[00:00:00] Crystal: I am Crystal DiMiceli, and welcome to the Forces for Nature Show.

Do you find yourself overwhelmed with all the doom and gloom you hear of these days? Do you feel like you as just one person, can’t really make a difference? Forces for nature cuts through that negativity. In each episode, I interview somebody who’s doing great things for animals and the environment. We talk about the challenge they’re addressing.

The solution they have found will keeps them going and will leave you with practical action tips so that you too can become a force for nature.

As you may have heard last year, I was asked to produce and host a podcast for a marine conservation organization called Healthy Seas. These guys do pretty incredible work in the prevention, cleanup, and recycling of ghost gear in the season. Oceans. And they wanted to have a show meant to highlight not only the great things that they’re doing, but also other people who are doing all they can to help this vital source of life thrive.

It’s been so fun getting to talk to a range of individuals, from lobster fishermen to divers, an activist, and even a filmmaker, which side note goes to show you that everyone has a role to. I wanted to share with you snippets from the first six episodes of the show and encourage you to then head on over to subscribe, and never miss a new one.

The first episode was with the Director of Healthy Seas, Veronica Mickos. We talked all about their strategy, how they’re contributing to a circular economy, and even her most memorable. In this snippet, we learn a little bit more about how Healthy Seas came to be and why its mission is so important for all of us.

How and why was Healthy Seas born?

[00:01:55] Veronika: Actually, it’s uh, very interesting how the storyline of health disease was born. We started as an environmental initiative in 2013, and at that time we were nothing else in a group of divers at the North Sea who seen the drama happening down there underwater. Which many people who just have a nice beach walk, look at the calm, beautiful sea.

Do not. What’s happening down there? So a group of divers at North started to clean up in their free time where they’ve seen animals entangled plastic, um, fishing nets, the devastating impact, and they didn’t really know what to do with these nets. So for a few years, they just kept, uh, cleaning up the bricks and, and left the fishing nets in, in a municipal being in the.

And then at a lucky moment in time, we, uh, got to know an Italian, uh, yarn manufacturer afield, who developed the technology to regenerate fishing nets and other nylon waste into, um, a yarn called econ. . So we met them together with another partner who was a nearby, uh, Dutch, so, uh, manufacturer star. So, and these three parties together just went, uh, very openly to a brainstorming meeting.

Like, like pieces of puzzle we all do separately. Good things, uh, from each other. And we thought, yeah, why not together? So the Italian YA manufacturer agreed to take the fishing nets, which the volunteers recovered, and the Dutch, so manufacturer wanted to use the nylon made of partially these fishing nets, and that’s how the storyline of health disease journey from waste to wear was born.

[00:03:35] Crystal: So you mentioned the ghost nets that you guys clean out of the ocean. Who’s most impacted by this problem? .

[00:03:43] Veronika: So indeed ghost nets cause a lot of problem for marine life. Uh, animals get entangled in them eventually. Uh, a crabb can live for, for months down there without, uh, being able to eat. And eventually they just starve die, and they create a circle of death.

Down there because other animals go and try to feed on them. Uh, for example, a seal also gets untangled and stuck. So first of all, it’s the main problem formula in life. However, it’s also a plastic waste, which remains in the sea and oceans and doesn’t buy the gride. So eventually losing pieces of plastic, so-called microplastics, which ends up in know food chain and or own.

eventually in some other parts of the world, for example, Asia, it’s very striking to see how much a problem This coast Net goes also to maritime industry safety. The fishing nets get unentangled in the propellers of the boats, so it’s really not just the animals underwater, but the entire society is affected by.

[00:04:43] Crystal: mm-hmm. . So their livelihoods can be affected, their

[00:04:46] Veronika: livelihoods eventually. Also, many times a fishing nets are washed shore at the beaches, so it’s a significant economical impact for municipalities to clean them up. Uh, so it’s in all areas of of our life they can cause problems.

[00:05:11] Crystal: In this second episode, we hear from Norbert Lee of Ghost Diving, s a and Eric Nelson of Aqua, the company that takes the nets and recycles them into sustainable nylon called Econo. They told me about the new US partnership created with Healthy Seas that they recently kicked off in Los Angeles. The group had retrieved nets off a ship that was sunk for a movie called Hell Below, and it was kind of like hell below the waves as Norbert tells us.

Now I’m a diver, but the kind of diver that’s been in clear, calm, warm water, 30 to 50 feet deep, but what you guys had done last month was way more intense than that. Can you describe for me what it feels like and what it looks like to dive in those conditions that you had faced? Bad visibility, strong currents, 150 feet down.

