So the more we have the diverse voices speaking, the better it is.
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And it doesn't mean like.
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People who look like me or sound like me and come from the same
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background can't speak out too.
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Everybody needs to speak out and more people need to speak out.
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And you can also build or contribute to interdisciplinary networks.
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So mental health, social justice, indigenous knowledge, climate policy.
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All those solutions need all of that.
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So that's always great.
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You can create open source or citizen science projects.
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So share research outside of paywalls, which is always great, co-create data with
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communities affected by climate change.
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That's the big thing.
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And then of course, seek mentors outside of traditional institutions.
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Look for activists, look for independent research, look for
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journalists, look for community leaders.
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I look for people on TikTok and Instagram who are actively speaking
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out to things that they prefer.
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These are the things that you know you would need to do.
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Now, what I want you to do as I end this, is I want you to realize that yes, you are
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going to hear voices in your life, whether you look up to them or not, who are
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going to criticize what you want to do.
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They're gonna say that it doesn't work.
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They're gonna say that, Hey, this isn't for you.
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This is not what you need.
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You don't necessarily have to ignore them, listen to them, but also do what you want
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to do because it doesn't mean that if they failed or theirs didn't work out,
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it doesn't mean yours can't work out.
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We're at a very different time than when they grew up.
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Even when I grew up, you know where information can be shared and information
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can be passed around a lot easier.
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It's still a lot of misinformation out there, but if you can put together in
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your own voice, be authentic to yourself and put it out there, that will help.
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The other thing I'm gonna say is there's nothing wrong with
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working a job to protect yourself.
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Like work your job to pay your bills, to enjoy what you want
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to do, get your like goals out.
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It doesn't necessarily have to align with what you want to do
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from a climate change perspective.
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You can always do that outside of your job if that's what you're passionate about.
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Right?
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Now obviously it's ideal to find a job where you can do both, and I suggest you
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do that, but a lot of the times, science in itself does not mean political stuff
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or does not mean something where you may show a bias towards doing climate change.
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Science in itself has to be unbiased and you have to test a specific hypothesis.
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Now, testing hypothesis can mean anywhere in science from actually
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look going out into the environment and sampling or looking at how people
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react to behavior change that will lead more towards climate change.
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Do you see what I mean here?
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So these are the different ways that you can go into look at the breadth of
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ocean conservation and ocean science.
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Don't just look at how do mammals travel or how do mammals breathe,
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or physiology and stuff like that.
15:44
If you're really looking into climate action is how can you take
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something like a marine mammal and make that into climate action?
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How do you take a topic that you like and make it into climate action from
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a science particular point of view?
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So I think that's where we need to really sit there and understand
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that this is where you need to move, but definitely move on it.
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Do what you need to do to get your passion out there.
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Be passionate, be authentic to yourself.
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Use your own voice, but definitely take action.
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You may need to adapt.
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It may not work what you want to do, and so listen to what people
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have done to see what's worked for them and what may not work for you.
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You can always try it and repeat it and see if it works for you, but also
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adapt to what they've done and see how you can get around the hurdles that
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they faced and stand on their shoulders
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to be able to build on what they couldn't go further in doing.
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You know, that's what science all is, right?
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When we take science and we try and build on the knowledge that
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one research paper gives, we try and build it on the next, right?
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And we try and build more information on that topic, and
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that's how we understand that topic.
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So understanding how we can do climate action, how people can do it, whether
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it's from a behavioral change standpoint or how do we get policy in there?
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Or even how people elect, or even from a scientific standpoint in the ocean,
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how do we get people to understand what's going on is the biggest thing.
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So do what you need to do.
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Obviously I'm more communication focused, but do what you think you need to do.
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Use that wonderful mind of yours.
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Use that passion of yours and say, I am going to change things.
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I'm not gonna let anybody talk me out of it, but I'm gonna listen to them because
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they come with experience and they come with challenges, and they may or may not
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have been able to overcome all of their challenges, but I'm gonna listen to them.
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I'm gonna say, okay, I'm gonna stand on your shoulders and I'm
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gonna build upon them, but I'm not gonna take your negativity to
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say, I'm not gonna do anything.
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I'm just gonna put my head down and do what I'm supposed to do.
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We need change.
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We need rebels.
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We need people who are gonna say, no, I'm not gonna take the status quo
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and I'm gonna continue to do that.
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That's why I'm doing this podcast, to be honest.
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So that's what it is.
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And you may not see change right away, and you have to be patient.
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But I say go for it and I hope this message helps.
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So, that's it for today's episode.
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If you have any more questions or comments, you know how to get
17:47
ahold of me, you can email me again for the person who emailed me.
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I didn't wanna mention your name 'cause I didn't ask beforehand if I could do this.
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But once I read the email, I was inspired to record this
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episode because of that person.
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So I really appreciate you emailing me.
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I will email you back.
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That's it.
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If you wanna also get ahold of me on Instagram, dm me
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at how to protect the ocean.
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But we need to change and we need to do things that will help us change.
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So, learn, adapt, act, learn, adapt, act.
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Continue to do that.
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That's it for this episode.
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I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the
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How to Protect the Ocean Podcast.
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I'm your host, Andrew Lewin from the True North Strong and Free.
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Have a great day.
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We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.