This pre recorded show furnished by Matthew Matern. All right welcome, Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern on KABC. This is Tagore, I’ll be sitting in for Matt, today we have a great show, we have rod Fujita of the Environmental Defense Fund. Welcome to the show, Rod. Great to have you here.

Hey, thanks, Tagore. Nice to be here.

Now, Rod, you are the Director of Research and Development for the oceans program at the Environmental Defense Fund. Can you tell our listeners about the fund and your role there?

Sure, the Environmental Defense Fund is a big international nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the environment, and to improving the welfare of people all over the place. We use law, science and economics to develop some durable solutions to these pretty gnarly issues. And we have four big initiatives, one on climate change mitigation, while on health, while restoring ecosystems and the oceans program, which I co founded about 30 years ago, and is now about 100 people.

So my job now is to provide scientific and technical support to all of these talented advocates for the ocean, who are deployed in a lab and geographies around the world, trying to make ocean biodiversity better, and to provide better jobs and better food security for millions of people.

Amazing. And you’re a scientist by training. Is that correct?

Yeah, I trained as a marine ecologist. That’s right.

Before we jump in, you just tell us a little bit about your background and how you went, you know from being a PhD program or working for the Environmental Defense Fund.

Sure, I actually started a little later than that when I was in college, I thought he called me was the key to saving the world. You know, I came of age in the 70s. And birthday was in the air as a lot of buzz. And so I mean, a lot of my friends got excited about that. And so I studied ecology, I got a fellowship after college, we went to Japan and studied how to grow marine organisms, because I thought that would also be a good way to save the planet, feed millions people.

And after that fellowship, I learned a lot, but one of the major lessons I learned was how ignorant I was and how my hands so I decided to go to graduate school, get the PhD, you know, be a little more patient grow up a little bit. And after so I was fascinated when I was in Japan it how fast seaweeds could grow. It’s just remarkable. And then I found out all the amazing things that you can do with seaweed, because in Japan, it’s huge, right?

It’s not so much here in America, but in Japan and throughout Asia. Seaweed is huge. So I came back for excitement about learning more about seaweed. And so I dedicated my PhD research was Hall and trying to understand how seaweeds work and you know, where they need to grow? Well, what kind of factors control their growth and distribution. And then the energy crisis. Yeah, you’re too young to remember this.

But I’m older than I look. Okay. All right. ‘90-‘78. Maybe you’re at ‘78-‘79. The energy crisis here and oil prices skyrocketed because the, you know, OPEC put an embargo on oil. And so everybody was scurrying around trying to find new ways to produce energy, right. And so we could avoid those long gas lines and wearing our sweaters and turning our thermostats down and everything. So the government was giving out huge wads of money to scientists to try to figure this problem out. And my lab got some of that to see whether we could grow seaweeds to make biofuel.

And we had a thought a better idea. We pushed back and said, hey, you know, we can do that. But we can also use wastewater as a as an input to this right. So we could go see Sure. We can also clean up the wastewater in the process. So you’re kind of a twofer. And then we thought, wow, wait a minute, we can also grow shellfish in here and produce a food stream right. And we can use a seaweed to do the polishing step at the end.

So we at the end of this project, we had created this sort of ecosystem based waste recycling, fuel producing food producing little machine and it kind of worked beyond our wildest expectations. only did all those things that we said it would. It produced food and produced seaweed with zero pollution and zero inputs, because all it was wastewater, and sunlight. So I got really excited about that I decided I didn’t want to really be a pure scientist anymore.

I wanted to do stuff like that you can solve problems using science. But after I finished my PhD, the job Mark was terrible. All that funding dried up because the price of oil dropped again. And everybody lost interest in series and biofuel. It was amazingly fast collapse of interest. And I could not find a good job.

So I wandered around being a postdoc, and had a lot of fun studying coral reefs in Florida and studying rocky intertidal systems in Oregon. But then, I saw this ad for a scientist and Environmental Defense Fund to work on climate change. And I thought, wow, this is a place where I can actually fulfill my lifelong dream of doing something to help the planet. So I sign up with bound and haven’t looked back since.

Oh, I think that’s a good that’s an amazing story and a good point. Just take a break. Well you’re listening to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern, KABC, we’ll be right back.

