In this episode of the "How to Protect the Ocean" podcast, host Andrew Lu discusses the importance of finding and building a community focused on ocean conservation. He reflects on his own experiences and the recurring theme of community in his life and work.
Andrew emphasizes that being part of a community can provide support, motivation, and a sense of purpose, especially when facing environmental challenges. He shares his journey as a marine biologist in Ontario, Canada, and how he has sought to connect with like-minded individuals who are passionate about ocean conservation.
He highlights a recent gathering with colleagues to establish an Ontario Ocean Group, where they can collaborate on projects and discuss solutions to pressing ocean issues. Andrew also references organizations like Surfrider, which have successfully built networks of volunteers and chapters that empower individuals to take action in their local areas.
The episode encourages listeners to seek out their own communities, whether through established organizations or local initiatives, to amplify their impact on ocean conservation. Andrew concludes by inviting listeners to share their experiences and thoughts on finding community in conservation efforts.
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When you publish as many episodes, I do per week. I do Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I publish a new episode. When you publish as many episodes, you find that you see every once in a while a theme, whether it's in your life or through the episodes where a theme or a topic just kind of keeps arising. And then you start to say, you know what? I'm going to talk about that topic on today's episode because sometimes you just like, I see things that align and you're just like, OK, now I've got a clear way to go about this. And sometimes it helps me with my life. And other times it helps you with yours. So hopefully, today, we're going to be talking about finding your community for ocean conservation. And that way, it could be in a career. It could be in a volunteer position. It could be anywhere so that you feel that you are a part of a community that's helping the ocean. And there was an interview that I did recently with Surf Rider as well as a dinner that I went to with a couple of colleagues and friends of mine that really got me thinking about finding my community here in Ontario, Canada. So we're going to talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. Let's start the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. This is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And if you want more information, I try and provide this as a resource. Not only this podcast, but we have a YouTube channel. We have other podcasts that are part of this, a little bit of a network that we have here. You can go to SpeakUpForBlue.com to find those other podcasts, or you can find out more information. So you go SpeakUpForBlue.com and you can find more information. If you want stuff to come to you in your inbox, you can sign up for our newsletter that SpeakUpForBlue.com/newsletter. Pretty simple, SpeakUpForBlue.com/newsletter. And that newsletter comes out every Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. in the morning, eastern time. You will get it to your inbox and you'll get the latest podcast, the latest videos that we put out. The latest ocean news is happening and the latest job ads that are coming through that you might be interested in at some point and time. So today, we're gonna be talking about community and finding your ocean conservation community, your ocean enthusiast community, your ocean practitioner community, whatever ocean science community, whatever that community might be that you are looking for, we're gonna talk about how important it is to find that community and how it could help you and center you and help you drive sort of your goals forward in terms of just being a good human being for the planet, having an impact for the planet. A lot of the times, I've been thinking about this recently, a lot of the times we get caught up in our own world, right? I have two girls, two teenage girls, great, fantastic kids. I am very, very, very appreciative and grateful for the kids that I have and how they are turning out and how they're growing up to be great young women that they are. They have, they're in high school and they have pressures, they have their own sort of thing going on. We have hockey, we're starting indoor soccer today as I record this with one of the kids. When one daughter's getting trying to get into university, so she's working on marks and studying hard and they've got jobs, they've got friends, there's a lot of stuff that goes on. Myself, I've got the podcast, I've got a full time job, I coach sometimes, I coach my girls hockey, I go out to their sporting events, we have socialized with my wife and I. We tend to get caught up in our own lives and a lot of the times, you get caught up in that phone that you're just scrolling through or maybe even listening to the podcast or you want to do outdoor activities and fitness and you want to stay healthy and all that kind of stuff. There's so many things that you can get caught up in and everybody has their own hobbies. They have what they want to do. Some of them are more active than others. Some of them are sitting in front of a microphone and doing podcasting. Others are fitness, others are doing puzzles or knitting or whatever that might be reading and a number of different books. Everybody has their own kind of hobbies but everybody wants to be able to have an impact on life. They want to be able to go through life and have a purpose and if you don't have a purpose, sometimes it's difficult. You can get into a, not a, I'm not going to say because I'm not a medical doctor, but a bit of a depression in life. I mean, where's my life going? Where do I want to go with it? I see this a lot of times with people who are trying to get careers, especially younger people who just graduated, trying to build and establish their career, trying to get a job and they can't find it. So they feel like the purpose that I want, my dream, I can't get to, right? And so it's harder to find that purpose. And sometimes, we are facing some pretty serious things in our lives from the perspective of what we've been going through over the last year, caught the last couple of years. We've seen