We have 70% microplastics in our body. At one of these negotiation events, we handed out a credit a cookie like a credit card, and we said, have you had your weekly dose of microplastics? Because there was a statistic that came out that we’re ingesting the equivalent of a credit card’s worth of microplastics.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Mattern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program today, Antoinette Vermilye. She is the cofounder of the Gallifrey Foundation. She is into marine conservation, a champion of women in environmental leadership, as well as helping, you know, reduce the use of plastics and overfishing and many other things then. So welcome welcome to the program, Antoinette.

Thanks. Thanks so much, Matt.

There’s so many different topics to cover in the environmental space. And one of the ones that I I missed that I I think I read you were involved in was MyOcean Mining, which I know has kind of reared its head recently in the Trump administration wanting to greenlight ocean seabed mining for American companies, which actually, it’s a Canadian company.

Ah, it’s a Canadian company.

It’s an interesting story. So just to give your listeners an an overview, when about fifty years ago, when we were talking about the laws of the sea, the idea was and I think many people have this impression that at the bottom of the ocean, it’s deep and dark and nothing can thrive. And there’s cold, intense pressure, you know, everything that you would we imagined, and that was the basis on which the law that governs the ocean was devised. In the seventies, eighties, nineties, we actually got down further and further in the ocean and discovered quite the opposite, that it’s teeming with life.

And I don’t know if any of you have seen the hydrothermal vents with these spouts and toxic chemicals streaming out of 400 degrees centigrade filled with white snow crabs and all sorts of creatures, which technically you would have thought would not be able to survive. And that’s one we’re learning so much about how life can thrive on this planet.

And along the way, we’ve also discovered that as you we’ve been picking things up and doing research on them, we’ve discovered that there were some metals that could have been of interest, particularly the the new vernacular has been for the green transition because these are rare earth minerals. And so what has happened is over the last ten years, particularly, up until now, and in fact, to today, no permit has been issued by the international authority, the International Seabed Authority, to actually exploit mining.

Yeah. It is a tragedy if we were to do it because we we certainly can do surface mining of these minerals and still get them. And if we do need in fact, do need them, which arguably we do, yeah, there are certainly ways to get them that are less harmful to the environment, and we shouldn’t go, uh, deep sea mining.

You know, it’s it’s it is a bizarre situation that The US hasn’t ratified this treaty and has kind of played as an outlier in this process for decades, really. It’s it’s really an unusual scenario, and, of course, the Trump administration’s, you know, throwing yet another curveball into the scenario.

I think in the end, as we’ve said, the actual company is a Canadian company. The ship is based in The Netherlands. The financial headquarters are in Switzerland. The flagship is Malta. How those countries and and going to actually sanction breaking international laws and insurance and risk.

So I actually tend to think that this may be a storm in a teacup. Of course, we have to take it seriously because if you’re gonna bulldoze through all of that, then there are far greater implications about international relations, and that could have long term consequences in other areas. And the other point I would just like to say is that the actual metals that they’re looking to get are in these potato sized nodules that you find lying at the bottom of the ocean floor.

So you’re gonna go down if you do do this, and this has been one of the issues of the the scientists and the and particularly those working and what they’re discovering with biodiversity. These things take 5,000,000 to accrete because it’s basically sediment around tooth, a bone, a tiny chip that has slowly accreted with sediment over this amount of time. And we’re going to go down, pick it up, probably churn up the seabed, and they that does not return because it’s so deep. So that will leave a a long lasting scar.

But more importantly, we’re going to use it for something that maybe be an electric vehicle or something like that that will last how long? Five, ten years? Imagine five million years to use something for a five to ten year life. I just is that stewardship of our planet, of our resources?

Absolutely not. And, you know, I I loved how you kinda broke it down as to the all the different players in this, whether it’s Malta and Switzerland and The Netherlands, and and all of those are places in which the bad decision making could stop and places where countries and citizens can intervene and say, hey. Is this what we want our governments to be supporting, our companies to be supporting?

The answer is absolutely not, and and hopefully, the pressure can be put to bear to stop it. And as you said, hopefully, it’s a tempest in a teapot, and and we move on to the next a million challenges that we have. You know, let’s take us back to the beginning, Antoinette, as to what what started your journey towards environmentalism in the beginning.

Okay. So as a kid, I was brought up in West Africa. Used to go to the beach there and see the fisher people go out in these little canoes breaking through very strong waves. I mean, these are waves that are surfing waves. I mean, they’re really powerful, and they go through and they come back with their catch. And as a young child who is not conditioned to life and death, death really upset me. So seeing fish dying was an incredibly powerful thing for me.

