Frequently
Asked
Questions

I fell in love with the ocean when I was five years old, on a family vacation to Key West, Florida. I saw a coral reef through a glass bottom boat and started a shell collection. I got to hold a sea urchin in my hand and felt its hundreds of tube feet crawling on my palm. My mind was blown. I decided on the spot to become a marine biologist. Then I was stubborn, lucky, and diligent enough that it actually happened. I remain madly in love with nature, and my work has shifted from science to strategy, policy, media, and community-building for ocean and climate solutions. What keeps me in this line of work is my deep concern for the future of coastal communities, love of coastal cultures, and desire to contribute to solutions for our climate crisis.

Do it! Become a marine biologist. We need people who have a really deep and nuanced understanding of how individual species, ecosystems, and oceanographic phenomena work; people who are experts on coral reefs, phytoplankton, octopuses, currents. But ocean conservation requires more than that. My Ph.D. focused on the sustainable management of fishing in the Caribbean, and very early on I realized that counting fish and re-designing fishing gear was only a small part of the challenge – if realized that if I wanted to make a greater contribution to sustainable management I actually needed to talk to fishermen and talk to policymakers and understand the socio-economic and cultural context within which these fish are getting caught.

Conservation is not just about science; it’s about people. We need to connect science to policy, to social justice, to art and culture – and do this work in a way that cares for people and communities. You don’t have to do all of that, but find the elements you’re most passionate about, and find collaborators with whom you can have a much larger impact.

Nope. I get a lot of requests (often phrased as demands!) to help students of all grade levels with their homework – or thinly veiled requests to just do it for them. A lot of “could you answer this list of questions for me by tomorrow” type of emails, and often they are questions whose answers would be quite easy to find with a quick internet search. I am thrilled that there is so much interest in ocean science and conservation – and you can check out these resources which may be helpful – but, no, I can not help you with your homework. Though consider this my encouragement directly to you to diligently do your homework. :)

First off, graduate school is not for everyone, and that’s totally fine. There are infinite ways you can contribute to ocean and climate solutions without an advanced degree. I decided to pursue a PhD because I wanted to gain a deep understanding of ocean science, so that I could be useful translating that into ocean policy – and because becoming Dr. Johnson was/is quite helpful as a young black woman who wanted to be taken seriously. There are, of course, many other valid reasons, and once you’re really clear on what yours here are 6 tips:

1. Find an advisor you deeply respect and really get along with. This person will be your mentor, advocate, critic, and collaborator for the next 5 to 50 years. You need to really vibe. And for advanced degrees in science, it’s individuals advisors who select which students they want to admit into their research groups – you don’t apply to a graduate school in general, you apply to work with a specific advisor. So do some research to determine whose science you find most compelling, and send them a note expressing your interest and asking for a meeting. Mostly they are interviewing you, but you can also ask questions about how they normally work with their students, what research they might have funding for, etc. If it seems promising, see if you can speak with some of their other students before deciding. This is a big deal; choose wisely.

2. Try to secure your own research funding so that you have the freedom to follow your nose toward what you think is most important. If you are dependent on funding from your advisor, you will have to focus on the research topics for which they have received grants – this can be great if your interests are thoroughly aligned. If you are dependent on funding from teaching/assisting courses, you will have to dedicate a lot of time to that work and it often does not pay well – this may be great if you love teaching and it can be a strong component of your application for future jobs. But if you can secure your own funding through grants and fellowships you will have more flexibility in what research you pursue and the hours you have for pursuing it. Links to some relevant fellowships, some of which to apply for before you start grad school, and some of which fund students closer to finishing their degrees: NSF Graduate Research, NSF IGER, Department of Energy, American Association of University Women, Switzer Foundation Fellowship, etc. And some key post-doctoral opportunities are: AAAS Fellowships, EPA Fellowships, and NOAA federal Sea Grant Fellowships.

