What Happens When Politicians Ignore Ocean Science?

0:00 I think there's a confusion with environmental and ocean conservation. People think that ocean conservation is hard. If you strip away all the different, like, politics and everything like that, protecting an ocean is not difficult. What's difficult is getting people to buy into that protection, to agree to this protection. To take away greed and understand that the ocean is a part of us, and we're a part of it, and that we need to protect the ocean. But when we put together legislation, strong legislation, that has been worked on both parties or numerous parties and non-partisan. Where people are working together on it, and they have a vested interest in making sure that our planet is protected, especially within the boundaries that they can protect, ocean conservation is not difficult.

0:42 And we've seen a lot of success from it in a lot of different ways. From policies that don't normally get see the light of day on big news items on, like, CNN or on CBC or even on NPR and stuff like that. It's not sexy news. And it's not really made to be sexy. What's sexy is the outcome when we look at how we treat the ocean and how when we change our ways and put the laws and policies and regulations into place, that we can actually be successful in protecting the ocean. So we're gonna talk about today. This is the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, your weekly ocean news update. If you wanna stay informed on everything that has to do with ocean, and you want a resource that helps you learn more about what's being done in and around the ocean and what's effective in the ocean, hit that follow button right now on the podcast app that you're listening to this to.

1:28 We're on every podcast app that's out there. If you're listening, we're on it obviously. So hit that follow button, 'cause when when you hit the follow button, we get up in the charts on whatever podcast app that you're listening to this on. And other people that like that podcast app also get access to it, 'cause they get to see it. There's a lot of podcasts. I think there's four million podcasts, maybe about 400,000 that are actually active within the last 90 days. We put it out five days a week, folks. We're like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And by the way, for those of you who say, "Hey, five days a week is too much for me for my podcast feed," if you go to speakupforblue.com/patreon, you can get access to a free version of… This is always free, but, like, Patreon, we have some paid tiers. But there's a free version of that where you can just get the interviews or you can just get the solo episodes.

2:11 I'm trying to put two together. So you can check that out at speakupforblue.com/patreon. And of course, if you wanna join the community where we talk once a month about the oceans, I'm launching that this month. You can do that. Just go to speakupforblue.com/patreon. This is exciting. We're gonna be talking about policies and regulations that may not be sexy in the regular news but that have actually worked over time. I've talked about this before, but I wanna talk about this again because they're so important. By putting the legal framework into play, once this gets passed and once it gets agreed on, once it gets enforced, we become active ocean conservation managers. As nations, as international nations, this is what we do. As a world, as a planet, we can actually protect the part of the planet that covers 70% of it, over 70% of it, and I think that's important.

2:56 But the problem is, is those legislations, sometimes they don't go anywhere or they get kiboshed because a certain party or a certain individual does not like the environment. Hint, hint, Trump, Trump. And so it gets all discombobulated, and regulations get rolled back and stuff. You have to put it together, you have to put it in play, you have to pass it in law, but you also have to enforce it. You have to make sure that you continue to put that into play. And once you do that, you get to see some huge successes, and we're gonna talk about some of those huge successes. For Canada, for my country, we were at less than 1% protection. We talked about this earlier this week. Less than 1% protected of our oceans within the longest coastline of the world, within the exclusive economic zone of 200 nautical miles. We have actually increased it from less than 1% in 2016 to over 15%, and there's a new proposal we talked about yesterday where they're gonna increase it even more by designating more marine protected areas, putting $3.8 billion Canadian into the pot to put together a number of different protected areas at sea and on land and in fresh water.

3:54 Huge. Huge things. But we couldn't put that into place until we had the actual regulations, which were installed in 1997, where we had the Oceans Act, which allowed the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the federal government, to put in marine protected areas. And even then, when they were putting in, there was allowed to be a certain extractive activities that could happen. And then eventually they stopped that. And now it's like fully protected once you're in there. I think they allow scientific research and things like that. But no oil and gas, no mining, no fisheries, nothing like that. So it's wonderful when it works because now we have the legislative tool to put together so that if we needed to ramp up our protected area space or the things that are protected, we did that. We could do that, and we did it from less than 1% to over 15% to hopefully 30% by the time we get to 2030.

4:40 That's in like three and a half years. But we can do it because there are a number of processes that are going on because of that legislation that was enacted in 1997. It took us a while to get it going, but we're actually doing it. So we have to have patience, obviously we want to do it more and faster, but we have to have patience and we want to do that. And who's to say that we can't do more than 30%, depending on what we're looking at protecting. I think that's an important aspect that we don't see all the time. Now let's go back down to our neighbors down south, my neighbors down south in the US. The US has had some great Fisheries Act type thing. We have the Fisheries Act that is part of the Oceans Act, and where we protect habitat. But like the Magnuson-Stevens Act was a huge thing that were put in by Republicans in the '70s. We also had the Marine Mammal Protection Act that was also put in by the Republicans in the '70s.

5:23 We had the Endangered Species Act, and we had up here in Canada, we had the Species At Risk Act. All those that were put in back then, which is an important part because they protect species. And if you go back and you look at the species that they protect, they have the legislative tool that triggers certain processes that actually forces the government to ensure that those species, those habitats are protected. So let's look at something like the manatee in the US that occurs in Florida. They were down to like less than 600 individuals in the 1970s. They got put on the Endangered Species Act, the Federal Endangered Species Act, and they went up to 6,000 because that act triggers a lot of different tools and a lot of different processes where there has to be recovery plans, there has to be extra monitoring that's done.