All right, welcome back. You’re listening Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern on KABC, this is Tagore, I’m sitting with Rod Fujita, the Environmental Defense Fund. Welcome back. So before we took a break, Rod, you were telling us a little bit about your background. And, you know, as a scientist, and how you ended up at the Environmental Defense Fund, kind of working to combat climate change and create help create a sustainable environment?

Obviously, there’s a lot of attention surrounding climate change. But I’m not sure for many people, including myself, and our listeners really understand the interplay between the climate, our climate and our oceans. Can you speak a little bit to how raising temperatures are impacting the ocean?

Absolutely to go well, first, let me say that it makes me very sad that we have come this far and so little on climate change. Because when I first joined the fight, and 1990, we had a chance, we had a very good chance to prevent this really terrible onslaught of wildfires and flooding and storms. And little coral islands being swamped by seal arise. Water Systems getting sound, I mean, we’re living in a world of our own creation, unfortunately, and we had a chance to prevent it.

Back in the 90s, I tried hard. My colleagues and I tried to pass legislation in the US, we worked all the international conferences, we hammered out international agreements. But as you know, it didn’t work. And I feel this tremendous sense of loss and also energizes me to try to do something about it. As I get ready to end my career, you know, it’s been 30 years, I’ve got ready to retire.

But I don’t want to retire until I do something positive because this is one of the greatest injustice is ever perpetrated by humanity, you know, against future generations against current generations that are living through this preventable disaster. So I feel like we’re past the point of no return, or there’s still progress that can be made.

There’s still progress to be made. And that’s why I’m fighting so hard right now. And I hope everybody listening will take heart and not be depressed. We there’s still a lot we can do. There’s still time, but we really have to pull out all the stops now. We have no time to look around. That’s for sure. So you asked about the the interplay between the atmosphere and the ocean and climate change.

It’s it’s complex in some ways, but the simple answer is that the ocean has been saving us from even worse climate change. The ocean is the world’s largest reservoir of carbon. And it’s been sucking all of that well, not all a big fraction of the carbon dioxide that we’ve been pulling out of the earth in the form of oil and natural gas right, about a third is that right? It takes stocks in about a third of the carbon emissions.

Well, this is part of the story to go are so it used to suck out a lot more or, and now it’s getting kind of filled up with carbon and the processes that in the ocean that are taking up the carbon are starting to saturate. And also, in the meantime, humans have been busily destroying those pathways. So mangrove forests are really good at taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in soil. But we’ve cut down a lot of them, right?

And destroy them and use them to grow shrimp or turn them into charcoal. The seagrass meadows of the world are really good at sucking them down carbon to and putting in soil. But we’ve been wrecking them too by adding wastewater into nearshore areas, reducing light penetration, which you know, is really, really bad for sea grasses. And, you know, running over them with both propellers and some major causes of seagrass loss. Wetlands same thing, wetlands are a great at sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it into peat that lasts 1000s of years great carbon sequestration pathway. But what we’ve been doing with farming them, we’re digging them up with red stuff.

Cisco, where I live lost, like 90% of the wetlands, right, so we were doing a great job destroying the oceans capacity to store carbon and save us from climate change. The ocean keeps chugging away anyway, it’s big, and it has huge capacity, but it is suffering and it’s its capacity to save us from climate change is not unlimited. As you can see the oceans warming up.

Right, it took a long time. You imagine trying to you know, watching your beer and warm up right after you take it out of the fridge takes a while right through to warmer was imagining the entire ocean, all that liquid. With all that heat returned to capacity. It’s takes decades for it to heat up. But it has been decades it’s been a century actually. So the ocean is warming up. Even the deep layers of the water ocean are warming up.

That starting pack the circulation of the ocean, which is a major way that the ocean sucks down carbon and puts it into deep water. So the ocean basically has acted like a big flywheel on the planetary climate system slowing it down if it weren’t for the ocean, we’d be fried by now. So the ocean has been staving off climate change by absorbing carbon and absorbing heat.

But not without effect. Coral reefs aren’t getting fried, right. But coral reefs are kind of the sensitive child, the canary in the coal mine. They’re very sensitive to temperature change. And they’re bleaching by the millions ever since the 1980s.