3. Publish. This is how you will make a name for yourself, putting your ideas into words and signing your name to them. Not just academic papers, but popular press articles, op-eds, blog posts. This is how people will learn about your work, value your contributions to your field and the broader public discourse, and how you get credit for the work you do. And yes, being the first-listed author on a paper does matter, so see what you can do to earn that spot in group projects.

4. The other students are also your teachers. You can learn as much from other students (from helping with their lab work or fieldwork, through discussing scientific papers, over happy hour debates of scientific theories) as from your professors. Lean into this. It will make you sharper.

5. Build a network. It goes without saying, but this will vastly increase the options available to you after graduate school. This includes for fellow graduate students, professors, and perhaps people working on policy in state and federal agencies. The science nerds on Twitter are usually quite a friendly bunch, so that can be a good place to find people doing interesting work and connect with them.

6. Work really hard. Meet your deadlines. Volunteer to contribute to others’ projects. All this should also go without saying, but it really matters that people remember you as a diligent team player – especially when it comes time to write you a letter of recommendation.

There is so much to be said about this, so here’s the short version. I think of “ocean justice” as a subcategory of environmental justice, which is a subcategory of social justice. How do we ensure that one group of people are not disproportionately exposed to environmental toxins or lacking access to nature? How do we ensure everyone has equal access to a clean and healthy environment? That same concept extends to the oceans. There are so many equity and access issues that intersect with ocean conservation. For example, who gets to swim? Black and brown kids have a disproportionately high rate of drowning relative to white kids because they’re not taught to swim, and/or don’t have access to pools and beaches. Who can afford to go into ocean conservation? It’s a field that’s peppered with a need for unpaid internships and scuba certifications. Which communities are dealing with the most polluted waters and the labor violations of the fishing industry? Who is making the policy decisions that affect coastal communities? It’s important to keep in mind who is getting the short end of the stick when it comes to both environmental degradation and conservation. All this is intertwined with how we manage oceans sustainability. So equity and justice and intersectionality are guiding principles of my work.

It is a common misconception that white people care more about the environment than people of color. In fact, polling shows that Latinx and Black people are more concerned than whites about climate change and more supportive of stronger environmental policies. It’s just that the spokespeople of the environmental movement have not reflected this diversity. But this is starting to shift. Finally. The environmental justice movement is growing bigger and stronger, and more environmental groups are taking equity and intersectionality seriously.

There’s certainly still a long way to go, however it’s really encouraging to see how much conversation there is around climate justice has been inspired by the Green New Deal. There is also more awareness that ocean conservation is a social justice issue. Communities of color and poor communities remain most disastrously affected by pollution, overfishing, human rights abuses, loss of coastal ecosystems, storms strengthened by climate change, and sea-level rise.

Two very concrete and practical things that can be done to change the face of environmentalism:

1. Pay interns a living wage so that people can afford to join this work and,

2. Ask all job applicants the same questions, so all the jobs don’t end up going to people with whom you had a great chat about your shared love of sailboats or something.

Do it. Join us! Find where your skills and interests fit into this work. We need all the help we can get and there is a huge diversity of organizations working on ocean conservation in different places and with a broad spectrum of approaches and areas of focus. As a place to start, you can learn more about the key issues here.

All opportunities at Urban Ocean Lab will be posted on this page. Additionally, Schmidt Marine and SEVENSEAS Media each maintain excellent ocean job boards. For jobs in the broader climate field, check out Climatebase.

So very glad you asked. And there are oh so many ways. But, first, I have a question for you: What are you good at? What are your special skills that you can contribute? Because we don’t all need to be doing the same things, but scientists, artists, activists, teachers, executives, lawyers, etc., all have a role to play. So don’t just look for generic ways you can help, but for ways in which you are specifically valuable.

Second, know that we already have most of the solutions we need — from regenerative farming, to renewable energy, to replanting ecosystems, to electrifying transportation — we don’t need to wait for new technologies, we just need to get to it. Where national governments won’t step up, local, city, and state actions are even more important.

