World Ocean Radio - Protection
The face of war is changing quickly: cheap, unmanned, versatile drones and remotely operated aircraft, coupled with rapidly-advancing technology, satellite communications, ambiguous algorithms, accountability, and responsibility are shifting the shapes of war around the globe, especially as it pertains to the unseen and largely unmonitored high seas. With a world struggling to keep up, the instruments of war are becoming invisible, ephemeral and uncontrollable. What laws are in place to protect the ocean and the natural systems on which life is sustained?
This week on World Ocean Radio we are hailing the alewife: a species of herring found in the west Atlantic where they thrive along shore and seasonally move into estuaries before swimming up small streams to freshwater ponds to breed. Alewives are considered a “species of concern” by the US National Marine Fisheries, threatened by dams and re-channeling of streams that blocked their upstream trajectory each spring. Host Peter Neill recently communed with them as they spawned upstream; in this episode he proposes reasons for alewives to offer us hope.
"The state of the ocean is not good." So states Vidar Helgesen in the forward to the UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) State of the Ocean Report that was released in May. This week on World Ocean Radio we are summarizing the findings.
On June 8th each year we come together as a global community to celebrate World Ocean Day, a date set aside to recognize our relationship with the ocean. Public awareness of ocean issues in the United States barely advances year on year, despite consistent efforts by conservation, ocean, and other environmental organizations like World Ocean Observatory whose mission it is to inform and educate. What is World Ocean Day meant to do? Do we have the will to coalesce around a single issue, to be informed and changed into a voice for change?
Bio-regions on Earth are organized into types, then realms, and are further distinguished and mapped for planning, strategizing, developing, and as a tool for protection of the planet. A major trouble with bio-regional mapping is that it neglects nearly 83 percent of the ocean–beyond marine protected areas–leaving the high seas and deep sea unaddressed and vulnerable.
This week on World Ocean Radio we're sharing some methods and means to make small and large changes that can have effects on the climate and sustainability challenges that are caused in large part by the consumer choices we make every day.
This week on World Ocean Radio we're discussing a recent trip to Lisbon, Portugal to attend the Economist Ocean Summit. One such conversation we participated in was on the topic of regulation--those systems and structures that frame best practices and are designed to control abuse. Regulation is conflicting and contradictory, especially when most regulatory decisions are followed by time-extending litigation. What if we could redefine regulation as an incentive to succeed? What if regulation could become a motivating context to advance change, rather than a backwards impediment to progress? We'll explore this and more.
In this episode and the next, World Ocean Radio reports on the status quo, business-as-usual, tunnel vision conclusions at COP28 in Dubai, hosted by the United Arab Emirates, December 2023. While many millions of dollars and intentions were pledged toward solutions, the focus and associated response was too narrow and inadequate to address the deficit consumption of our world's natural and ecological resources.
This week we continue the multi-part RESCUE series by listing some of the most critical changes and improvements required to create a new, sustainable ocean economy--in essence a checklist for step-by-step actions toward future governance, regulation and investment in the world ocean.
RESCUE as an acronym offers a plan for specific action and public participation: Renewal, Environment, Society, Collaboration, Understanding, and Engagement.
This week the multi-part RESCUE series continues with a call for a new valuation of ecosystem services and natural resources that reflects the true costs of goods, services and ecosystem functions inclusive to habitat, food, water, regulation and recycling that serve human populations now and in the future.
RESCUE as an acronym offers a plan for specific action and public participation: Renewal, Environment, Society, Collaboration, Understanding, and Engagement.
This week we continue the multi-part RESCUE series with the topic of seafood consumption. While more than 3 billion people worldwide rely on wild-caught and farmed seafood as a significant source of animal protein, unsustainable and illegally caught seafood harvest threatens a major health crisis if we do not confront the issue through regulation and enforcement of best practice, change in social behavior and consumption, and new technological innovations toward a sustainable future.
This week we continue the multi-part RESCUE series with an outline of the four technological focus areas of the recently announced Ocean Climate Action Plan, the organizing connection of which is technology. Guiding the actions of the plan are a commitment to be responsible stewards of a healthy and sustainable ocean, to advance environmental justice and engage with all communities, and to coordinate action across governments.