It’s maybe somewhat of a over simplistic question, but is the warming in the ocean coming from the increase in climate or from the absorption of the carbon emissions, it see increase in temperature in the atmosphere that’s related to the emissions of greenhouse gases that are accumulating atmosphere. But there’s another thing going on that’s also insidious, in addition to the warming, which is killing off coral reefs, and causing sea levels to rise, because water expands when it heats up, and ice is melting, right.

So those are those are the effects of warming. It’s also causing fish to move around quite a bit away from the tropics toward the poles, that’s really dislocating and impacting millions and millions of people in the tropics, which again, another huge injustice, right?

The countries that are responsible for climate change. The industrialized countries mostly in the temperate zone, are benefiting from the movements of these organisms, because their fisheries are getting more diverse and more productive.

Right, including in the Arctic. The countries that have very little to do with causing climate change and are still not emitting very much greenhouse gases and are underdeveloped, are losing their marine resources and biodiversity.

So again, the terrible thing that we really have to write is there a way I lost my train of thought sorry. Now, in addition to all the effects of warming, the carbon dioxide that we’ve been spewing in the atmosphere is also dissolving into the ocean.

So the ocean is helping stave that off as well, but it’s causing the oceans pH to decline is becoming a little more acidic every year. And of course, that’s terrible for mandalas and coral reefs and other marine creatures that need to To make shells out of calcium carbonate because it’s very sensitive pH.

So is there a way to increase the amount of carbon that the ocean is able to absorb from our atmosphere, but at the same time, curb the negative impact that absorption has.

This is one of the reasons I still get up and go to work every day. It’s because the ocean is very, very resilient. And if we back off some of the bad things we’re doing to mangroves and seagrasses, and salt marshes.

And if we leave more big fish in the ocean, if we let the whales come back, there’s a chance that we can restore some of the oceans capacity to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, slow down climate change, and benefit from all the wonderful things that would happen if there were more mangrove forests and more seagrass, and more coral reefs, and more big fish in the ocean and more whale swimming around.

Right we can also grow a lot more seaweed. Presently, far less than 1% of the ocean surface is farmed for seaweed and seaweed is a marvelous thing to grow for a number of reasons. One, it’s one of the fastest photo synthesizers on the planet, they can pull carbon out of the water faster than any other organism. And that means as you lower the carbon dioxide in the water, that means that more carbon dioxide flows from the atmosphere in the water.

So it pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere under certain conditions very rapidly. It puts it into seaweed bodies, which are extremely useful as food, they’re highly nutritious. They’re used to make billions of dollars worth of products like cosmetics and toothpaste and chocolate pudding and all kinds of things. You can turn them into biogas to create a carbon neutral fuel, clean burning carbon neutral fuel. They’re even useful as soil conditioners and crop stimulants.

So if we use seaweed as fertilizer, instead of chemical fertilizers, we could a hell the crops grow better with less carbon dioxide emissions, right. And we might be able to reduce the nitrogen oxide emissions which are powerful greenhouse gases from agriculture.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal American with Matt Matern. We got to take a break. We’ll be back in a bit. All right, we’re back on Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern and on KABC. We have Rod Fujita of the Environmental Defense Fund on the show. Welcome back.

You know, before the break, Rod, you were talking about the amazing impact that seaweed has, and helping, you know, reduce some of the negative implications of climate change. You know, kind of diving a little bit more more into that, you know, it would seem like seaweed would be a very easy thing to kind of put more of in the ocean, you know, what is that? Is that accurate? Is that it? Or, you know, you know, why isn’t it being harvested more?

Yeah, it does seem like it’d be really easy, you know, it’s plant like it requires very little input, it doesn’t need much care maintenance. Here’s the thing though. A lot of seaweed is being grown. Just it’s all in nearshore waters. And it’s all by mostly all by us very small scale operators. So these are like family farms in the Philippines, or somebody’s little patch of water in Indonesia.

When you add all those little operators together, it creates like you know, lots and lots of seaweed. A lot of people in Chile and all over the world are harvesting seaweed as well as farming it right. So that’s, that’s what makes up the global seaweed market right now supply of seaweed. But there’s so and so those nearshore areas, it’s easy to go see with air because the water is shallow and you can just put a stick in the in the mud and titles boiling to it and it’ll grow until it’s harvest time. So it is pretty easy. But here’s the chance.

