My name’s David Helvarg. Since I’m starting with 15 subscribers I think you all know that already. The plan is to begin using Substack as a way to share transcribed interviews with our amazing (if I do say so) guests from our Rising Tide Ocean Podcast (co-hosted by Vicki Nichols Goldstein) in edited down form, also share some of my ocean-related stories and ideas, both those published in mainstream media and original stuff. And of course I’ll be strongly promoting the work of Blue Frontier (www.bluefront.org), the ocean conservation, policy and media group that I run day-to-day with Associate Director Natasha Benjamin and with the support of an impressive crew, guidance of a salty board of directors and a newly established advisory board full of impressive water men and women.
As for that subtitle - Those of us working on ocean- climate solutions have begun to recognize that we are now having to practice triage, a medical term that breaks down to—saving what we can, while we can. That would include the hoped-for goal of preserving 10 percent of the tropical coral reefs that existed in the twentieth century and a yet to be determined percentage of kelp forests, mangroves and other endangered marine (and terrestrial) habitats so that there will be a reserve of biological diversity to build back from.
At the same time, we must also ensure that climate adaptation strategies—badly needed in flood-prone cities like Houston, Jakarta, and Lagos— and now San Diego - don’t become a substitute for quitting fossil fuels ASAP as well as ending deforestation while shifting to regenerative (carbon-sequestering) agriculture and aquaculture, assuming that works. Like most things, there will be no silver bullets but more of a scattershot approach to unscrewing what we’ve already screwed up. But enough with the firearms-based metaphors.
Incentivizing innovation in legislation and large markets like California is already helping scale up clean energy so that today wind and solar are cheaper power sources than coal, oil, and gas, according to research by BloombergNEF and others.
Combining the traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous communities with Western science is also helping us find solutions for restoration and carbon sequestration but I’ll go into that another time.
For more on my thinking you can also check out my friend Steve Chapple’s latest ‘Hot Globe’ Substack notes from Friday Feb. 2. Honored to have been able to share that special Groundhog Day with Punxsutawney Phil. Groundhogs - the sea otters of the land. Steve and I are basically historical artifacts at this point which means we can use our past experiences to write or report on changing conditions from a baseline well of deep living (I was born mid-20th C). I’ve been a freelance journalist for just over 50 years, became a Private Investigator 40 years ago, wrote my first book 30 years ago (‘The War Against the Greens’) and founded Blue Frontier as a small but effective national ocean advocacy group just over 20 years ago (when you go to our www.bluefront.org website be sure to check out our 20th Anniversary Report).
So, while I have not been able to figure out the cut-and-paste function on Substack yet or how to place links, insert photos or pull quotes I promise I’ll figure it all out before we post a second note. The one photo you see is from our (Blue Frontier’s) 2018 global March for the Ocean that took place in DC, in various locales across the U.S. and 26 other countries.
To end this initial introduction/rant I’ll quote two of our oft used BF slogans:
“When the people lead, the leaders will follow,” and;
‘The Ocean is Rising but so Are We!”