Shows / How To Protect The Ocean
How To Protect The Ocean
Dive into the Depths: Join Andrew Lewin on 'How to Protect the Ocean' – Your Gateway to Exclusive Ocean Insights! Explore the latest, uncharted realms of ocean science and conservation that you won't find anywhere else. Andrew takes you on an inspiring journey to uncover the hidden gems of oceanic discovery and initiatives. Tune in to discover how you can transform your life for a better ocean, one episode at a time. The How To Protect The Ocean is your resource to keep you informed on the…
Episodes
- How To Protect The Ocean
Why Saying "Fishing Is Bad" Backfires
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…
- How To Protect The Ocean
The Reef That Built Itself Back: Coral Recovery After Bleaching
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…
- How To Protect The Ocean
Why Nobody Can Name a Marine Protected Area
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…
- How To Protect The Ocean
Can You Name One Marine Protected Area? Dr. Judy Mann-Lang on MPA Day
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…
- How To Protect The Ocean
What the Sustainable Seafood Label Can't See
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…
- How To Protect The Ocean
Ships Without License Plates: The Dark Fleet Behind Fishmeal
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…
- How To Protect The Ocean
Whose Dinner Becomes Fish Feed?
On a May morning in 2017, the people of Gunjur in The Gambia woke to find their lagoon had turned red, with dead fish on the surface. Investigators traced the…
- How To Protect The Ocean
The Fish That Feed Your Fish: What Farmed Salmon Really Eat
The family behind the world's largest salmon farming company built a global industry. Now one of its members is asking how it can be sustainable to grind up…
- How To Protect The Ocean
What Your Farmed Salmon Ate: Inside a Five-Year Fishmeal Investigation
More than half the seafood eaten on Earth now comes from fish farms, and most of those farmed fish are raised on fishmeal made from wild-caught fish. Maya…
- How To Protect The Ocean
How to Read the Seafood Counter Like a Marine Biologist
Picture a big sign over the seafood counter promising sustainable fishing, with a fish every independent guide says to avoid sitting on ice right below it. In…
- How To Protect The Ocean
Is Bottom Trawling Always Bad? It Depends Where
Off the south coast of England, about 100 kilometres out, sits Haig Fras, a granite reef covered in jewel anemones and cup corals. For years it was protected…
- How To Protect The Ocean
The Trapdoor That Saves Sea Turtles From Shrimp Nets
A Kemp's ridley sea turtle, the most endangered sea turtle on Earth, gets swept into a shrimp trawl. It hits a metal grid, slides out through a flap in the…
- How To Protect The Ocean
The Cod Came Back: What a Fishery Collapse Teaches Us About Overfishing
Five centuries ago, explorers off Newfoundland described cod so plentiful that a weighted basket lowered into the sea came back full. By July 2, 1992, so few…
- How To Protect The Ocean
How to Choose Sustainable Seafood
You want to eat seafood the right way. Then you hit the seafood counter and face a wall of labels, a sign promising "sustainable practices," and an employee…
- How To Protect The Ocean
Slow Down for Whales: How Global Shipping Learned to Share the Ocean
Blue whales can't dodge ships. When scientists tracked blue whales alongside cargo ships off Southern California, the whales responded in just over half the…
- How To Protect The Ocean
When Whale Food Moves: Climate Change, Crab Traps, and Pop-Up Gear
In 2014, a patch of unusually warm water nicknamed "the blob" settled off the west coast of North America. The cold, food-rich water that normally stretches…
- How To Protect The Ocean
The Whale Heart That Beats Twice a Minute
Fill your hands with cold water, hold your breath, and press your face in. Your heart slows within seconds. That reflex lives in every whale in the ocean too…
- How To Protect The Ocean
The Biggest Mouthful: How Blue Whales Eat and Why Krill Matters
A blue whale can swallow a volume of water bigger than its own body in a single gulp. That move, called lunge feeding, is one of the most extreme feats in the…
How To Protect The OceanWhales Are Sprinters: What a Blue Whale's Heart Does When It Lunge Feeds
What happens to the heart of the largest animal on Earth when it charges into a swarm of krill? Dr. Ashley Blawas, a postdoctoral scholar in Jeremy Goldbogen's…
How To Protect The OceanThe Pollution That Breeds: How the Great Lakes Stopped Invaders
In 1988, someone found a striped mussel the size of a fingernail in Lake St. Clair. Within a few years, zebra mussels coated pipes, boats, and the bottom of…
How To Protect The OceanHow Beach Cleanup Data Helped Canada Ban Plastic
You rinse the yogurt tub, check the number on the bottom, and drop it in the blue bin. In Canada, only about 9% of plastic waste actually gets recycled, and…
How To Protect The OceanWhat Happens to Fish When Our Pills Reach the Water?