So the nearshore areas are getting more and more crowded and they’re polluted. And they’re becoming less and less suitable for growing seaweed. Now see, we can reverse some bad stuff. But it’s still true that we use the nearshore areas for lots of things. There’s lots of fishing going on. There’s ship traffic, there’s all kinds of competing use.

So, the big potential for growing seaweed for the purposes of something like taking carbon out of the atmosphere, which will require millions of square kilometers of seaweed farms, that’s way too much to put in the near shore, it has to be the open ocean. And growing stuff in the open ocean is challenging.

The open ocean is very hostile. It’s high energy, there’s huge waves, there’s very strong currents. These things make growing conditions pretty good. But it’s, it’s really hard on infrastructure. So the world’s some of the world’s best engineers are working on this problem. And they’re being very creative and coming up with very clever ways to grow seaweed under these very harsh conditions. So there’s some promise there.

When we’re talking about seaweed, you know, I think I picture what I have with my sushi, but are we always, you know, is it? Is it that? Is it a specific type of seaweed? Is it kelp? You know, what, what are we looking at, specifically, as as a plan to absorb the carbon emissions?

Yeah, well, there’s all kinds of seaweed, there’s red mounds, and greens. And within those three categories is like 1,000s of species. The, so we’re really talking about all of them, because all of them can take carbon out of the atmosphere. But some of them are better at sequestering it than others. So sequestration, I didn’t explain already is taking out carbon from the atmosphere, and locking either way for hundreds or 1,000s of years.

That’s what we mean by sequestration. So you can imagine when you grow that sea, which called procura, to red seaweed that is turned into two Nori, which you wrap around your sushi, that’s really good at taking out carbon, but when you eat it, you turn it back into carbon dioxide, and you sell it back into the atmosphere. So it doesn’t do a heck of a lot in terms of sequestration, right.

On the other hand, if you if you get macrocystis, which is the giant kelp that grows, you’re off California, it’s a big brown Ouka grows about a foot a day, fantastic absorbing carbon, and really, really good at sequestering that carbon for a while within its kelp, fronds and stipes. And if you turn that into alginate, which is a common use for that kind of kelp, it live, the carbon will stay around for longer, without going back into the atmosphere, right.

And if you turn it into a soil conditioner, it will live even longer in the soil, maybe for centuries. So we need to think about the full range of seaweeds, they all do different things. They’re valuable for different purposes. So they all are great at absorbing carbon. But some of them are better at sequestering carbon than others.

You know, I’ve read about carbon offsetting. And usually that’s kind of done in the context of planting trees. And, you know, are you aware, are you aware of initiatives being done with, you know, growing seaweed or expanding the marine plant plant life to serve those purposes.

Definitely, a lot of people are trying to figure this one out, it’s kind of challenging, because you know, it’s relatively easy to measure the carbon going into a tree and then down into the roots and soil because you can see it, and you can stick your probes into the tree and in the south really easily. Imagine trying to do that in the ocean, right?

That the seaweed doesn’t have doesn’t have any roots. It’s not really in the soil. And so you have to measure all these grades of carbon transfer from the atmosphere, into the ocean, from the ocean, into the seaweed, from the seaweed out to the bacteria that are surrounding the seaweed and heating up the carbon into the body of the seaweed and then where’s the carbon go after you harvest and so you have to measure all those things.

It’s much more challenging than measuring carbon flow in a forest, which is why the carbon offset market is much more mature for planning for us and it is for seaweed, but we are working on it. And it’s going to be really important to solidify that science. That’s one of the things that EDF is working on right now.

To try to get really good data, really good models and some kind of scientific consensus around how to measure this and seaweed so that we can start up a robust, incredible high integrity market for these offsets. We want to make sure to buyers in these credits, that they actually are removing as much carbon as we say they are. And that requires data and science.

Yeah, and it would seem like there are certain advantages to you know, promoting seaweed as opposed to other sorts of plant life because it grows quickly, or at least that’s my impression. You know, it’s not like a tree that’s taking 1020 years to grow. I would imagine that within a relatively short period of time you get to a place where it’s efficiently absorbing carbon emissions. Is that fair to say?

Yes, that’s one of the reasons why so many are excited about CBD right now, because they do grow super fast, much faster than trees, and they take up tremendous amounts of carbon. The thing that seaweeds though is that they’re leakier than trees. So trees are pretty good at holding on to the carbon phantosaur By making wood and roots.