So I I used to I appreciate it now in hindsight and understood that that was a lifestyle, but I’ve always felt very strongly about how do you protect our environment and how do you protect creatures or the environment that cannot defend itself. That’s that I have felt is a very strong role. Why the ocean? Because it covers 70% of the planet. We are made of 70% water. Ocean has about 70% microplastics, so do we.

So we’ve got a lot of similarities at the moment. And so my journey actually began in seriousness about twelve years ago when we said, okay. We’re gonna get involved in this. And so I just need to say my background, I’m not a marine scientist. I’m you know, I I basically was like many people in the street. You went out. You did your job. You had you probably watched a few documentaries, read some books, and went, oh, yeah. That’s terrible. What can I do? And that was my starting point. What can I do?

So the difference is I packed up all my risk and fear of being humiliated or rebutted or being told you’re stupid, and I started asking questions. And so it ended up with my finding, actually, coincidentally, to where I live now, which is in Switzerland, right down the road is an organization called the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, IUCN. And little beknownst to me, and I’m sure to many listeners, this is the the kind of the mothership that spawned WWF.

So we all know WWF, but very few people know IUCN, which has a very it’s a more it works with policymakers, governments, scientists, and you have access to thousands of scientists. So I was in a very fortunate position because we started working with them to be able to ask scientists, how is this? Why is it like a child? You know? Why? Why? And I started to learn. And it’s it is a journey, and I always say this to everyone. When we go out and start doing things in in our life, you start off as a junior.

You’re learning along the way. But the difference is I came from a creative background and a business background. That means that my way of thinking was slightly different to other people. So you’d sit there and go, well, why haven’t we tried this? And they may have come back and said, well, we did it because blah blah blah. Fine. Or they may have said, well, actually, we haven’t tried that because of this. And then we can say, well, we’re willing to take the risk and push to try that approach.

And so it started off first of all, my first task was plastics. So at the time, David Attenborough had come out with Blue Planet. There was a famous scene of a whale holding its dead baby, which they believed had the the toxins in her milk had sort of affected that baby, and it had died. And that was the zeitgeist for plastics in the environment. So we started working with them to help develop their plastics.

Uh, I mean, they were doing a lot, but we were trying to take it steps further. And that was when I learned about social justice, social injustice of plastics. So it suddenly was no longer just a matter of plastics are bad for the environment in the ocean, plastics are bad for us and our health. And plastics, our waste plastic, is being exported to the global South countries because we can’t be bothered to deal with them.

So that also made a change. So suddenly, I often talk about carbon tunnel vision. We can look at something and say, we’re only looking at everything for, you know, carbon reduction. Okay? But we’re not thinking about the other externalities. And I think it’s really important. It was the biggest lesson I learned. Always look wider. What are the other impacts? And then knowing that, okay, how upstream can we go to solve that problem?

Because it’s no good. And the the perfect analogy is if you’re an operating theater and your artery is bleeding, you don’t want your surgeon mopping up the floor. You actually want to deal with the problem where it really matters. And so that’s really how our work is. Where is that artery? How can we get the right surgeons to do the right things to either slow it down, mitigate it, stop it?

I appreciate what you’re saying about being creative, and I think creativity has such a large role in this movement. And we don’t all have to be scientists to help the process forward because scientists do think a certain way, and other people with disciplines and different mindsets think a different way. And and it can be super valuable to have the melding of those, you know, different approaches working kind of in concert. And so I appreciate what you’re doing on that front. So tell us kind of what then led to your your next steps as far as starting the Gallifrey Foundation.

Okay. So both my husband and I come from a these different backgrounds. And I think at the end, what we’re looking at is how can we’re tiny. You know? We’re not an IUCN or a WWF. We’re very, very small. It’s basically my husband and I and a few part time people.

Well, I know as you were talking, I was thinking of somebody I’ve had on the show a few times, senator Ben Allen, who’s the California state senator who helped push this plastics legislation in California to to reduce the amount of plastics that are used out here.

And, you know, it was kind of a landmark thing. Now I see the plastics industry is crying that it’s it’s gonna take longer, and they want another year to to implement these changes. I was curious as to whether or not that legislation is on the radar back in in Europe and and what types of legislation you’re seeing in Europe to reduce the use of plastics?

In Europe, we have the single use plastics directive. That was probably one of the fastest legislations that was passed. I think it was 2017 or 2019 that it actually went into EU regulations, and then countries had two years to ratify it. And, basically, saying ratify means the country has to say, this is how I’m going to interpret that law into my national laws.