This week we continue the multi-part RESCUE series with a discussion of Earth law, a framework built upon the idea that ecosystems have the right to exist and thrive, and that Nature should be able to defend those rights in court. Can we ratify a collective treaty toward the protection of Nature? RESCUE as an acronym offers a plan for specific action and public participation: Renewal, Environment, Society, Collaboration, Understanding, and Engagement.
This week we continue the multi-part RESCUE series with a highlight of UNCLOS, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a major example of a far-reaching universal agreement that was drafted in 1982 and ratified in 1984. At the recent Davos gathering, a call to overhaul the UNCLOS instrument of ocean protection went largely unheeded. Who will be willing to step up and redress priorities to conserve and sustain the ocean? RESCUE as an acronym offers a plan for specific action and public participation: Renewal, Environment, Society, Collaboration, Understanding, and Engagement.
This summer we are revisiting some of our favorite World Ocean Radio episodes that highlight optimism in ocean news, science and advocacy. In this episode we discuss marine protected areas and their importance to biodiversity and to the mitigation of climate change and other destructive forces at work on the planet.
This week on World Ocean Radio: five suggested strategies as laid out by Karl Burkart (Managing Director of One Earth and formerly the Director of Science & Technology at the DiCaprio Foundation) by which to create the funds required to meet the urgent global climate crisis.
This week we're discussing the Sargasso Sea: a verdant, vital ecosystem supporting a great diversity of life, providing shelter for marine mammals, and serving as a repository for human endeavor, including shipping, fishing, harvesting, and pollution. And we're discussing conservation efforts including the Hamilton Declaration and the formation of the Sargasso Sea Commission, protection measures working toward the establishment of an International Marine Protected Area.
"Mother Earth has the following rights: To life, to the diversity of life, to water, to clean air, to equilibrium, to restoration, and to pollution-free living." So states the Law of Mother Earth, a Bolivian law passed in December 2010 as a binding societal duty. Bolivia is the first country on Earth to give comprehensive legal rights to Mother Nature, and in this episode of World Ocean Radio we explore the language contained in the legislation and assert that Bolivia may be inventing a social model that will show how we as a global community might transcend conflict and division toward a harmonious and sustainable future.
In this episode of World Ocean Radio we look back at the most egregious actions and decisions taken by individuals, corporations and governments that have led to the environmental crises we now face. The big offenders on the list include: the willful ignorance of the early science that foreshadowed what was to come, energy companies, corporate greed, CO2 emissions, fracking, fossil fuels, fertilizers, plastics, and our collective unwillingness to preserve natural systems for the future of all.
In this week's episode of World Ocean Radio we discuss publications, reports, and projects that are integral to the evolution of ocean policy and science, including the Atlas of Ocean Wealth, published in 2016 by the Nature Conservancy.
This week on World Ocean Radio we celebrate marine protected areas and discuss their importance to biodiversity, ecosystem resilience, and the mitigation of climate change and other destructive forces at work on the planet.
As of late March the Obama Administration is no longer considering Cashes Ledge in the Gulf of Maine for national monument designation. This news, delivered to a room of fishing industry regulators, came as a blow to conservationists who have sought monument status for years. In this episode of World Ocean Radio, host Peter Neill will offer his thoughts on the rationale which favors preserving this and other essential, bio-diverse seascapes, and that of the fishermen and state regulators who opposed these additional restrictions.
The public trust doctrine is designed to protect our natural resources for the benefit of future generations. Plaintiffs in a number of legal cases around the country, with the help of Our Children’s Trust, have been fighting to bring legal action against state and federal governments, claiming not enough is being done to protect their future by reducing global warming. In this episode of World Ocean Radio, host Peter Neill will discuss one particular climate change case, a landmark victory in Eugene, Oregon, which rejected all arguments raised by the federal government to deny youth their right to proceed with the case. This is a monumental step forward, proving that plaintiffs do in fact have a right to bring charges of violations under the public trust doctrine.
Oysters have had a history of ebb and flow, plenty and scarcity, and in New York Harbor there was a time when the waters were so polluted that oyster populations diminished and interest in consumption vanished. Enter the Harbor School, an innovative high school on Governor’s Island on the East River in New York City. They have launched a project to revive the defunct oyster populations through an ambitious goal of restoring no less than one billion oysters to the harbor. In this episode of World Ocean Radio, host Peter Neill will discuss the school’s history and their restorative ecosystem service activities and their effort to reconnect the harbor to the 30 million people living within its vast urban watershed.