wildfires, droughts, flooding, hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, earthquakes, storm surges, massive storms that come out of nowhere, here in Ontario, that it caused flooding. And there's been a lot of damage to homes and things like that. And then what happens is we feel helpless when it comes to this, right? We feel like we can't have an impact on the situation at hand that affects our lives and the people within our community's lives. It's very difficult to help in that situation when you're by yourself. It's when you're by yourself and you feel like, "Hey, I wanna do something." But I have no idea where I begin. I have no idea where I need to go. And I have to do better. But I don't know where to start. And that's where you have to find your community. And for me, I am a marine biologist in Ontario. And actually, a number of years ago, we had an aquarium that opened up, a public aquarium that opened up in Toronto. Now, I've been waiting for an aquarium to open up in Toronto my entire life. And back in the mid 2010s, the aquarium opened up. And there was a marine biologist that actually lived in Burlington, just outside Toronto, where the city that I live in, that was a marine biologist. And his wife was a marine biologist. And he worked at the aquarium. He was helping establish and launching the aquarium. And it was cool to have somebody that we know the same things. We know, and Andy Dehart, who's actually been on the podcast a number of times, we know what issues face the ocean. We have a lot in common. We actually like the 49ers as well, the San Francisco 49ers. So we had a lot in common. So he became a pretty good friend over time. And no matter where he is in the world, he's in Florida right now. But we kept in touch. We had that. We felt that bond. There was a bit of that community there, right? That establishing him, it was like just the two of us, three of us with his wife. There was like that community there. And that helped me feel like I'm doing something. I can talk about something that could be done. And I've been looking for that community of people who are around. Like I always see people on the coastlines, right? I see I meet people and I meet with them over Zoom or I meet with them over Riverside that I'm using to record this right now or Google Meet. And we have these talks and we have these discussions. But I can't really do anything outside of having these meetings because they live across the country on each side of the country, not even in the central part of the country. And so sometimes it's difficult. I don't know a lot of people within the Great Lakes area that are marine biologists and stuff. And so it's difficult. But over time, I was able to establish some friendships and meet some colleagues that want to do more for the ocean that live in Ontario. Some of them are science communicators. One of them is a business, business folk. It was actually two of them are business folks people, but they want to have an impact on the ocean. They want, from a Canadian perspective and from a world perspective, more people to have an impact on sort of the ocean, right? Be able to understand the ocean. Be able to put forward solutions for the ocean. Now we're all working on different projects and things, but we talk about it. We get together. And last night, as a recording this, I got together with two of them to say, hey, let's get an ocean, an Ontario Ocean group together. And let's start meeting every once in a while. Let's discuss the different projects, how we can help each other out potentially and collaborate. But it was just so refreshing to have people where we could talk about the big problems and talk about how we can slowly sort of chip away at addressing some of those problems and providing solutions for some of those problems. And it just made me feel amazing. And it brought me back to-- and even I was talking to them last night about it-- where it was like, there are organizations out there that are based where they have chapters, where they have volunteers. They have a small staff, or as a growing. And this is-- like I was talking to Surf Rider, Chad Nelson that we published last Friday. And there's just a couple of episodes of this. If you want to go back, I highly recommend that you listen to that. But Surf Rider established this large network of chapters along across the US, a bit into Canada, and a bit into other places around the world, where they could help coastal communities, coastal water quality, surfing sites, beaches, and so forth, and protect those and make sure that regulations are being followed, and that they had some pretty big wins. And if you listen to that episode, you'll hear some of those wins. But the basis of it all is this community of people that they've established through their network of volunteers, 100,000 volunteers, 200 chapters, 80 full-time employees. When they first started, there's really just three founders, surfers, that saw that there was something happening to one of their major surf sites. They didn't want it happening, and they decided to stand up for it, and they created this organization called Surf Rider. And now, you have all these volunteers, and you can mobilize these volunteers to take action on specific things. But you're also helping them find a community. So the headquarters is in California. But they're not always talking to the people in Florida, the people in North Carolina, the people in New Jersey, the people along the Oregon coast, or the Washington coast. They have their own regional communities, regional chapters. And each and every one of those in the little counties and stuff all get together, and they decide what they want to do under the surf rider name. They are provided with the training, they are provided with everything, but they've found their community within their own local area through the Surf Rider umbrella, the Surf Rider organization. You are a surf rider organizer, or you're a surf rider volunteer, and you are working with to help its mission by empowering people to drive that. So people who are along the coastline, say here in Burlington, there's no chapter here yet. But you look at what's happening in Ontario, like Ontario, and you can say, well, there's a lot of plastic pollution that comes out when we get big rainfalls. Well, that's not good. We need to do something about that. How do I do something by myself about that? How do I approach the