This is an Ocean's Day episode. Now
you're probably going to watch this after
Ocean's Day because
Ocean's Day 2025 is on the 8th.
I publish on the 9th and you're probably
going to see this at some point.
But I hope that this resonates with you
at any point in time you watch this,
whether it's June 8,
2025 or December 25, 2025,
or even 2026, 2027 and
further down the road.
We see a lot of problems with our oceans.
We see a lot of problems with nature and
a lot of the times and most of the time
it's due to us, the humans.
We are in a wasteful world and we
continue to perpetuate that world through
politics, through policies, through
actions and through promises.
And whether we want to do it or not, or
we're just a victim of circumstances in
this whole game we call ocean
conservation and then we call
world, we need to have hope.
And that's going to be the message I want
to drive home today
is the message of hope.
There's been a number of different things
that have brought me to this lately that
I've seen lately on TV, including the
Star Wars, which is all about hope, but
it speaks to everything that we are
facing as a world population,
everything that we need to do.
And we need to feel hopeful to get
inspired and inspire others to take
action to do better for our oceans, for
nature and for our planet.
So we're going to talk about that on
today's episode of the How to Protect the
Ocean podcast. I promise you you're going
to feel better after this. So watch the
entire episode. Let's start the show.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another
exciting episode of the How to Protect
the Ocean podcast. I'm
your host, Andrew Lewin.
And this is the podcast where you find
out what's happening with the ocean, how
you could speak up for the ocean, what
you could do to live for
better ocean by taking actions.
It is June 9th. Now, when I record this,
well, actually, I recorded a week early,
but when I published is going to be June
9th. I am getting ready to go to Nice,
France for the UN
Ocean Decade Conference.
The UN Ocean Decade is 10 years, a decade
between 2020 and 2030, where we are
dedicating towards the ocean. There's a
lot of action that is happening. There
are a lot of promises that are being made
by government as we speak because the
conference goes from, I think,
it's June 5th to the June 15th. It's a
long conference. I'm going to be there
from the 11th to the 15th. I'm going to
bring you more episodes later on next
week to be able to provide you with my
experience in one of these conferences,
the people I met. Hopefully, I'll get
some interviews as well, but there'll be
a lot of content driven around this. But
it's one of those days where I always
have trouble talking about it because
this podcast, every day we live, Ocean's
Day, right? Every day, June, Ocean's
Week, Ocean's Month, whatever you want to
say it, it's always over.
It's Ocean's Day here at this podcast.
Every time you tune in, it's Ocean's Day
because we live for the ocean every time
I either record or publish and every time
you listen and hopefully get inspired by
a lot of the guests by some of the
stories that I talk about and some of the
motivational stuff that we do.
And that's what today is going to be
because look, we're facing a world that
sucks right now, especially when it comes
to ocean conservation. We have
politicians in place that are either
causing problems for everybody else like
Donald Trump or you're in a country where
the politicians have to react to certain
politicians like Donald Trump to be able
to say, hey, we need to divest our
necessities or requirements to depend on
a place like the US and we need to build
something with other countries,
especially when it comes to oil and gas.
That means we may need to build more
pipelines. We need to get more oil and
gas out of the country, which means we're
not going to reduce our footprint with
oil and gas, which is what we've been
wanting to do for the last decade or so.
And the actions have led towards that,
which is disappointing. I guess I'm
talking about Canada, which is it's
disappointing to me and there's a lot of
worry that happens with that. You have
oil and gas, which is a huge fossil fuel.
It's dirty, especially when you take it
out of the ground like the tar sands in
Alberta and Saskatchewan, but it's also a
necessity for our economy because our
economy is essentially
based on oil and gas.
So we're in a bit of a pickle, a big
pickle, to be honest. It's not something
that I like, but because of what's
happening south of the border, we have to
free up our dependence on the US for
selling oil because we sell 95% of the
oil to the US and we have to go to the
different markets, whether it be
European, whether it be Asian markets.