6:05 There has to be like a habitat assessment that's done to make sure that these manatees are being able to eat the seagrasses that they have, making sure they're not getting chopped by the propellers in the intercoastal, I guess highway or intercoastal waters in Florida, because that's where they live and there's a lot of boats that go up and down. So there's speed limitations that were put in. There was habitat restorations that are put in. Although they've been taken off and their population has gone down, which they shouldn't have ever been taken off because we knew that this was going to be a problem because of habitat, we know that it can be put back on when the right government's in place and they can recover again. We also have the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which is like a fisheries act, which brought back like the sardines and anchovies on the West Coast and a lot of other fish on the East Coast like the menhaden because it triggered certain processes like stock assessments to manage and set quotas and set limitations on how many fish are being taken every year and every season.

6:54 These acts not only allowed that to bring back, but because there were more anchovies uh, and herring maybe. All these forage fish that were allowed to come back, we could start to see the sea lions come back. And because the sea lions came back, we started to see an increase in the great white shark population. Because of the Endangered Species Act, 'cause of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, all these took place because, seals are marine mammals, so that helped them because they weren't allowed to be hunted or harassed or anything like that. Great white sharks were put on the endangered species list. They are starting to bloom in population on both the West Coast and the East Coast, and they're a phenomenal species. They're just wonderful. But they put the policy in place to be able to get to that point where we can say, "This is a conservation success." And people followed it, and governments followed it, and fisheries communities followed it.

7:38 And all these people that had all their say in this time, and what we've learned over the years, have turned into conservation success stories. That's a really important part. And there are always, like, conflicts out on the ocean. There's always people who may not be happy that there are that many sea lions or that many great white sharks or, because of climate change, you start to see fisheries slip and stuff like that. But that doesn't matter because we have these monitoring systems in place because of the policies that are in place, and you can see if populations go down. You can find out why those populations are going down. Sometimes you can do something about it. Maybe you can't do something about it. But we can understand the ocean better because we have these tools in our conservation tool belt that we can use to help protect them.

8:19 And that's really, like… I don't know if I need to say anything more. When we start to use them and we start to follow them, we can actually do some really good for the ocean. That's a really important part. But we can't have politicians making decisions to go against them. The Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans here in Canada, DFO, made a decision last year to open up offshore fishing of cod to commercial industries. Some people didn't like that. The environmental organizations didn't like that. I had Oceana on to talk about that. The science didn't follow that. This was a decision made by somebody who's not fisheries-based, who's not science-based, is not a scientist, and they're supposed to follow the science. And the science said, "No, let's not do it," but the politics overcame that.

9:00 And it was the burden that was taken on by the minister, but the minister, to be honest, made the wrong decision. We've had a huge history with cod. It built our fishing fleet from the inception of Canada, even before that. But we also destroyed it and then we had to put a moratorium in 1992. To destroy it again as it's starting to recover doesn't make sense. So having these politicians make these types of decisions is really bad for the environment, even if you have the tools to make the right decisions. We may not agree with all the decisions that are made, and that's fine. I get that. But, like, you gotta follow the science. You gotta follow what people are saying, and you can't just dip into pressure because somebody's saying, "Hey, I need this money," or, "I wanna be greedy," and things like that. We can't do that.

9:40 We're seeing it in the South happen in the United States, and it's just… You know, when, when politicians don't have a connection to the environment and only see the environment as a resource, as a natural resource, and as a money-making machine, and not as part of the planet that we live on and we need to treat properly. I'm not saying we can't take advantage of some of the natural resources, but not to a point where it's gonna degrade the planet further. We need to make decisions with the planet in mind. 'Cause that's with us, our communities in mind. And some politicians just don't get it. They just don't get it. How they get back in power? I'm not a political analyst, so I don't have a clue. But, we need to stand up to these types of politicians, and we need to vote with the environment in mind, and the economy in mind, 'cause we can do both. There's lots of things that we can do. And some of you may agree with me, some of you may not, but I do feel that we can grow the economy and the environment, or sometimes not necessarily grow the economy, but we can protect our environment and still have good, quality lives.

10:30 That's it for today's episode. I wanted to just talk to you about some of the non-sexy things that we see in ocean conservation but are very effective. And so I wanted to talk about that. I would love to hear your opinion. You can join the community on Patreon. It Go to speakupforblue.com/patreon. You can also get access to just our interviews that we do every week. We didn't do one this week, but you can get access to it. I'll put this episode up on this week. Some people don't like the solo episodes during the week because it bogs up their newsfeed. So we'll put that on Patreon as one, and I'll try and put just the solo episodes on Patreon too if I can do two feeds. But if you want all of them, obviously, just follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app. I like using Apple Podcasts. Sometimes I like using Spotify. Sometimes I like using YouTube. If you're on all three, follow us on all three.

11:11 Subscribe, whatever that might be. Whatever's best for you and how you like to do that. But I wanna thank you for being a supporter. I wanna thank you for listening. This is such an important part of my day to be able to talk to you, and I really do appreciate it being a important part for you listening. So thank you so much. I'm very grateful for what you guys have been able to do and allow me to do, continue to do, to be able to speak about the oceans on these airwaves in this podcasting space. And I just appreciate you. That's really what it is. So this is the end of Oceans Week, our episodes. We hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know what you think. You can let me know in any kind of socials. They're all in the show notes as well as the Patreon link. And I wanna 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.

11:52 Have a great day and a great weekend. We'll talk to you on Monday, and happy conservation.