What’s that like?

[00:06:04] Norbert: I’ll take it right now before we start. It’s not all like that because that, that site is usually pretty clear. It’s just cold, but it’s still pretty clear where we could see most of the wreck and, and, and have some decent visibility. However, uh, it’s springtime. There was recent storms, so everything got mixed up and that made it really challenging.

And, and to answer your question, it it was essentially by the time we got down to. A hundred feet. It was basically a night. We were at night . It was, it was really dark and I didn’t know where we’re at the bottom until I’m so Pascal and Kareem and the, and, and Keon, the cameraman, and Mark. They all went down first and I didn’t see them until I saw that huge camera light.

That’s, that was my signal. Oh, I’m getting close to the bottom. and lo and behold, there was, it was really murky down here, , I, I, I dunno how to describe

[00:07:03] Crystal: it. It was, and there, and there’s no audio, right? Like, it’s not like you guys have some sort of like pain to see

[00:07:09] Norbert: where the bottom Yeah, I don’t even know. No.

It was just all light con, light communication and you know, hopefully you are aware of where everyone is. . Yeah. Oh, and the current itself typically. Like a little bit of current because when the second you touched net, it silts up everything. So it just becomes a cloud of, of sediment that just blocking your view.

It makes cutting a little dangerous because I, I don’t know where my teammate’s hand is, so we have to really feel for the hand to make sure we don’t slice gloves and fingers off. So that’s the intensive part behind it. So we do enjoy a little bit of current because it just washes everything. But that current didn’t help because everything was already mixed and murky.

So all of it was really touch contact. So, but you

[00:07:58] Crystal: were feeling for his hand, like Yeah, I was feeling for his hand visibility. Wasn’t that clear that you were able to

[00:08:04] Norbert: not clear at all? Yeah, that’s scary. I mean, to anecdotally, Kareem was, uh, he was on his side in Pascal side. They had the huge chunk of net.

We were working on a different section of the boat and Pascal, his and how

[00:08:19] Crystal: many. . Oh, uh, I’m sorry. How many were you?

[00:08:24] Norbert: Six of us. Six of us. Six of us, okay. Yeah, four worked on the big section. Uh, so Kareem Pascal worked on the main part of the net along with the camera folks. We were doing teams of two. And yeah, with Kareem and Pascal, obviously they had almost no visibility.

So when Pascal whipped out that. Basically a chainsaw. This machete, everyone had to stay clear before you cut it so they don’t slice

[00:08:49] Crystal: hands off. So he, he was cutting with the machete and not a No, no. He

[00:08:53] Norbert: had a special knife that was just slicing it through like butter. We had a different cutting device that took a little bit more time to cut.

[00:09:00] Crystal: Yeah. And he was just like, chopping it away with

[00:09:03] Norbert: this. Yeah. I just said, all right, I’m getting outta the way. And ca whoosh slice on that like nothing. Man. Yeah, it was, it was really

[00:09:13] Crystal: intense. It was super intense. Could, could you see them, um, on the other side? No, no.

[00:09:19] Norbert: Our, our section of the rec was, uh, a ways away.

[00:09:31] Crystal: The next episode was with Gillary Darabi, an environmental journalist who had just attended the UN Ocean Conference. She went there with a critical eye and asked the hard questions like who wasn’t invited and was it worth it? She also filled us in on the topics discussed and the progress being made in protecting the world’s oceans.

And speaking of progress, let’s hear about some solutions. What kinds of solutions were being discussed at the conference for Go Gear or marine pollution in general?

[00:10:02] Gelareh: I mean, I loved hanging out with the scientists and the researchers, and I got so nerdy asking them all kinds of questions about what they’re developing and what kind of products they were representing at the event.

Speaking to the scientists who had developed the unmanned boat that is solar powered and wind powered, and can go out to sea for long, long periods of time, collecting important data, capturing important images to study different. Marine animals collecting data on microplastics. Really, like, think about it, this, this boat that’s out to sea.

There aren’t human crew on board who get hungry and tired and lonely and need to go to the bathroom and miss their family. There are no stops for fuel, so it can just keep going and access parts of the ocean. Humans probably can’t. There’s a funny story about how they get phone calls from different coast guards around the world wondering what this robotic thing is in the ocean, and for them having to explain what they’re doing with scientific purposes and negotiating different coast guards around the world.