And now it's starting to say, okay, well,
what are we going to be doing with that
oil and gas? How is that going to affect
our environment as well as the world
environment? Is that going to increase
our greenhouse gas contribution or are we
going to find ways to
decrease it in other places?
I don't really know. And it's giving me a
little bit of anxiety when I start to
think about it. In addition to that, we
have provincial governments like the
Ontario government here in Canada who are
putting forth, as I mentioned a couple of
weeks ago, a bill five that will replace
the endangered species act with the
species conservation act.
Species conservation act, which
essentially takes away recovery plans,
which is a huge part of species at risk
or endangered species act. They're going
to take away protecting the areas where
they could feed the
areas where they forage.
They're only going to protect areas where
they actually sleep. So they're dense,
essentially, which is not good. They're
going to put together special economic
zones, which essentially we can do
whatever we want in these zones. We can
develop, we can destroy
whatever we want to do.
It's taken away a lot of great recovery
and actions that have happened in the
past and that will happen in the future
to protect these species, to protect
biodiversity, which helps protect the
planet, which helps
protect the environment.
And of course, like the Ontario
environment and habitats, and as well as
will be prosperous for us and will stop
with flooding and all this kind of stuff
will increase without it.
It builds on the anxiety. We have these
politicians in place and they're saying
they're using what's happening down.
So as a way to do all these moves,
they'll say like the Ford government, the
provincial government, Ontario saying,
Hey, you know what? You gave us a
mandate. We said that there was a threat
from the south that we have to do this.
And this is something he's wanted to do
for a long time. He's just using what's
happening down south as an excuse. And it
just sucks. It really
does sucks to see that.
And so what I wanted to do today with all
of this stuff is really talk about hope.
I've seen two things over the last couple
of weeks that have really brought me back
into that hopeful feeling with all the
crappy stuff that's
happening in our world.
We have seen examples of that and it was
shown in the ocean documentary, the
movie, so that we can see firsthand, not
only the destruction that's in this case,
the trawl fishering takes, but also the
recovery that it can have when we allow
things to recover, right?
So we get this type of stuff and that
makes me feel better because even though
someone who sees the destruction and sees
the policies and the politicians make all
these crappy choices, having a video like
that, having a movie like that and being
able to get that distributed widely
because Sir David Attenborough is pretty
much the king of documentaries right now,
seeing him speak like that with his passion and his voice and just as a way to do that,
with his passion and his voice and just
everything about him really resonates
with a lot of people and people love
watching documentaries by them, whether
they're sad, whether they're happy, it
doesn't matter. They love watching this
and to watch a movie like the oceans, I
feel will really inspire people to take
action and I feel as though like looking
at stuff with oceans and Oceans Day and
Oceans Month will help
inspire people to take action.
That's the whole point of these Oceans
Day weeks month. That's the point of why
we're doing this is to say, Hey, you know
what? We can still save the ocean. We
just have to make a few changes. Some of
them are big and some of them are small,
but we have to make changes. It could be
in your personal life and your behavior,
or it could be on a wider scale,
provincial, national, even local
government scale and
international scale, right?
There's all these different ways that we
can protect the ocean from a human side.
And so today what I want to do is I want
to go over some of those. I want to go
over and say, Hey, you know what? There
are certain things that you can do, not
only to decrease your ocean anxiety or
your climate anxiety, but also really
help out with the movement.
Help out with data analysis, help out
with data gathering. There's so many
things that we can do. And I'm going to
talk about a few of those today to help
inspire you to take action, to say, Hey,
you know what? Some of these are really
doable. They won't take that much change.
It's just a matter of a little bit of
change behavior, which I know can be
tough on all of us, but something that we
can do that may actually save us money in
some places, but also make us feel better
about the environment because we're doing
something. That's part of it.
Talking about it, listening about it and
doing something about it really helps. So
here's some of the things you can take,
like personally actions that you can
take, like our personal lifestyle
changes. So we got eat sustainable
seafood. There are guides like seafood
watch and ocean wise in Canada and they
have apps that help you make more
informed decisions. Now, are they
perfect? No, but they're better than just
going blindly and just assuming that
everybody is buying sustainable seafood.