In 2001, government scientists started adding a tiny amount of the synthetic estrogen found in birth control pills to a remote lake in northwestern Ontario, at…
How To Protect The OceanHow Did Humpback Whales End Up in New York Harbour?
This summer, people are boarding whale watching boats and seeing humpbacks feeding in sight of the Manhattan skyline. Fifty years ago, that same water was an…
How To Protect The OceanPlastic Is Still the Ocean's #1 Villain, with Dr. Judith Weis
Plastic keeps getting made, it never goes away, and almost none of it gets recycled. Dr. Judith Weis, Professor Emerita at Rutgers University Newark and…
How To Protect The OceanYou Left a Public Comment. Now What?
All week, Andrew has asked listeners to comment on and show up for California's marine protected area review. Today he answers the question that comes after…
How To Protect The OceanDoes Your Public Comment Count? Two Ocean Wins Show How
Earlier this year, about 65,000 people submitted comments on a federal deep-sea mining proposal near the Northern Mariana Islands, most of them opposed. The…
How To Protect The OceanThe Blob Hit California's Kelp. Protected Kelp Came Back Faster.
In 2014, just two years after California finished its statewide network of marine protected areas, a marine heatwave known as The Blob settled over the Pacific…
How To Protect The Ocean300 People, 50 Tribes, One Meeting: How California Built Its Marine Protected Areas
In 1999, California passed a law ordering the state to fix its patchwork of ocean parks. For two years, almost nothing happened, and two attempts to get the…
How To Protect The OceanCalifornia Votes on 15 MPA Changes in October. Who Got a Say?
California has a network of 124 marine protected areas, and in October the state's Fish and Game Commission takes up 15 proposals that could change it. The…
How To Protect The OceanMillimeters That Matter: The Sea Level Rise Threshold Coastal Wetlands Can't Survive
Sea level rise. It's a phrase everyone's supposed to be afraid of, and almost nobody can picture. A couple of millimeters a year sounds too small to matter…
How To Protect The OceanWhat the Coast Is Worth: How a Dollar Number Is Already Funding Its Protection
A boat's wake looks harmless right up until you watch it happen over and over. Every wake a boat throws off chips away at a shoreline that took centuries to…
How To Protect The OceanRed Tide, Decoded: Why It Isn't Random, and How to Track It
No smell. No warning. Just a beach full of people who start coughing at the same time, grab their towels, and leave. That's red tide, and it feels completely…
How To Protect The OceanNature's Kidneys: How Coastal Wetlands Stop Ocean Pollution
Green water. A smell that won't go away. Sometimes, dead fish washing up on shore. That's what too much nitrogen does to a coastline, and it's easy to hear…
How To Protect The OceanBlue Nitrogen: The Nutrient Story Coastal Wetlands Have Been Hiding
Every time this podcast talks about coastal wetlands, the conversation goes straight to carbon. Marshes, mangroves, and seagrasses pull carbon dioxide out of…
How To Protect The OceanWho Pays for Plastic? Inside the Law Quietly Shifting the Bill to Producers
For decades, the honest answer to "who pays to deal with plastic packaging once it leaves the shelf" was taxpayers, quietly, through municipal budgets that…
How To Protect The OceanInside Ocean Conservancy's Fight to Make Washing Machine Filters the Law
Ocean Conservancy's "Not Safe for Wash" campaign is built around a simple premise: the fix for washing machine microfiber pollution already exists, so the…
How To Protect The OceanYour Washing Machine Sheds Up to 18 Million Microfibers a Load
Every wash cycle sheds plastic. Last Monday, Andrew talked with Dr. Anja Brandon of Ocean Conservancy about microfiber pollution, and one question from that…
How To Protect The OceanCan Bacteria Actually Eat Plastic?
