If Everybody Had an Ocean

I am West Coast organizer for Oceana.

Oceana campaigns to protect and restore the world's oceans. Currently, our North American offices are focused on two major campaigns, "Stop Destructive Trawling" and "Stop Dirty Fishing." Recently, we won a third campaign to "Stop Cruise Pollution," but are still working on federal and state (California) legislation to force all cruise-ship companies to protect our oceans.

There's a lot of variance in my job. A typical day can range from standing at a table at a festival talking about the work Oceana does to sitting in a coalition meeting discussing how various groups can work together to sitting at my desk answering emails and phone calls and writing various outreach pieces. Each day is different. That's one of my favorite parts about this type of work.

After earning my degree in Environmental Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I came to an odd realization -- I didn't really like the people I was working with in conservation. I'm a political moderate at heart, and had yet to come across any groups I thought were taking a reasonable approach to working to protect and restore our environment. I decided that education was where environmentalism would truly occur, so I stayed in school to get my master's in Secondary Science Education. I became a middle school science teacher!

104. Most have been read, some have not. When receiving email, it falls into two categories for me: live person on the other end, or not. Those emails that fall into the first category get read immediately and responded to. Those emails in the second category are usually from listservs (the Marine Fish Conservation Network has an excellent listserv of articles and announcements, but it can be high volume) or are FYI emails ("thought you might find this interesting"). Odds are I will find it interesting, but it's not as high a priority for me. I try to read these emails during lunch or at the end of the day. Unfortunately, they don't always get the attention they deserve. From there, email is either saved in a folder, or deleted. In my professional career I've come to one strong conclusion -- you really don't need to save most of the email you receive. No, really. You don't.

Most of the people I interact with are as passionate about protecting the environment as I am, whether they're members of Oceana, concerned citizens, or environmentalists by trade.

Fishers. There are always horror stories of fishers looking to protect just their niche of the ocean to fish, but in my experience, speak to any one of these men or women individually and you'll find that they're just as concerned about the health of the world's oceans as we are.

Naperville, Ill. (outside of Chicago). San Francisco, Calif.

When I was 19 I spent 32 days sea kayaking in Prince William Sound, Alaska. I had never been encompassed in such a pristine environment before. For a month, I lived in a place that had bears, whales, puffins, and, shockingly, oil slicks. The oil slicks were from the Exxon Valdez spill over five years before I arrived. My anger was palpable at first. Once it receded, I wanted to learn. While on my trip, I read about what had happened, how the cleanup occurred, and how the settlement came about. I was enraptured by the dual ideas of preventing this from ever happening again and making the public care about this environment enough to truly understand its value. I never understood until I was there. How do you get someone to care about, and understand the significance of, something they may never see or experience? I think about that every day.

The usual: computer, phone, cell phone in dock, Rolodex, plant, desk lamp. Work stuff: papers, books (The Rockfishes of the Northeast Pacific, Organizing for Social Change). Personal decor: carved fish from Bhutan, Oceana water bottle, stuffed seal, "Shifting Baselines" tri-fold, jellyfish mouse pad from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Edward Abbey. To be able to incite the love and passion for the natural world that he did through his writing is an amazing gift; plus, there's always been that part of me with the ideal that'd crack the Glen Canyon Dam.

Owning an SUV.

Usually my feet, sometimes the bus, occasionally my car.

Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward.

Cheese pizza with crushed red pepper (New York style).

Yes! The Internet. I start most days with The Morning News and the San Francisco Chronicle.

I'm deeply passionate about what I do.

Under the water.

That every city corner must have a trash can with an ashtray and lid. I'd also like to have them emptied out on a regular basis. People don't want to discard trash every which way; they just find it to be the simplest. If every city took the time and spent the money to have a trash receptacle easily accessible, people would use them. Then trash wouldn't end up in the streets, washed down storm drains, and into the bay, ocean, or lake. It's simple and practical. Next we'll work on landfills and over-consumption -- one step at a time, people.

Yes.

Marketing nature and the need to protect it -- over the past 50 years or so, the environmental movement has learned a great deal from the corporate world about how to frame a message and get people to care. This has been a result of great marketing and public education campaigns. People now know they should recycle, that dirty air is a bad thing, and that there are laws to protect the environment. Most major newspapers have an environmental reporter on their staff full time; that wasn't the case a decade ago. There are magazines like Grist online. Environmental education is taught in schools. Pictures of celebrities supporting a cause are in Us magazine. The environmental movement has learned how to harness the power of marketing and the Internet to help spread messages more broadly and educate more people in a more effective manner.

Competing with each other -- the unfortunate situation is that we are all competing for the same pots of money so that we can do this work for a living and have a long, lasting impact. This creates an environment, though, of organizations which work for the same good causes having to outdo each other in order to maintain their portion of the pot. We must get our names in the press more than the other organizations, appear more effective, have more members, and so on. No one group is better than another. We each have our own philosophies, but that doesn't mean more can't get done by working together.

Rage Against the Machine (I was going through a teenage angry-at-society phase.) Now, I'm more musically mature. My tastes have broadened; I'm more emo than angry. Currently in heavy rotation on my iPod: Wilco, The Postal Service, Stereolab, and The New Pornographers.

PC for work. Mac for home entertainment (pictures, music, watching DVDs). I also like both chocolate and vanilla. So there.

Donate either time or money to an organization, any organization. These people are working full-time to protect the environment for us all. Give them some support. It really does make a difference.