Third, there is so, so much that needs to be done, so when you’re thinking about how to contribute, think about how your efforts can be a part of something larger than yourself. Think beyond reducing your own carbon footprint and plastic use and think about systems change. The question is less “what can I can do?” and more “what can we do?”

This article by Emma Marris lays out a great summary, and here are a few specific things you can do:

• Join a group! As a place to start, you can learn more about the key issues here.

• Put your special skills to use. Make art to inform and inspire, use law to fight for climate justice, create websites to help us organize, cook meals to nourish activists, throw parties to build community. Everyone doesn’t need to do the same thing – what are you good at?!

• If you have even a small bit of land, plant trees and grow food. Plant a Climate Victory Garden.

• When you eat and feed others, whenever possible choose foods that are grown organically and regeneratively, to reduce pesticides use and restore carbon to the soil, where it belongs. Also, reduce food waste – that’s a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

• If you can vote, vote in every single election. In the 2016 election, around 10 million registered environmentalists did not vote, way more than enough to flip outcomes.

• If you have money or hours to spare, donate it. Want to put your media, research, writing, legal, social etc. skills to good use? Check out this website set up by Patagonia Action Works. It is a matchmaking database of NGOs and specific “skilled-volunteer” needs.

• Show up and raise your voice. We have to transform culture. So, talk about climate change. With your friends, colleagues, neighbors, church, school, sports team, family. We can’t mobilize at the scale we need to, unless we face this existential challenge head on, together, with clarity, grounded in science and empathy, and focused on solutions.

Building community around solutions is the most important thing.

We often focus on the ways in which the ocean puts up with endless waves of abuse — climate change, pollution, overfishing, habitat destruction, deep sea mining… It’s time to flip the script. The ocean is a hero, not just a victim. It has so far absorbed over 90% of the excess heat created by burning fossil fuels and about 30% of the excess carbon. Here are 4 ways the ocean can and should! – become a core area of focus for climate solutions:

1. Offshore Renewable Energy: Offshore, wind blows more strongly and consistently than it does over land, so floating turbines could mean more energy, more reliably – and produced near population centers. Right now there is only one wind farm in the US! This is due to insufficient scientific data about the proposed sites, and inadequate federal staffing to review permit applications – we need to fix this and accelerate the ramp up of wind energy.

2. Marine Ecosystems: So far the ocean has absorbed around 30% of the carbon dioxide we have emitted by burning fossil fuels. And more is possible. We need to protect and restore coastal ecosystems – wetlands can hold five times more carbon in their soils than a temperate or tropical forest! Plus, coastal ecosystems can often provide cheaper and more effective shoreline protection than sea walls.

3. Algae Biofuel: Biofuels produced on land – mostly ethanol from crops like corn and sugar – often rely on large amounts of water, fertilizers, and pesticides, and require so much fossil fuel to produce that they can barely be considered green. Algae biofuels are still in development, but it is estimated that the U.S. could grow 500 million dry metric tons of macroalgae annually, which equates to about 10% of national transportation demand.

4. Regenerative Ocean Farming: With over 90% of global fish stocks maximally exploited or overfished, we certainly can’t rely on wild fish to feed the world and industrial aquaculture is often unsustainable. But regenerative ocean farming of seaweeds and filter-feeding shellfish (oysters, mussels, clams, scallops) – which live off sunlight and nutrients already in seawater – can reduce local ocean acidification and improve local water quality. And this stuff is really good for you.

Food: Around 3 billion people rely on seafood as a significant source of protein. While relying on wild fish to feed the world isn’t sustainable, we can farm the ocean regeneratively, producing oysters, mussels, clams and seaweed in abundance.

Jobs: There are around 3 million jobs in the “blue economy” in the US, spread across shipping, fishing and coastal tourism.

Culture: Coastal communities have cultures that depend on the ocean, whether that’s seafood-based cuisines or just hanging out at the beach and swimming.