I thought that was quite funny. I also noticed, you know, a lot of green venture capitalists. They’re with kind of their checkbooks in hand, paying attention to who the innovators are. And yes, there were big investments in big research projects that came from very reputable scientific institutions. But one of the ones that got me the most excited was this young woman who had developed.

A very chic cooler, you know, like the cooler you take to the beach and you keep your soft drinks in or or whatever your watermelon in. And she had discovered that the waste from coconuts actually makes a great insulation. So she created these coolers with coconut husk as the insulation and the design was beautiful.

She’s put a lot of great research into it. And there was a company that made an investment in her and her product and I got to talk to her and she. Buzzing and so excited and really I could just feel the payoff and the potential. And so really the message that was sent to me very clearly is that you don’t have to have a PhD or come from a huge research institution.

You can just have a great idea and a spark of inspiration. And people now more than ever, really do want to back and invest financially in wonderful green.

[00:12:34] Crystal: In the winter of 2021, an unusually powerful cyclone called Storm Arwin RET havoc on the United Kingdom, Ireland and France. In Scotland alone on land. It was estimated that over 8 million trees were damaged or affected by the. and the damage was no less underwater. Andrew Jack, a fisherman that works in the Moray Firth of the North Sea, lost almost 600 lobster traps in the angry Sea.

He could have decided to just forget them and all the negative consequences of that action, but instead, he contacted Duncan Simpson of UK Ghost Diving, and the two collaborated on the retrieval of this lost gear that at first seemed like it couldn’t be done. So they’re lobster pots. They’re designed to trap lobster or whatever else might get in them.

Duncan, what kind of animals were you finding when you were coming upon the, the pots that were inside of them? Yeah, I mean,

[00:13:34] Norbert: what,

[00:13:35] Duncan: what tend to find with, um, discards lobster pots that aren’t being, you know, actively removed. Is that you find everything, you’ll find little fish in there. You’ll find two or three crabs.

You’ll find two or three lobsters. You’ll typically like attack each other and then something else will go in to eat what’s being attacked. Sometimes they’re just full, they’re full of life and obviously it just, it stays there. It never, it never comes out.

[00:13:57] Crystal: So they essentially, I mean if you don’t take them out of the water, they essentially to death,

[00:14:02] Duncan: well, they lay the to death or eat each other.

You know, something else will go in to eat that. But yeah, effectively some were just, And they’ll just, they’ll just die. You know? I think on one occasion with Chris, one of the guys, he pulled like a pregnant crab out of one of the pots, you know, which obviously these guys have quotas and regulations and stuff of what they can, what they can take.

It’s designed to be sustainable and that pregnant crab and straight back in the water, you know, which is pretty satisfying. Obviously there’s a lot of, if the stuff that’s. Which is not being monitored. It’s like below size, you know? And that’s, that’s return to the water, you know, otherwise it would just sit there and they would just carry on catching continuously until something was done.

Obviously in this case, nothing would be done. It would just be left to rofer, like years and years and years, you know. And also like the ma fifth is famous for dolphins. You can actually watch them from the shore, you know, and there’s obviously seals about and stuff like that. You can find many cases online of seals being trapped and even some cases whales being trapped in discarded rope that’s just floating loose in the water.

That’s obviously a hazard that we were keen this coast diving to remove it can be dangerous. You know,

[00:15:13] Crystal: it’s dangerous for the boats too. The motors can get caught up and you know, it’s, it’s just dangerous for everyone. Well,

[00:15:20] Duncan: yeah, there’s, I mean, there’s a few times when, cuz there’s so much lying in the water.

There’s a few times. The prop of our boat got trapped up in line, so you have to send like a diver down underneath the boat to cut all that out. Otherwise you’re stuck, you know?

[00:15:34] Crystal: Did anything happen to you guys while you were doing this work? Yeah,

[00:15:39] Norbert: just, um,

[00:15:42] Andrew: gear team up, up. So a couple.

[00:15:47] Duncan: And, uh,

[00:15:48] Crystal: they were sending up what,

[00:15:50] Andrew: they were sending up recovery bags.

So there was like a, like a clump rope where several different Cs all hanging from that. So C 15, 20 kilo from this. Although bags are floating on the surface of

[00:16:04] Duncan: need, grab the rope and then tie

[00:16:06] Andrew: off one cut, cut that three from the lumper rope, and then be able to hold that over the rail. As we’re doing that, there was so much rope in the boat that the cre sort of fell over the rail back in the water and the up in the leg, and was pulling me towards the side of the boat and Chris and our diver, he stepped in and just cut, cut the rope, and uh, yeah, clean my leg from that.