And the reason why that worked is governments and everyone were not they they hadn’t the plastics industry hadn’t managed to mobilize itself enough to come to that, so it slipped in. And that’s about 10 articles. You know? It’s plastic forks. It’s balloon sticks. It’s cutlery. It’s plastic bags. You know? So you have quite a lot of different things, which is great.

And we actually, as civil society and campaigners, have a tracker of who’s doing the best at actually implementing those laws. So that’s where the campaign start start part will be the bleating about who’s good, who’s bad, name and shame, because that keeps the pressure on. So in that sense, that’s how that has worked. We are now I don’t know if you know that there’s a big treaty being negotiated, the global plastics treaty, which will lead to the COP. A COP is conference of the party.

So we know of the climate COP. I think that’s quite well known. But then you have a biodiversity COP, and then we’ll end up with a plastics COP. That will be the final outcome. And that’s where all nations will come together, and they will agree the framework under which all negotiations regarding plastic global plastic, uh, regulations will take place. We’re into round five. It was meant to terminate last year, but we had a few stubborn members, wonder who.

And so now we’re in 5.2. So the point is that it’s like everything. We’re now trying to find different ways to highlight to member states who will be the ones making the decisions why they should go for a high ambitious treaty. And an ambitious treaty would mean, let’s try and reduce the amount of unnecessary plastic production, because all plastic production, 40% of it is single use plastics. So or packaging. So which is crazy. It is absolutely crazy.

When we think and so this is the other part that maybe your listeners don’t know. But if you and I I mentioned earlier that we have 70% microplastics in our body. At one of these negotiation events, we handed out a credit, a cookie like a credit card. And we said, have you had your weekly dose of microplastics? Because there was a statistic that came out that we’re ingesting the equivalent of a credit card’s worth of microplastics. And it went down quite well because people some people knew and they laughed about it, and other people were actually, you know, fascinated by this. So it created a debate. It started creating questions, linking this to health.

So plastics, in order to make them soft, hard, or squishy, require certain chemicals and plasticizers. And the key thing here, which I think people should be aware of, is that those chemicals actually have a unfortunate thing. They mimic our hormones. And our hormone delivery system is not like the dose makes the poison, I e, the more you’re exposed to. It’s the constant microdosing, the constant touching, ingesting, inhaling.

All of that gets into our body, and that starts to impact us. And it’s now being linked with a number of neurodegenerative diseases and cancers, infertility. And so all of these are actually quite real. So what are we trying to do? We’re trying to alert member states that there is a health impact of plastics. So surely, we’d want to get rid of those chemicals. And in fact, funnily enough, with the Trump administration, that would be something I would expect them to be pushing straightforward on because they want a healthy population and removing all these terrible chemicals.

Then we also have the impact the economic impact. If if we have fertility problems, what’s gonna go down the line? So this is where where we play different angles and try and find a narrative or a a policy or a fact that will help a member state go back to their country and go, guys, girls, we need to look at this seriously because this will have an impact on our future. That’s kind of the way we work.

We have to take our wins where we can get them, and and we’re not going to completely phase out plastics tomorrow. But looking at a at a downward trajectory of the use of them in their most harmful forms.

I think that would be the ideal. Obviously, we want to and, again, it’s back to your the the artery. Surely, we want to get rid of everything that is unnecessary. And the sad part is that there are so many alternatives, which would be fantastic, but the problem is they’re not subsidized to the tune of 17,000,000,000,000 as the fossil fuel industry is. So we’ve got a little bit of a market problem there. But, you know, there are ways.

And also, I think there’s a willingness. We just did a survey in Switzerland, and it was basically asking people to count their plastic for a week and then to report on it. We compiled all the statistics, and at the end, we said, you know, do you think does this do you feel that plastics have any impact on your health? Are you worried about that? And we got ninety three percent of people saying yes. That’s a powerful, powerful statistic to go back to parliament.

I think that, certainly, boycotting has a place in in our society. It’s not the sole tool that, uh, is going to get industry to change, but it is a tool. And it’s a tool of conscious companies to say, hey. We’re going to not use these if we’re in a a fast food chain or we’re in something else. And then a consumer can feel, hey. I prefer to use this go to this company that is sourcing more responsibly and ethically.

I agree with you, but my model is always if I’m a single mother with two children holding a full time job. The crux point is convenience. And so we have to try whatever our solutions are to make it convenient for whatever that substitute or different system, delivery system, might be. And that is where it was interesting. I actually did a podcast, and it was it was quite heartwarming. A woman had said, I took my seven year old son to the supermarket, and I said, this time, we’re going to try and avoid anything in plastic. Let’s have a game. And she said he took to it immediately. He knew what this was all about.