But seaweeds are really bad and holding on the carbon. And so they leave a lot of out in the ocean. So we need to figure out ways to capture all that carbon and do something constructive with it. On the other hand, seaweeds are producing a whole lot more useful products, right?

There are other ways of sequestering carbon. So you can get food, you can get alginate you can get Caribbean you can get like Apollo’s you can even there’s some evidence you can feed seaweeds to cows, and that reduces their methane emissions, which would be a great way to reduce the effects of climate change and the rate of climate change.

So when you think, you know, if you’re someone with a lot of resources, and you’re trying to make sure the return on your investment is the most, you know, efficient, you’re Matt trying to maximize your ROI. Is there a particular initiative or you know, low hanging fruit, you see that someone should consider directing their energy towards to get the most bang for their buck to, you know, kind of reduce carbon emissions?

What are the easiest things for us to tackle right now, where you’re talking to a guy who spent his entire career like not making any money, so I’m not the right person to tell you that ROI. But theoretically, that the established markets are for food for alginates For FICA collards. And so those are already there, they already pay certain prices. They’re not growing that fast. And seaweed is not super valuable, you know, for those purposes.

But there’s some promising developments in the processing field. Where in some companies are figuring out how to isolate pure protein and pure nutrients and pure vitamins, and minerals from seaweed, which are very valuable. So if you’re an investor or a businessman, you might want to look at some of those products if you want to increase ROI.

Of course, that requires more investment. So who knows about the profitability right now, though, we expect those markets to expand, we expect cost to go down, and therefore the ROI and profits should increase over time.

Yeah, I think maybe I misspoke. I was kind of meaning just in terms of an analogy, not not investment in terms of profitability, but you know, return on investment in the sense of the most efficient way of reducing carbon emissions. Are there specific things, be it seaweed or, you know, kind of reducing certain practices that you see is the most immediately feasible things that we can do to kind of drive down? Carbon emissions?

Yeah, thank you. Thank you, the solution set as sort of a target darts, target and a bar, right. So there’s this red circle in the middle. Those are the no regrets strategies. That’s what we should be doing right now. Because they remove some carbon from the atmosphere, maybe not as much as other solutions, but they generate a huge number of benefits.

So there’s no regrets you know, we should stop cutting mangoes down immediately. We should save as many salt marshes and seagrass meadows as we can immediately we should restore cigarettes or as me I take a break here let’s see, Unite and Heal with Matt Matern on KABC. We’ll be right back.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern on KABC. This is Tagore Subramanium sitting in for Matt. We got Rod Fujita on the Environmental Defense Fund with us today. Rod before the break we were talking about, you know, the really amazing impact seaweed and seaweed development is having on as a kind of avenue for reducing climate change.

You know, before we kind of switch topics, are there any really emerging technologies that you’re excited about that you see in the immediate you know, five year 10 year timeframe or even sooner that you see is having a real kind of Quantum impact on on our ability to combat climate change.

Yeah, well, let’s stick with seaweed for a minute. You know, yeah, I think when ocean engineers figure out how to grow seaweed in offshore environments, that’s going to result in a quantum leap, because the open ocean is vast, and there’s huge areas that are suitable for growing seaweeds, if we get only get them out there.

So that would be a game changer for seaweed as a way to suck up atmospheric carbon dioxide and produce many, many, many other valuable products for for human welfare, and economic development. I think that, you know, other game changing interventions will require quite a bit more research, you know, we’re maybe at a threshold for seaweed, right, I think within a few years, people will figure out how to grow it in our shores, because we already know how to grow at near shore, it’s not that hard.

Also under consideration, or other interventions, that may have greater potential to take carbon out of the atmosphere, but come with much higher risks. Right, so things like putting alkalinity into the ocean to chemically alter it is it could have a big effect on carbon, but it also is pretty risky, and unfortunately, irreversible. So if you think back to this sort of metaphor of, you know, a dark target with the you know, the bullseye with no regrets policies that are really great to do, no matter what they do for carbon, because will benefit tremendously from them.

There’s another tranche or another outer ring of solutions that might bring more carbon benefit, but have higher ecological risk. And then there’s still outer circles of solutions that might have gigantic, you know, benefits for climate change, but are super risky, and kind of irreversible. And we if they don’t work, we may have lots of regrets. So they’re presented to policymakers.