[00:16:28] Crystal: The rope wrapped around your leg and was pulling on you? Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. It’s

[00:16:32] Andrew: just, uh, we don’t usually have that rope on on the boat. You would never be standing on top of the rope when you’re shooting a awake gear, but just for the circumstances. I was trying to haul theses over the rail, but um, yeah, the weight of the sort of fell back in my leg and towards the, toward side of the boat.

Yeah.

[00:16:50] Crystal: Oh my gosh, that’s, that’s really scary. Yeah. This is not easy work that you guys do.

In the run up to Black Friday, I chatted with Laura in Waterland, an Oceans and Sustainability Advocate en the Founder and c e o of the Sustainable Brand. Lere Black Friday is synonymous with buying and leads to rampant over consumption, whose impacts you’ll hear about in just a moment. But my favorite part of the episode was when we talked through the new concept that Healthy Seas was promot.

Blue Friday, which is the idea of shopping sustainably and ethically. You walk away with clear ideas on how you can lighten your impact wherever you go shopping. Well, speaking of over consumption, what are the impacts of buying too many things?

[00:17:47] Laura: So, yeah, for me, over consumption translates to, it’s a culture of disposability really, instead of reusing like people would do in the past, now everything’s disposable, which as you can imagine, and I’m sure a lot of people have seen from pictures on the internet or on the news even.

It creates a huge amount of waste. because for example, when you speak about fashion, 60% of the garments are made from fabrics that come from fossil fuels. So that doesn’t biodegrade in the environment and shoppers buy more than they need or maybe even gift faultlessly. And so that means that that ends up in the trash, ends up being donated.

And there are such a thing that closed landfill in Ghana, in Chile, and other places around the. . And the second type of waste that it makes is resources because all these things have to be made so there’s waste of water, waste of energy, it’s just a whole mess. Really, over consumption has a bad impact, and nowadays we want to produce more for cheap, which leads to workers’ exploitation and for environmental practices, and then access CO2 emissions.

You know when, again, with the example of fashion, it’s a hundred billion garment

[00:19:09] Crystal: sales every year, a hundred billion.

[00:19:11] Laura: So that’s just a whole, yes, that’s a whole bunch of clothing and 20% of it never is sold. So you can imagine that. What’s not being sold and then what’s not being used properly and discarded is just a lot.

Oh yeah.

[00:19:29] Crystal: So you mentioned that 60% of clothes are made from fossil fuels. Give me an example of the fabrics that are are made with fossil fuels.

[00:19:38] Laura: All the synthetic fabrics. So that’s your nylon, estin polyester. And I mean, they all have different

[00:19:46] Crystal: names. You also mentioned a closed landfill in Chile and somewhere else.

[00:19:53] Laura: Yes. There were articles actually this year, both of the, the articles were this year in the garden, but in also other news channels. One in Ghana and then there’s one in the Chilean Desert as well. The, these were the biggest two scandals of closed landfill this year.

[00:20:14] Crystal: Actually now, now that you say that I, I remember it.

It’s where like, if we in developed countries go to donate our clothes and they don’t get sold, they get thrown out and then sent to these landfills. Is that correct? I I, that’s what I’m remembering.

[00:20:31] Laura: Well, when you donate your clothes, let’s say you donate your clothes in America, your charity shop is going to keep part of it, but they’re gonna scan through and they’re gonna discard most of it.

There’s a high percentage of the clothes you donate that does not make it to the racks, and those clothes generally then get shipped to. Places like Africa or Southeast Asia in big bundles where you will have people buying these bundles without being able to look and scan through what’s in there and the quality of it.

And then they will try to sell them on. But again, they’ll scan. They’ll have to scan for it once they can look and they won’t be able to sell all of. . So a lot of it is gonna end up in landfill because of that. Even if they tried to sell some of it, you know, I was living in Indonesia and I would go to the secondhand stores that they had and you would find everything and anything.

And some of the clothes still had Goodwill price tags on from like Australia, mainly because Bali and Australia

[00:21:41] Crystal: are so close geographically, but. You never think of that because you, you think you’re doing something good by donating your used clothing, but it might still end up in a landfill somewhere in the world.

And lastly, I wanna leave you with our most recent episode with Feric Fu, the director of a new documentary called Mediterranean Life Under Siege. The film and series takes viewers on the journeys of some of the Mediterraneans most precious species as they navigate survival around the increasingly human dominated l.