And he was, you know, mom, look at this. This is not in plastic. Let’s should we try that? How about this? And he really enjoyed it. And she said, I’ve never had such fun with my son shopping for food because he was looking for new things. So it became a game. And I think in the end, it’s that kind of how do we switch the perspective from being something that is a burden, a pain, into something that can be joyous and fun and still be good.

Well, tell us a little bit. Let’s switch gears a bit as far as your championing of women in the environmental leadership space, and what has that looked like?

Well, that started off in so I’m I am firmly in the ocean space. Okay? That was where I started. It’s where my heart is. But how did so I became the cofounder of group, a campaign group called She Changes Climate. And that came about one day when COP twenty six, that’s the climate conference, was taking place in Glasgow in The UK, and Boris Johnson was the prime minister. And in his inimitable wisdom, he decided to select the high level team, all men.

So he didn’t even think about this. He just went, oh, you know, you, you, you, you, my friends, whatever. And it was like and that was that moment, and we all have an epiphany moment, when I went, I thought that this problem had been solved. I thought that this was no longer an issue. How wrong am I?

So I’m with a group of a number of women. Obviously, we sort of said, hell, this is crazy or whatever. And I then I literally, the next morning, I said, look. I don’t give a damn what happens at COP, but what happens at COP affects my work. And if I don’t do something if we don’t do something about this, then this is gonna carry on, and we have to do something. So, again, we mapped. We sort of started to see who was out there, but we have my cofounder was based in The UK. And between us, we literally said, okay.

We’re gonna get we’re gonna create a statement. We’re gonna get women to sign this high level women. We had a Nobel Prize winner. We had Laurence Tubiana, who is, uh, one of the architects of the Paris climate agreements. We had Christiana Figueres. We had Emma Watson, Emma Thompson. We had, you know, we had all sorts of people signing it, and it was great. But at the same time, we said we spoke with Arlok Sharma, who was the COP twenty six president, and said, we really need you to make a change or else we’re gonna publish this letter.

I didn’t realize that Britain is a little bit they were very reactive to that threat. And so what happened was by the end by the time COP six came around, three women were in the high level team, but the most important one was the deputy chief negotiator for The UK. And that was really important. Are are we still gripe? We said it should have been co. Why why does she have to be deputy? Why can’t she be co negotiator?

But, anyway, it’s suddenly you suddenly start realizing and and now I’m gonna just say the other the reality of a journey. So we thought, yay. We’ve done something. We’re you know, we’re doing good. And suddenly, I was targeted because guess what? I’m a white, middle aged, privileged woman. Where’s my lived experience of what true climate change is? And that was a really humbling experience, but it was also really educational.

And it was like, I am not the person to be doing this. This is not my story. So then we made a pivot, and we started saying, this is we’ve got privilege to be able to enable the the conduit, the the passages, but it’s our job to find women on the front line who are actually experiencing the real the real stories and to get their voices. And it’s not just a seat at the table.

It’s their voice at the table. So now we’ve switched more to becoming a a conduit for those groups, creating networks within smaller areas. And I think I just want to go back to another bigger picture. Why? Why is this important? Why do we need women? Okay. You know? And, of course, I hear that a lot. But I think at the end

Seems seems rather obvious to me, but, uh, go on.

We talk about biodiversity. What about biodiversity of thought and different perspectives? And women do bring different perspectives. I’m not saying everyone. We’re not all not all men are thinking the same. Not all women are thinking the same. But don’t we need I mean, what did Einstein say? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So it’s not just it’s not just women.

It’s youth. It’s indigenous. It’s it’s it’s basically creating that smorgasbord of different thoughts, which may be, and I will be honest, it can be a lot more tempestuous at the discussion level. But then you’ve got all those perspectives in at the same time, and they do bring a more robust, more valuable output than the same vanilla thinking in and it’s garbage in, garbage out data. And we really need to change that. So I actually think it’s a loss of value. We’re not actually you know, you’ve got half the planet, and you’re not actually using that value to to good effect.

Well, I I totally agree with, you know, empowering women at at all levels, and I feel like that is one of the reasons why we have the set of problems that we have across the globe. I mean, whether it’s, uh, the wars that we have to the environmental destruction that I think that if we had more women leaders and more women at the table, a lot of these issues would be looked at differently, solved differently because of of the perspectives that women bring to the table. So I believe that that is the revolution of the twenty first century is that, you know, empowerment of women and at at all levels.