Yeah, and I imagine just for you, even if the science is there, or the, you know, the know how some of these issues have, you know, logistical barriers, because they require coordination amongst various countries and different political systems. So that’s probably another set of challenges.

That’s right. That’s right. And some of them, you remember, we’re talking about disrupting a very complex system, right? I mean, climate change itself is a disruption of a complex planetary, social and ecological system. And it’s resulted in some predictable effects of unity and other very unpredictable effects. Same thing with solutions.

Some solutions are smaller disruptions to the system, and are likely to have more predictable effects. Some of these bigger interventions, like putting sulfide in the atmosphere to cool the planet down, you know, may be more disruptive because the scale is larger. And the disruptions may have ripple effects that we can’t even anticipate right now. So it creates more risk and uncertainty.

Amazing. So, you know, I want to pivot for a second, because I know you have a lot of experience in this area. And I think it’s something that would be interesting to our listeners, and, frankly, interesting to me. And that’s sustainable fishing, and the environmental impact of our current fishing practices.

You know, I’ve I’ve read that the our current our current fishing practices, if you know, they continue are likely to result in significantly over fished areas over the next decade or so. You know, Can you can you speak a little bit towards the state of our current fishing practices and some of the concerns we need to be mindful of?

Yeah, let me start by saying that if you only look at the headlines, you would think that all fisheries are terrible, and they’re all going to end soon. That’s really not the case. If you get the bigger picture, and you have a chance to travel to a lot of countries like I have and work directly with fisheries. It’s a much more optimistic picture. And I think fisheries reform has been quite a success story actually, would you wouldn’t get that, you know, for every newspaper, but there’s a lot of success stories, they don’t get reported.

Because I guess, you know, reporters are not that interested in it. But, you know, the global state of fisheries is better than it was 20 years ago. In the United States, in particular, we’ve almost ended the practice of overfishing, which is remarkable, right over 20 years. And we’re on a trajectory, we’re one of the best managed fishery fishing countries in the world now. And we’re leading light that other countries are looking toward for guidance.

And so and you know, other countries have their own expertise to land, Japan just passed a major reform, the biggest reform in seven years, I was fisheries law, and they’re getting really serious about conserving fishery resources, Japan, will not only have a positive impact on his own fisheries, but it’s a leading fishing nation. And it’s a powerful voice in international fishery management organizations that span the entire Pacific, as is China, which also just completed a whole lot of pilot studies that show real promise and getting their fisheries under control.

So, again, you’re not going to read about this paper, is one of the reasons I wrote my book heal the ocean is to tell some of the success stories that people don’t get, so that all of us activists don’t give up in despair. So there’s there’s a ways to go with fisheries. But I think we’re on the right trajectory. We know what the solutions are, we know that fisheries do better. When you do science, and you assess stocks and you manage based on science, we even know how to help fisheries become more resilient to climate change, because fisheries are used to variation, right?

Like farming, fisheries really are kind of dependent on nature, you know, they’re going around chasing fish. And they have to change their tactics and strategies as the fish change. Climate change is making the fish change their patterns in different ways. But still, it’s changed. So fisheries are kind of well positioned, I think, to become resilient to climate change.

There’s some gnarly problems to fix, like what happens when fish stocks move from one jurisdiction to another, and, you know, are governed by treaties that are not designed to deal with climate change effects, we’re already seeing signs that these are breaking down, you know, when fish move from one country to another, there’s incentives to overfish the stock in, in the trailing edge, right before it leaves. And there’s no regulations at the leading edge of the chain.

So people are catching this thing. What do we do with it, and sometimes they discard it. This is happening off the east coast, United States, for example. So we’re trying to come up with new governance strategies and management measures that are more flexible, and allow people to adjust to these relatively rapid changes in this distribution abundance, that are being induced by climate change. And that’s kind of the leading edge of fisheries reform.

Now, the rest of it is well known, well documented, it’s just a matter of scaling it up and putting the necessary resources into it so that less developed countries can establish their own science based fishery management programs.

And so when we talk about these changes in fishing practices, and you know, kind of management plans to prevent overfishing, are these are these profitable interventions? Or are they just interventions that we need to do in order to mitigate the downstream negative consequences?