Bacteria that eat plastic sounds like the fix everyone's been waiting for, and Andrew gets sent videos about it constantly. So on this solo episode, following…
How To Protect The OceanThe 90 Percent Fix Hiding in Your Laundry Room
Every time you run a load of laundry, your washing machine sheds plastic. Not metaphorically: synthetic clothing made from polyester, nylon, and rayon releases…
How To Protect The OceanA 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…
How To Protect The OceanShow Me the Receipts: Why I.CARE Monitors Every Coral It Plants
Most coral restoration groups check on a sample of what they've planted, often around 20 to 30 percent, and report that sample as if it represents everything…
How To Protect The OceanThe Nursery Hack That Pays for Itself
Coral nurseries need constant maintenance, and that maintenance is expensive and relentless. When Andrew talked to Mike Goldberg, co-founder of I.CARE, his…
How To Protect The OceanHe Almost Quit the Dive Business. Then a Coral Reef PhD Student Walked In.
Mike Goldberg had over 10,000 dives and decades running a dive shop in the Florida Keys, enough time to have seen the reefs at their pristine best. Then came a…
How To Protect The Ocean84 Percent: Inside the Worst Coral Bleaching Event Ever Recorded
This year, most of the coral on the planet went through heat stress severe enough to bleach it. That's not a rounding error: 84 percent of the world's reef…
How To Protect The OceanEveryone in the Tent: How Ocean Treaties Actually Get Made
Holly Koehler has spent almost thirty years in rooms most people never think about: windowless UN offices in New York, the FAO in Rome, and what she calls…
How To Protect The OceanInside the System That Makes a Seafood Label Trustworthy
Between a fishing vessel out on the water and a can of tuna in your grocery cart, there is a complex, little-understood system working to verify whether you…
How To Protect The OceanThe Ship Has Reached the Shore: The High Seas Treaty Explained
There's a video online of a room full of exhausted diplomats breaking into applause after nearly 20 years of work. One woman brings down the gavel and says…
How To Protect The OceanCorals Nearly as Old as the Pyramids, and the Fight to Save Them
Somewhere on the ocean floor right now, a coral colony has been growing since before the Great Pyramid of Giza was finished. One deep-water black coral off the…
How To Protect The OceanA Summer Internship, Thirty Years, and One Career for the Ages
A grad student faces a simple choice: write another term paper, or take a summer internship. She takes the internship, gets assigned to sea turtles, and thirty…
How To Protect The OceanDeep Sea Mining Exposed: Inside the Fight to Save the Ocean's Last Frontier
Deep sea mining is no longer theoretical. In this episode, Andrew sits down with Matthew Gianni, co-founder and Political and Policy Advisor of the Deep Sea…
How To Protect The Ocean5,000 New Species Prove the "Ocean Desert" Deep Sea Mining Claim Is Wrong
In September 2021, Time magazine profiled Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company (TMC), and his push to mine the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a stretch of…
How To Protect The OceanThe Gerard Barron Pattern: Why a CEO Who Watched One Deep-Sea Mining Company Collapse Is Trying Again
Why would someone who watched one deep-sea mining company collapse go back and try it again? That's the question at the center of this episode, and it's not…
How To Protect The OceanBottom Trawling on Seamounts: The Damage Nobody Sees
Seamounts are underwater mountains that rise at least 1,000 meters from the seafloor without breaking the surface, and they punch far above their weight…
How To Protect The OceanFrom Shoveling Coral Overboard to Negotiating at the UN
Before he ever sat across a table from UN delegates, Matthew Gianni spent 10 years working as a commercial fisherman up and down both US coasts. Gillnetting…
How To Protect The OceanBlue Collar White Coat: Meet the People Behind Ocean Science
Science communication has a blind spot: it keeps putting the same faces in front of the microphone. In this episode, Andrew talks with Amy Weldon, host and…
How To Protect The OceanWhy YouTube Might Be the Future of Ocean Science Communication
YouTube has quietly become one of the best platforms for ocean science communication, and in this episode Andrew breaks down exactly why. Fresh off yesterday's…
How To Protect The OceanEpisode 2000: TV Offers, Job Offers, and a Major Announcement
Today marks episode 2000 of How to Protect the Ocean, and Andrew is taking a break from the usual format to look back at how this show came to be. From an…
How To Protect The OceanThe Power of Podcasting for Ocean Science Communication
Podcasting has been part of Andrew Lewin's life for 11 years, and in this episode he explains why he thinks more people working in ocean science and…
How To Protect The OceanShort-Form Content for Ocean Awareness: What Actually Works
This week on the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, Andrew kicks off a science communication series exploring how ocean advocates can spread awareness across…
How To Protect The OceanThe Electric Boat Revolution Is Here
Electric boating is having its Tesla moment, and few people understand that shift better than Alexandre Mongeon, CEO and co-founder of Vision Marine…