local council to do that? I don't know how to do that. I feel lost when I do it by myself, because I don't feel like I have enough power. But under the surf rider name, and you have a local chapter, say in Vancouver or in other places in the US, you have that number. You can go to somebody and be like, hey, have you ever dealt with this before? Or have you ever noticed this? I've noticed this. You go through your training, this online, that's provided online, and you have all this stuff. You have your community, you have your backing. One of the big stories that they talked about-- that Chad talked about when he was on the podcast-- was the fact that there was a park that was going to be changed, and it was going to affect one of the best spots for surfing, as well as a park that's visited-- one of the largest visited parks in the world, or in the US. And it was going to get changed. Something was going to happen to it. I don't remember exactly what. You have to go back to the podcast and find out what. But they mobilize people in the area. And they had like 2,500 people come out and to the public comment period. And they basically said what they wanted to say. They had to change the venue three times because so many people came out. Normally, you don't get that many people. That's why they do these small venues. But surf ride was able to get 2,500 people. Probably most of them in their chapter. This is in California. So they had a pretty big chapter there. So people came out to say, hey, we are not for this. We are against this. And it was a David and Goliath kind of situation, where surf rider was the David. And the government, I think, was like a highway or something. And the people who were in charge of the industry or developers were Goliath. And they did not get that pass through. Because the people wanted something. So they found their community. They mobilized the community on a specific action that everybody's aligned on. And everybody had a chance to say something. And that many people, when you're talking about democratic government, they're like, well, the people spoke. And then we have to listen to the people for the most part. That doesn't happen all the time. But it happened in this situation. They found, but they found their community. And although not every sort of issue gets resolved by mobilizing people like that. And I'm sure they've had their losses, surf rider and people along the coastline. We definitely had our losses. But by having people join in a community of other volunteers under one sort of umbrella to say, hey, here are our values. If you believe in our values and our mission, come together, volunteer, and you can help drive some of the programs that fall under their programs. They actually-- you know, Chad, it couldn't do something along the coastline that they observed, and they want to do something. Confined a community of people who want to do something and want to have an impact. And you're part of a larger thing. You bring it to their attention, you mobilize on that act. And then under the surf rider umbrella, you can be a part and you can do some great things. Imagine. Just imagine the beauty of that, right? I think that's something that we lose focus on. We get caught up in our own lives, and we observe stuff, but then we just get apathetic. We're just like, you know what, I can't do anything about it. Not by myself, and I don't know where to go. You just have to search. So if you want to have an impact, whether it be on the environment, whether it be on fighting homelessness or hunger or child hunger or adult hunger or people's hunger, whatever that might be, find your community. Find the help so that you feel that you can have an impact. You don't have to volunteer every day, volunteer once a week, once a month, whatever that might be, attend some meetings to get on their newsletters, right? But you feel like you can have more of an impact as part of a group than to say, I'm not going to have an impact at all, right? You can learn from each other. You can learn from the different exercises that have been done in the past from this group, and then you can build on that. And then you can do more in the future. And I think that's what's important when we talk about life, we feel like we have had more of an impact on our local community or, you know, province or state, or even country, right? But you have to find your community. And it may or may not be with Surfrider. You know, if you want to go to Surfrider, you can go volunteer.surfrider.org. I'll put the link in the show notes in the description. But you don't have to volunteer with Surfrider. And by the way, you don't have to be a surfer to be a volunteer with Surfrider. But you can volunteer with whoever you'd like. You know, whatever matches what you want to do and the impact that you want to have and the purpose that you want to be able to fulfill. And instead of scrolling on your TikTok or on Instagram or whatever, you feel like you get out, you meet people, you get more social, you feel part of the community, and then you can build on that. It's not an easy thing, it's going to take a lot. It takes to change a habit. You know, some of us are more extroverted than others and that's okay. But you can be a part of something and you can help. Even by putting just your signature on certain petitions that the organization that you're volunteering with wants to push through and wants to change. So there's a lot of things that you can do and it doesn't, you know, the level of effort changes but find your community. I've been able to find mine and hopefully that will grow as we continue this. But I've been able to find mine and it gives me, it makes you feel better and it gives me more purpose on what I can do in the future. So I hope you're able to find yours and let me know. What do you think? Put your comment down and if you're watching this on YouTube, put it in the comments or if you're watching this on Spotify, you can put it in the comments as well. Or if you want to just tell me just me itself, I would be happy to share, you know, I would listen to what you have to say. Just DM me on Instagram at how to protect the ocean. That's at how to protect the ocean. I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of The How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. And I want you to have a great day and happy conservation. (upbeat music) (keyboard clicking)