Oh, and oxygen. Phytoplankton, the base of the marine food web, produces over half the oxygen we breathe.

Learn more about these issues here.

I’m really grateful for wonderful filmmaking. It’s my job to know what's going on in the ocean, but I haven’t been and can’t go everywhere. So even people like me rely on photographers and filmmakers to understand what’s happening below the surface. The biggest thing to remember is that everything is connected. For instance, look at the flooding in the midwestern US. The ocean is largely responsible for our relatively stable global temperatures thus far, absorbing over 90% of the excess heat created by burning fossil fuels, but even so, climate change has brought increased rainfall to the Midwest. With increased rainfall comes increased flooding that is devastating to agriculture and has washed away layers of topsoil that could take hundreds, if not thousands of years to rebuild. All of that topsoil, along with all of the fertilizer and pesticides, is running down the Mississippi, into the Gulf and back into the oceans where it is having a detrimental effect on coastal ecosystems.

At the same time plastic pollution is running from land to the ocean. About a metric ton of plastic enters the ocean every four seconds. And let’s not forget about seafood. We want to eat healthy fish that live in clean water, we don’t want to eat fish filled with pesticides and plastic, but that is exactly where we’re headed. So, whether you just enjoy the beauty of the ocean in documentaries or you want to eat seafood or you want to go on a beach vacation one day or you want your kids to be able to, it all matters. And if all that’s not convincing enough, about half the oxygen that we breathe comes from tiny phytoplankton that live in the ocean.

We often think of ocean conservation as being about coral reefs or whales or tropical islands — things that are far away from where huge numbers of people live — but that is ridiculous. About 9% of the global population, 710 million people, live in coastal urban areas less than 10 meters above current sea level and eight of the ten largest cities in the world are coastal. In the United States that number is even higher, with about 32% of the population, approximately 104 million people, living in coastal urban areas. And all of these people and places are at risk because of sea level rise and stronger storms and loss of coastal ecosystems. We need to think about cities when we think about ocean conservation.

I’ve been starting to look at New York City as a case study for exploring what an ideal relationship between ocean and city looks like in terms of equity, access, fishing, protected areas, infrastructure, and also, most urgently, how we deal with sea level rise and protect and restore the coastal ecosystems than protect us. As a Brooklyn native, I never really thought of myself as living on the coast. I now think about NYC as an archipelago of a few dozen islands. The Hudson River can be salty as far north as Poughkeepsie and the East river is actually just the connection between Long Island Sound and New York Harbor; it’s not a river at all. I love that our ferry system is expanding. There are whales passing through and seahorses living under piers in the Hudson River. Thanks to stronger environmental policies, water quality is better than it has been in 100 years! People are really starting to face out from the shore and interact with the water in new ways. There's so much more work to do, and it’s an exciting time to be back in NYC as a marine biologist.

We need to be pressuring corporations to adopt sustainable practices ASAP and to raise the bar for what qualifies as sustainable. For example, some of the fisheries being certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council are far from deserving of that label, and more broadly, the seafood on your plate may be a product of Illegal, Unreported or Unregulated (IUU) fishing or tied to human rights abuses such as forced labor and human trafficking. When it comes to fossil fuels. We need to pressure companies, universities, and banks to divest from fossil fuels and we need to pressure corporations to reduce their production and consumption of plastic (reminder, plastics are made of fossil fuels and, as demand for oil and gas falls, fossil fuel companies are relying on plastic production to save themselves from the economic fallout). At the same time, we need to push for a renewable energy transition and work to electrify our transportation system.

