How To Protect The Ocean

Every time you run a load of laundry, your washing machine sheds plastic. Not metaphorically: synthetic clothing made from polyester, nylon, and rayon releases microfibers with every wash, and depending on the study, a single load can shed anywhere from a few hundred thousand to millions of them. Most of us have never thought about it, because unlike a plastic bag on the beach, you can't see it ha...

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, directed by Rory Fielding, and one of its central voices is Mike Goldberg, co-founder of the Florida Keys coral restoration nonprofit I.CARE and owner of Key Dives in Islamorada. Andrew sits down with Mike for the full, unedited version of the...

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 in the water. I.CARE checks on all of it. Every single coral outplant gets monitored at one week, one month, 90 days, then one, two, and three years, with no substitute and nothing left unaccounted for. That rule was built in by co-founders M...

Coral nurseries need constant maintenance, and that maintenance is expensive and relentless. When Andrew talked to Mike Goldberg, co-founder of I.CARE, his answer wasn't to hire more staff. It was to let paying customers do it for the fun of it. Mike owns a dive shop in the Florida Keys, so the paying customers are scuba divers, and over the years he's built a funding model so small that nobody ha...

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 coral bleaching event in 2008, and a few years later, Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, a still-unexplained outbreak that's killed coral tissue outright across more than 20 of Florida's roughly 45 stony coral species since 2014. At one point...

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 area, across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, and NOAA had to add three brand-new alert levels to its Coral Reef Watch scale because the existing one had no category for what was happening. In this episode, Andrew breaks down exactly w...

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 "oftentimes very boring hotel ballrooms around the world," where countries hash out how the ocean actually gets managed. She's the Vice President of Policy and Outreach at the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), and before th...

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 should trust what is on the label. In this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast, host Andrew Lewin breaks down how that system actually works, and why the blue check mark on your seafood means something real. Andrew starts with the...

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, "the ship has reached the shore." That moment, in March 2023, closed out a negotiation that had already failed once in public. It became binding international law this year, and the fight over what it actually protects is happening right now....

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 coast of Hawaii has been dated at 4,270 years old, making it one of the oldest living skeleton-building organisms known to science. A single pass of a bottom trawl net can wipe out that kind of habitat in seconds, and it's a fight that's st...

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 years later she is in the room for some of the most consequential ocean policy agreements ever negotiated. This episode traces that career from the beginning, and it starts with a realization that shapes everything that follows: sea turtles...

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 Conservation Coalition, for an in-depth look at what's actually happening on the seafloor and in the negotiating rooms deciding its fate. Matthew spent years as a commercial fisherman, including five years as a deep sea trawlerman off the Cent...

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 international seabed between Hawaii and Mexico. In that profile, Barron called the CCZ "the most desert-like place on the planet," arguing that mining the deep sea does less environmental harm than mining a rainforest because there's suppose...

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 hypothetical. It happened, with the same industry, some of the same licenses, and the same person at the center of it: Gerard Barron, now CEO of The Metals Company (TMC), one of the most prominent and best-funded companies pushing to start com...

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 biologically. Topographic upwelling pulls cold, nutrient-rich water up their slopes, fueling plankton blooms that draw fish, sharks, seabirds, and marine mammals, while their rocky surfaces give slow-growing corals and sponges a rare hard place to...

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 for Spanish and king mackerel in Florida. Bottom trawling off central California, New England, and Florida for sole, redfish, hake, sablefish, shrimp, and other groundfish. Hook-and-lining for salmon and albacore tuna in Oregon and California....

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 executive producer of the podcast Blue Collar White Coat , about why she built an entire show around the people science coverage usually skips. Amy spent 15 years in science communications, starting at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, and no...

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 2,000-episode milestone and the new Pisces Oceans licensing agreement, Andrew explains why he's diving back into YouTube after stepping away last spring, including the launch of a brand new daily show, Ocean Decoded Live. Andrew walks throu...

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 accidental start in 2010 to a name change driven by search engine optimization, to over 3 million downloads across 11 years, this episode traces the full arc of the podcast's history. Andrew also opens up about how podcasting reshaped his career...

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 conservation should be doing it too. He walks through what makes long-form audio and video different from the short clips discussed in yesterday's episode: the ability to sit with complex topics, tell a full story, and reach an audience that's multita...

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 every major content format. Today's episode digs into short-form video: TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, and what it actually takes to make original content work when you're used to talking for an hour, not ninety seconds. Andrew i...

Electric boating is having its Tesla moment, and few people understand that shift better than Alexandre Mongeon, CEO and co-founder of Vision Marine Technologies. Andrew sits down with Alexandre to trace his path from importing speed boats in Montreal to building the electric outboard systems now powering boats across North America. Along the way, Alexandre shares how a chance meeting with Olympic...

Not every ocean conservation win comes from a nonprofit or a government program. In this episode, Andrew breaks down three for-profit companies that are cleaning up the ocean, funding wildlife research, and paying living wages to the people doing the work. These businesses show that conservation and profit are not opposing goals. They can be the same goal. Andrew covers 4Ocean, whose full-time cap...

4ocean has removed more than 50 million pounds of plastic and trash from the world's oceans, rivers, and coastlines. That milestone did not come from a government program or a traditional nonprofit. It came from a for-profit business built around a single idea: every bracelet sold funds the removal of a pound of ocean trash. In this episode, Andrew breaks down how 4ocean went from one viral video...

The boat rental market is bigger than most people realize, and it's growing fast. In this episode, Andrew shares a personal story about his dad, boats, and why he's spent the last few months considering buying one, before walking through the data that changed his mind about ownership altogether. Andrew breaks down the numbers behind the boat sharing economy: a market valued between nineteen and tw...