We also heard from Annie Miro with some insights into the conservation work taking place for some of the species featured in the movie. Some of the stories that Fedi talks about are the unpredictability of working with animals, how he got some of those seemingly impossible shots, and which storylines stood out to him the most.

If you ever wanted to know how nature films are made, you can’t miss this one. So you were saying that you studied. These species and created the stories around them. Did you find particular individuals to track for the movie?

[00:23:02] Frederic: Yes, indeed. Like for instance, the, the turtle story. The turtle story was based on the true turtle story because there was a pin that was put on that turtle within the south of France.

Uh, we could follow heart until Greece, you know, uh, the low. 4,000 kilometers. So it was tracked, the whole itinerary of that turtle was on map. And then we, we reenacted the whole story with different turtles being at a different stage of the travel. So we found a turtle in, in France, we followed for a few days until Corsica.

Then we found a another one in Italy near. And we followed it onto Messina, and then we followed another one and we completed the whole, the whole real trajectory with four, five different turtles.

[00:23:58] Crystal: Now, some of the shots were from the perspective of the animal as if the camera was on their back. Did you actually have a camera on some of the animals or were those animatronics, , uh, or is that a filming secret,

[00:24:16] Frederic: No, no, no, no, no. It’s not a filming secret because a film on the making of, uh, there are some shots where we could approach. Certain animals really, really close and come on top of them. We did, but the one where the camera is really, really on the, on the back there are two examples. One is the whale. The fin wheel so that we stick a camera temporarily on the back of the wheel and the camera will stay one or two hours on the back of the wheel and then release.

So it’s with, uh, I don’t know how you said this, something like the

[00:24:54] Norbert: sticks.

[00:24:55] Crystal: It’s like a section cup or

[00:24:56] Norbert: something. ,

[00:24:57] Frederic: yeah. Section cup. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. . So that’s very funny because you see on the back that where you. Up and down and all that, and you see the fish all. So that’s one, one. Uh, uh, for the turtle, the marine turtle, we didn’t want to put the camera on the turtle.

It would, uh, I thought it was too hard on the turtle, so we made antic turtle. To, to create certain specific shots. And that was very funny. That was very helpful actually. And so we had this half turtle that was animated with the head and, uh, and the palms and all the fin and, and we were diving with it.

And, and one day we were at Greece and there was a big turtle there and she saw. Animatronic turtle. She hurried at it and she, she fought with her. She wanted to destroy it, because, because it was her territory and she didn’t want any other turtle in her territory, so she tried to kill her

[00:26:00] Crystal: even though it half a turtle. ,

[00:26:02] Frederic: we have the, we have the shot. It’s amazing. Oh,

[00:26:05] Crystal: really? Yeah. Is that in the, the making of

[00:26:09] Frederic: No. Yeah, it’s on, on the film. You see when she goes into the, the harbor? Yes. There is a fight between two turtles where there was one shot. Is is done with this.

[00:26:20] Crystal: Oh, I didn’t realize that.

Yeah, I didn’t even realize that was an animatronic one. .

[00:26:26] Frederic: Well, there all the shots are not element except this shot.

[00:26:30] Norbert: Yeah. In the middle. Oh, how,

[00:26:32] Crystal: how interesting.

What’s even cooler about this last episode is that Fedi gave us a link to share with you so that you can go and watch the documentary online. I’ll include it in the show notes along with the password, and I’ll also include a link to sign up for the Healthy Seas newsletter. . In doing so, you’ll receive a bonus clip from Fred talking about the dolphin with Alzheimer’s, one of the most incredible stories told in the whole documentary.

I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into the Healthy Seas podcast. I’m having a blast creating it. So much so that this year I will be offering my services to other sustainability, conservation, and animal welfare organizations. If you’re from an organization that you think needs a podcast, Get in touch with me, or if you have a favorite organization you wanna hear deeper stories from, let me know.

You can reach me at crystal forces for nature.com. In the meanwhile, while you have your podcasting app, open head straight on over to the Healthy Cs podcast and subscribe. Leave a review and let me know what you think. I am so grateful for your support. Chat with you soon.

Don’t forget to go to forces for nature.com and sign up to receive emailed show notes, action tips, and a free checklist to help you start taking practical actions today. Do you know someone else who would enjoy this episode? I would be so grateful if you would share it with them. Hit me up on Instagram and Facebook at Becoming Forces for Nature, and let me know what actions you have been taking.

Adopting just one habit can be a game changer because imagine if a million people also adopted that. What difference for the world are you going to make today?