Go and look at these apps. Make sure you
cover. You can look at multiple if you
want, but make sure that you are covered.
And say, look, if the person behind the
counter or the waiter can't tell me if
this is sustainable, because of where
it's caught and how it was caught, then
don't eat it. That's the action that you
can take. That's the power that you can
have and tell them that's why I'm not
eating because you guys don't know. And
you can't tell me. Okay. So that's one
thing. The other thing you can do is
reduce single use plastics might be a
little hard at first. When you start to
realize how many single use plastics are
in our life, but you can carry reasonable
water bottles, bag utensils and say no to
straws. Use those paper straws.
As much as people don't like them, they
pretty much at the point now where you
can actually drink out of one drink and
you'll be fine. You have a metal straw
that costs like two bucks. You can have
straws. However you want. When we talk
about straws, we're talking about people
with disabilities that need those plastic
straws. I completely understand. Do what
you need to do, but these are the choices
you could make if this works out for your
lifestyle. But it's not just about
straws, but all single use plastics all
around. So like, for instance, I always
go when I'm out in the air, I don't know how to do it. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
So I'm in the office or I'm in the
office. We go out for lunch once a week
or so. I'll go to a place where I'll go
buy food or get takeout for the office
now I tend to go to a place that will
have the reasonable containers that are
compostable that tends to help me out. I
know they're composed. We'll have done
the research. I go to that place a lot
more than I normally do. I don't use or
compostable or
environmentally friendly utensils.
utensils. So I'm able to make those
better decisions. Now, if
we go to a different place
and they don't serve environmentally safe
or protected or non
single use plastics, if
they sell single use plastics, then I'll
be careful in terms of
how I'll use it. I'll
say no to a plastic bag, no to plastic
utensils, and I'll just bring the
container even though
that's plastic. You can't get away from
all of it. I don't want
people reducing what you
eat or where you eat from, but that's a
power that you have if
that's important to you.
You can avoid those places because that
is something that you
want to avoid. You don't
want to have single use plastics. You can
even talk to the
owner or the people behind
the counter and say, Hey, you know what?
Like I would love to
get that. I would love
for you to get like environmentally
friendly containers and
it's supposed to happen like
in Canada anyway, it's supposed to
happen. So just reduce
single use plastics to a point
where you can not have to have them at
all. Not depend on them
at all is always great.
Use reef safe sunscreen. This is
basically the non-enzene benzene type of
sunscreens. They have
harmful chemicals like
oxybenzone that bleach reef. So anything
that's mixed with zinc is usually pretty
good. It's harder to
put on. It's not the best, but they're
getting better at making
ones that are easy to put on.
They don't feel like when you put them on
and you can still see the
sunscreen. It could be a pain in
the butt. I use it as much as possible.
It's also better for your skin. So
there's always a secondary
benefit when using those. Now, of course,
you can also reduce carbon emissions. You
can bike, you can walk, you can take
public transit and you can
eat more plant-based foods.
Those are some of the things that you can
do that will immediately reduce your
footprint on the planet. That's something
that's really important.
Pick up litter, even if it's not yours.
So a beach on the street in your own
neighborhood, it all flows downstream.
Wherever it goes, it will find a waterway
and it will flow downstream. So the more
you can pick up, the better. Sometimes
like when I'm on a walk,
I'll even bring like gloves or something
in a bag and I'll just pick them up and
walk in the dogs or something. And I feel
like the dogs like it
when I pick up that plastic.
Because I don't know about you, but I
have one dog who likes to eat everything.
It takes away from her and especially
hurting her stomach when she eats it.
I don't catch it at her eating it. So
picking up that stuff, picking up litter
off the ground is always helpful. And it
takes care of your neighborhood, right?
It takes care of your city or town that
you live in. And it allows you to be
like, you know what? I help keep this
clean. This is something
that's really important.
Now, some of the mental and emotional
actions that you can take to turn your
anxiety down is join a community or an
online forum. You can join the undertow
community by going to speakupforblue.com
forward slash the undertow that
speakupforblue.com forward slash the
undertow to join our community where you
can talk about this stuff.