So going back to the example I said of trying to synchronize different inputs when, you know, campaigners and policy makers or whatever, it’s the same principle. The more people that you can bring in together and get their the more you’re going to ground truth where the potential problems are down the line, the more likely you are to end up with something that is actually workable because you’ve had everyone who feels they are part of this, they have ownership, and that there’s that lack.

And it’s kind of as I my grandmother used to say, common sense is not common. I would agree with her. And there are so many people who are so passionate. And my job I consider my job is to take what they do and see how we can either connect them with other groups to really amplify the impact of their work. And some of that might be just listening and finding out what they’re doing, what are their challenges. I’ll I’ll give you an example.

Right now, we’re bringing together people from different nations who work in trying to protect sharks. I don’t know if you know, sharks are killed. A hundred million sharks are killed each year. And despite all these laws and policies that are meant to protect them, that number has not changed since I started. It’s got worse. So what what’s going wrong here? So the thing is, let’s get all the groups together, find out what are they doing that works, what are they doing that doesn’t work, what would they like to see done, and then we’re gonna map that out, and then we’re gonna take it to the next stage and bring in all the big policy makers, different laws. It might be fisheries.

It might be the trade in convention and trade in international in international trade in endangered species. It may be different things and find out what happens when what’s going wrong? What where are the holes? Because this is not working, and what would need to be done. So that’s kind of the thing that that we like to do, but it’s based on their work, and they need that credit.

So I just all I want to do at the moment is just understand more, again, being the the person who knows nothing. And then, you know, like that, you’re gonna ask the questions. Why? Why doesn’t this work? Why doesn’t that? That that’s how I’ve well, you know, we wing it. We take high risk because sometimes things can go wrong, but sometimes things go right.

Well, thank you for all the work that you’re doing, and, uh, tell the audience a little bit about things that they could do that you think would would make a difference or, you know, words of encouragement, thoughts as to where they can go to find you and and find the work that you’re doing and support the work that you’re doing, which is truly inspiring to me.

Thank you. Well, I suppose the the first thing I would say to anyone is think about you have power. Everyone has agency. You can either choose what you choose to eat and maybe eat a lot less fish, if you can, because that is going to reduce pressure on overfishing. Your wallet, it’s what you choose to buy, if you can again. And no one ex is expecting this to happen in a day, but it starts with one step, your voice. I actually make a point of signing petitions every day. And I sit there and I think, oh, can we go again?

But you’d be surprised when you have a large number that gets to a policymaker and they can go back and say, oh my god. A hundred thousand people in this, you know, area have said this. That adds up. Don’t ever diminish your power, your power to talk about something. I think at the end of the day, the other thing is that we all have to understand that we are on a journey. There is a lot going on in the planet right now to cause us grief. So find your community. Find people with whom you can talk.

Your guest list is community. They’re incredible. Those are people you you could oh, I could talk to Bill. Oh, I could talk to captain Paul. I you know, those are things that matter. So reach out to your friends who share the same thoughts as you and start talking about it. Create a WhatsApp group or a signal group or whatever. I don’t know what to use these days. But, basically, just that, I think, is your first thing. I think for actual to get involved in campaigning, fair enough.

There’s we all know about the Sea Shepherd’s, Captain Paul Watson Foundation. We’ve got all of these different groups that are not too difficult to research. So, again, I’m not gonna point you to one direction or another. But I think at the end of the day, it’s up to us to educate ourselves, and that I think is the most important thing. I always ask people, what was the day that made you stop using a plastic bottle?

Or what was the day that made you stop eating fish? What was that pivotal moment that you went, I’m changing? I I love that. I think that’s the most exciting thing.

Well, I think that’s well said, and we all can make change every single day, and we can make better choices, andb n we can raise our voices and and be, uh, contributing to the to the solution rather than being part of the prop.

And and that is a process. It doesn’t happen in one day or one week or one year, but it’s something that we can all be kind of working together. And as you said, as a community, it it certainly makes it easier when we’re working in concert. It makes it more fun. And so thank you, Antoinette, for being on the program. It’s been delightful having you, and, you know, please give a shout out to your organization where people can find you and and work together with you.

Thank you. So it’s Gallifrey Foundation. And if people forget what that is, that is the Science TV Doctor Who. It’s his home planet, Gallifrey. So Gallifrey.foundation, and you’ll find us there.

Okay. Fantastic. Well, thanks again.

Lovely. Thank you very much for having me. I feel very honored.

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