This is one of the beautiful things about working in fisheries, you know, a lot of times you just have to say no to a destructive practice, right? And that causes job loss that causes economic losses. But many environmental problems are amenable to win win solutions. If you search hard enough, you know, the easy answer is always just stop doing it. Right? Or you’re doing it because you’re greedy.

But it’s usually a lot more nuanced than that. If you bother to ask farmers and ranchers and fishermen and miners and other industries that are why they’re doing things that are wrecking the environment. They have pretty good reasons sometimes. And often, it’s in response to the nature of the regulations they’re operating under, or to price incentives, you know, the economic imperative. So when you diagnose a problem deeply, sometimes you can see a win win solution, and that’s the case for fisheries.

So if you assume that, you know, fish Humira, overfishing, and using guidelines such as because of greedy, then the solution is to just stop it. And then they would lose the jobs and they wouldn’t make any more money and the world would suffer because fish is one of the best way best, you know, most nutritious forms of protein, and micronutrients with the lowest carbon footprint of any protein right on the planet, and cows and pigs and chickens.

So what do you do? Well, we asked, Why are you doing these things. And we found out that is because nobody is sure about how many fish they can catch. So they’re competing with each other, to maximize their cash. Often, it’s tragedy of the commons in some cases.

And so in these cases, we’ve been able to introduce a solution that allows fishermen to make more money at the same time, as it conserves the stock better, because it creates a stake in the future revenues that can flow from a conserve stock, instead of getting all the value from just dead fish caught today.

So it changes the mentality from short term exploitation to long term stewardship. And it’s like magic, these people turn around and the fisheries turn around and become sustainable. I want to go back to that, because I think it may have been lost on on some people as a, you know, what, what a, again, is the solution to this tragedy of the commons, the use of time seeing overfishing, it’s really to provide fisherman security, you know, all humans need to know where their next meal is coming from, where they’re going to sleep that night, right?

It’s it’s a core human need. Fishermen are insane. A lot of fishermen are not secure data, because the open ocean is a commons. And there’s no property rights, and nobody knows who is going to catch what, it creates insecurity. And so the solution is to create security by giving people who don’t have rights, rights, rights or power in the society. And fishermen have no power.

So when you give them rights, when you give them tenure, some of this is replicating models that are 1,000s of years old. And we’re just rediscovering the wisdom that indigenous people had in creating territories, right for fishing that you exclude other people from these kinds of interventions create the incentives that people need to become stewards, rather than short term exploiters of resources.

And when you say rights, what do you what kind of rights are you referring to?

Depends on the context. So in eastern Indonesia, there’s a long tradition of spatial rights and as and traditional stewardship of those areas under traditional law, so the path of least resistance rather than impose new rights that come from the West, is to just go with the flow and establish far more rights around those traditional marine areas.

So that’s a spatial right in Chile, in the 70s spatial rights as well. In industrialized fisheries, it’s more about sharing the catch, giving each fisherman a percentage share of the total level of cash. So we can design these things in a way that is tailored to each specific social and cultural and economic context.

Now for consumers like myself, who go to Whole Foods and we see you know, farm raise Pol Pot, we wild, do you have any general recommendations that people should be mindful of when they’re buying, you know, food from the ocean, and trying to, you know, encourage a more sustainable fishing practice.

The good news for consumers it is that the certification of siwi has come all along way. So now you can go in your grocery store and immediately see, which was how the little blue Marine Stewardship Council fish icon, which are Fairtrade certified, which have a green rating or a yellow rating from the Monterey Bay, aquarium, Seafood Watch programs.

These are all highly reliable sources of information for consumers. Big buyers, like Walmart and Costco are also using the same rating systems to make sure that their seafood supply chains are getting more and more sustainable.

Wow, that’s super interesting. And I think those are great resources that consumers and people like myself will look to when they go to the supermarket. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show rod, very informative and educational.

I think we’re out of time today, but if our audience wants to learn more about what you’re working on and what the environmental Um, defense funds working on are there any websites or resources they can access?

Yeah, they can check out our website at edf.org. And you can look at EDFish.org for a bunch of blogs on ocean fisheries artist sequestration and all the things we’ve discussed. Been a pleasure being on your show. Thanks for having me on.

All right, you’re listening to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern on KABC.