Get it off your chest. Read stories that
are a positive stories about the oceans.
Hear people talk about the oceans and be
like, Oh, I want to get in on this
action. You can do a lot of that. That'll
be really great. Many of us have social
media and we have these fees that we
could actually curate because the fees,
the algorithms based on what you interact
with and what you watch or what you read.
And that's going to be important. If you
want to read more about the ocean and
positive stories, start engaging with
those stories, share them, like them,
love them, whatever you have to do and
comment on them to say, hey, thanks for
sharing this positive stuff.
Then you could start to be like, Hey, you
know what? Like I'm starting to get
really interesting information on my
newsfeed and use it for what it's
supposed to be. Not just like Karen's
getting people arrested or people
complaining about everything.
You could find very good positive
environmental news on whether it be
TikTok or Facebook or Instagram or
whatever you're watching Snapchat,
whatever you're watching, you can find
out. But you have to curate that a little
bit. You have to do that for yourself.
You can practice ocean gratitude. So take
moments and reflect on the ocean's beauty
and importance and not just the ocean
lakes and streams as well. I was talking
to a friend of mine when I went away to
Vancouver last week. We were walking in
Stanley Park, which is a very famous park
in Vancouver and it's
right along the ocean.
We were walking along the ocean and we're
just smelling the air, looking at the
ocean, looking at the mountains in the
background and just enjoying the moment.
In fact, even when my buddy went in, he
went in swimming even though it was like
54 degrees Fahrenheit or something like
that. It was crazy cold. He went in and
had a nice swim because it was a nice
day. He wanted to cool off. He definitely
cooled off, but he enjoyed the moment.
Right? And then next, you know, about
five minutes later after he got out of
the water, we see some seals. We enjoy
the ocean. And I told him, I said, you
know what? We probably take it for
granted that he grew up in an ocean.
We don't get to be around or we don't
take in the moment when we're around Lake
Ontario, Lake Erie, all the different
great lakes that are here, the five
different great lakes and just like enjoy
the view, enjoy what they represent,
enjoy what we see each and every day that
like I have a 20 minutes away. I have a
beautiful walk like a beautiful lakefront
and I could walk that every day and I
don't. I don't even though I should every
time I do it. I'm like, I should do this
more. So don't take it for granted. If you really want to do this, I'm going to take it for granted.
If you live around a lake or even you can
walk by a stream or something, enjoy
nature, enjoy the moment, enjoy the green
space, the more you enjoy it, the more
politicians keep it around. So and the
more you'll enjoy that gratitude. Okay?
So now you can also share the ocean wind.
So talk about successful conservation
stories in your social circles,
especially when somebody
tries to bring you down.
There's somebody in your group that's
trying to bring you down by bringing down
like, Oh, it's so sucks that we have
climate change and there's flooding and
this and that's like, Oh, you know what?
There's actually somebody who prevented
flooding and one of their cities and talk
about those stories have like a roster of
stories to be like, Yeah, this is what I
want to do. That's really important.
And then limit doom scrolling. This is
what my therapist tells me all the time.
Like there's a lot of crappy things going
on in the world and they're shown on
TikTok, on Instagram, on social media in
general. Stay away
from that stuff, right?
Limit that type of scrolling, go out and
enjoy nature. Go for a walk. If you have
pets, take them for a walk. If you can
take them for a walk. If you go out and
you're near a water body and you can go
swimming, go kayaking, go whatever. Just
even walk along the side. Just take in
the breath of fresh air, enjoy it. And
that will help you recover from all this
doom scrolling. It'll help you really
enjoy nature and understand how nature
functions just by being in and watching.
Watch the birds and listen to the birds
and watch the animals and see what they do.
And look at their behaviors is so much
better for you. Let's talk about using
your voice, speaking up for the ocean,
speaking up for the blue. You can host or
join a World's Day event. Like I'm going
to nice. I'm not expecting everybody to
go to Europe, but there's always an event
on June 8th. I attended this in the past.