Regenerative ocean farming. As pioneered by GreenWave and others, this entails growing seaweed and bivalves (oysters, mussels, clams, scallops). Just a single acre of ocean can produce 25 tons of seaweed and 250,000 shellfish in five months! Seaweed and shellfish don’t need to be fed; they grow with just sunlight and the nutrients and plankton already in seawater. Because seaweed grows so quickly (kelp can grow up to two feet in a single day), it can provide healthy food and biofuels while absorbing tons of carbon and being a significant part of the climate solution. Not only is regenerative ocean farming sustainable, developing this industry can create millions of new jobs while decreasing food insecurity.

Ah, the question that has launched a thousand awkward moments during otherwise lovely meals. When I’m out to dinner and it comes time to order – whamo! people turn to me with “What fish should I get? What’s sustainable?” Of course, I’m thrilled more and more people want to eat sustainably. With over 90% of commercial fish populations either overfished or fished to their maximum capacity, and with climate change wreaking havoc on ocean ecosystems and driving fish towards the poles in search of cooler waters, it’s important to get this right. So, here’s my answer. Five easy guidelines.

1. Eat low on the food chain; avoid large predatory fish. It’s good for your health and for sustainability. Eating large, predatory fish like sharks, swordfish, and tunas is generally unsustainable — they just can’t make babies as fast as we scoop them up. Plus, smaller fish like sardines and anchovies are high in omega 3s and low in toxins, while large fish tend to contain comparatively large amounts of mercury and other toxins because those substances accumulate as you move up the food chain. This is why there are FDA recommended limitsfor how much fish young children and pregnant women should eat.

2. Eat local. Support your local fishermen. Over 80% of the seafood we eat is imported, so eating local is a good way to reduce your carbon footprint. Plus, while grocery stores often just carry popular species of fish like tuna and salmon that are under pressure from overfishing and population decline, your local fishermen can provide a greater variety of more sustainable options.

3. Eat American. If you’re located in the U.S., this step is key. The U.S. actually does a very good job managing our fish stocks under the Magnuson Stevens Act (MSA). In fact, just 18% of the fish stocks managed under the MSA are considered overfished compared to about 34% of fish stocks globally. U.S. fishing vessels are also subject to a number of labor requirements while labor conditions on some international fishing boats can be quite poor.

4. Eat farmed shellfish and seaweed, but think twice about eating farmed finfish. The sustainability of fish farming is improving, but farmed fish are still often grown in high densities, and so there’s a lot of spread of disease and pollution. But ocean farming of shellfish — oysters, mussels and clams — and seaweed is super-sustainable, and we should all be eating more of those things because they actually just live off of nutrients in the water and sunlight. They’re also a low-carbon option as shellfish absorb carbon to make their shells and seaweeds absorb large amounts of carbon while they photosynthesize.

5. Don't eat shrimp or octopus. Shrimp is the #1 seafood in the U.S. and it is incredibly damaging. Wild shrimp are caught in a process called trawling where fine mesh nets are dragged over the bottom of the ocean, catching everything in their paths. Only a small portion of the catch is shrimp, and the rest of the catch (often over 90%, often much of it perfectly edible fish, when excluder devices aren’t used) is thrown back dead. Trawling also destroys the habitat, making it difficult for the remaining shrimp population to recover. To paraphrase Sylvia Earle, the terrestrial equivalent of bottom trawling would be using a bulldozer to catch songbirds. Farming shrimp also results in massive amounts of habitat destruction – mangrove forests off the coast of countries in southeast Asia in particular. As for octopus, many octopus fisheries are in decline and the farming of octopus is fraught with issues. Plus, they are incredibly intelligent and to me just a bit magical – my favorite sea creature!

I am super into the Green New Deal. It is a bold framework that acknowledges that climate change, inequality, employment, and health care are actually all intertwined. But the Green New Deal has a big blue gap: the ocean. So I collaborated with Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign to co-create a Blue New Deal plan and with Data for Progress on a policy memo on Blue Jobs and the Green New Deal. The ocean must play a larger role in climate policy – our food security, jobs, economy, and safety, not to mention cultures, depend on the ocean. These documents lay the groundwork to take the ocean from unsung solution to policy cornerstone.