Of course I attended. I know doing this.
It's it'll be in the future. This week
I'm attending and I attended an Ocean's
Day event in a library in Milton, which
is just the city beside me.
And I got to talk to a lot of people who
are interested about the ocean, whether
it's careers, whether it's just about the
ocean in general, talking about the
ocean, even podcasting, talking about
speaking up for the blue is really
important. And so speaking up for that
blue and hosting a day event or being a
part of that attending one is always
great in the future when you can do so.
Right to elected officials emails,
letters, write stories, personal stories
of why you think the ocean important, why
you think your lakes and rivers are
important and the environment important.
I'm sure they cannot ignore that. They
have to read everything that you put.
They have to listen to everything you
say. They may not agree with you and they
may do something different, but you can
force them to listen to it.
Read it because that is your power. You
elected them there. They are there to
answer for you. Some politicians are
better than others. Those are not very
good. You don't elect them the next time
and you tell people about. I was like,
hey, I wrote to this person never
responded or he never said he said the
opposite of what's being done.
He understood my plight, but I'd said my
piece and this is how he treated me or
she treated me or they treated me and I
don't like it. And so you can talk about
that as well. And then you can support
indigenous ocean stewardship amplifying
the indigenous voices that are important.
And they're on social media that are on
the internet and initiatives in your area
can really help in terms of managing the
environment. So lifting those voices up
is really important. Nobody protects the
environment like indigenous people and
their culture. It's so important.
And now we're just starting to scratch
the surface of collaborating with and
having indigenous communities lead
conservation in and around their area.
Start ocean conversation. Talk with
friends, family, or even coworkers about
what they can do to like how they can be
in conservation. Some of them will be
very negative because people don't want
to change, but it's very important that
you talk to them because there's going to
be those few. They're like, oh, I could
do that. And they might do that. They
might respect you enough to
do that. So that's always good.
And then of course, post educational and
hopeful ocean content, you can share the
stuff in my podcast. We can look at
beyond jaws and all the stuff that's
going on there. There's a lot of hopeful
and great projects that we're talking
about. And you can share those clips that
I send out on social media. You know, the
ones you've probably seen them quite a
bit. There's a lot of different things
that you can do that will help you share
these types of stories.
Let's get into like the hands on action
so you can support and volunteer or even
provide financial help. You can donate to
ocean conservation organizations, even $5
a month to the ocean Conservancy or any
kind of local organizations will really
help them a lot, especially that monthly
spend is what a cup of coffee, maybe even
less than a cup of
coffee that could help out.
And if more and more people donate the
same amount, then you can really get
something moving and support these
organizations, especially local
organizations that need your help. You
can volunteer for beach cleanup or river
cleanups or any kind of cleanup. Anything
that helps the environment, even going on
walks and stuff like that. Nature walks
is always a great thing and doing it
yourself. You can support ocean focused
businesses. This is a huge thing. Look up
B Corps. These are corporations that have
a social enterprise twist to them. These are for profit purposes.
These are for profit businesses that want
to protect and help their employees. They
want to protect and help the environment
and they want to protect and help
society. These are great businesses that
you can support very easy by just buying
their products and or services. You can
adopt a sea creature or you can adopt a
tag like follow FA hlo. You can actually
go on their app and their website. I've
talked about this before. I actually have
their bracelets have two other bracelets.
Their shark, their regular shark and
whale shark where they actually team up
with organizations that tag and
animals, whether they be in aquatic or
marine or even on land and they tag
animals that you can watch them. You can
actually get an animal and you can watch
them forever. If that tag falls off, you
get another animal. You can see where
they go. It's really cool what you can
see. It's all on an app. So really great
thing that you can do there. You can
offer your skills so you can write you
can design you can code you can market
all those can help nonprofit
organizations and citizen science
projects who don't have the people with
those skills in their organization
because they might
just be a one-off project.
that just is very tight on budgets.
Everybody's tight on budgets.
So the more you can
volunteer, the better.
You can also go on a board of directors,
that would help as well.
Now you can look at taking more action
and be curious and contribute.
So you can participate in
marine citizen science projects,
apps like iNaturalist,
eBird for shorebirds,
or ReefCheck, or even
citizens of the reef.
If you go on their website,
they have a way that you can,
we talked about with Andy
Ridley a couple of weeks ago,
where we talked about
identifying boulder corals,
plate corals, branching corals,
all these different types of formations
and helping the AI be
as accurate as possible.
It's really kind of fun.
I've done it before
and it's a lot of fun.
It's really easy.
You can just do it with your hand.
You can do it with a
couple of clicks of the mouse.
It's really great.
You can do that.
I'll put a link in the show
notes to get access to that,
but citizen science of the reef.
It's basically being able to gather data
for the Great Barrier Reef.
But you can also take in a free ocean
course or a webinar.
The MOOCs, these are, I
forget what it stands for,
but there's a shark one,
Shark MOOC, that's available.
These are massive online courses, I
think, ocean courses.
And it's all about sharks.
You get to learn all about sharks
and help identify
them and stuff like that.
It's really cool.
You can read ocean conservation books.
We have lots of books.
There's some books behind me.
I've talked about books.
I've had authors on.
You can read lots of ocean
books and conservation books
and learn about the
oceans and the heroes,
like Dr. Sylvia Earle, Dr.
Ariana Elizabeth Johnson,
Octavia Bell, Jasmine
Graham, Dr. David Schiffman.
There's so many people, Dr. David Ebert,
who's my co-host on Beyond Jaws,
that you can get to know by their books
and their ocean stories and
share those ocean stories.
You can watch ocean
documentaries with family and friends
and talk about those
movies with other people.
Just had Oceans, Sir David Attenborough,
which is always great.
There's so many out there.
Just be careful which ones you go for,
because some of the
messages aren't always the best,
but most of them are pretty good.
And you can follow local marine projects
or any kind of environmental projects.
It doesn't matter if you're on the coast
or outside the coast,
you can follow them on.
You can stay informed and
engaged with what's happening
near your coast.
That's the list, but of course,
there's so many other
things that you can do.
That was a list of 25 of
them that we went through
in about almost 25 minutes.
And so these are things that you can do
just on today's Ocean Day.
The next year, you can start to focus.
You don't have to do all of them.
You can pick one, you
can pick half of one,
you can do whatever you'd like.
But the more you act, the
better you feel about the ocean,
the better you feel your contribution,
the more you lower your
anxiety, which is always great.
Now, I'm not a therapist by any means,
but I am somebody who worries about the
ocean on a daily basis.
Sometimes I get really
worried based on what people say
and some of the
policies that are put in place
and laws are put in place
or even worse taken away.
But the ocean always wins
out, whether we're here or not,
the ocean will always win out.
And it's better that
we're here and we protect it
and we reduce our
negative influence on it
and start to benefit the ocean.
So that's my message for you today
with all the crap that's
going on with the ocean,
with the environment,
with the world today,
there are ways to find hope and that
could include education,
that can include
action, whatever you might do.
And to get both of those all in one shot,
you can go and join
the undertow community
by going to
speakupforblue.com forward slash the undertow.
We're going to be launching soon.
And I'd love to see you part of it.
I'd love to see you in there and I'd love
to interact with you.
That's the best part of
the undertow communities
that we actually get to interact with
people virtually on video,
on audio, whatever that might be.
And also written.
So it's a great online community.
Highly recommend that you join us
speakupforblue.com
forward slash the undertow.
And I also want to say thank you so much
for what you do already.
Just by getting education, if you're
acting for the ocean,
I'd love to hear more about it.
You can hit me up on
Instagram at how to protect the ocean
or you can go to speakupforblue.com
forward slash contact.
Fill out the form goes right to my email,
but you can also see me
in the undertow community.
So speakupforblue.com
forward slash the undertow.
I want to thank you so much for joining
me on today's episode of the how to
protect the ocean podcast.
I'm your host, Andrew Lewin from the true
north strong and free.
Have a great day.
We'll talk to you next
time and happy conservation.