Here’s this week’s show!
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We present to you The Oceans Show!
To start this show, we chat about this week’s first City of Vancouver proclaimed Meatless Monday, and Alissa tells us about the animal advocacy that she conducted on this day. Then Alissa tells us about her experiences at the recent Resistance Ecology Conference in Portland, OR that she attended. We did a feature interview on this conference recently, on our May 24th show.
Ania Budziak, Project Aware, on Marine Debris
Who best suited to protect the world’s oceans than those who know it most intimately — undersea divers! Today we talk to Ania Budziak, the Associate Director of Science & Policy with Project AWARE, about marine debris. For the past two decades Project AWARE has been educating divers on emerging ocean issues. Since World Oceans Day in 2011, Project AWARE has been catalyzing a global movement of divers to combine efforts – online & offline – for postive, long-lasting environmental change. One of their key campaigns is Dive Against Debris which gets divers from all over the world out collecting marine debris and recording their findings.
This short video summarizes their campaign:
Wietse van der Werf, The Black Fish, on the Illegal Driftnet Fishing Industry
Our feature interview is with Wietse van der Werf, co-founder and International Director of The Black Fish non-profit organization. The Black Fish is an international marine conservation movement on a mission to end the industrial overfishing of our oceans. Through investigation and action, they work to expose and challenge illegal and destructive fishing practices. Their grassroots campaigns and educational projects are aimed at empowering individuals to get actively involved in conservation work and help build grassroots citizen-led conservation communities.
One of the campaigns that they are in the midst of working on right now is to expose and end the illegal practice of driftnet fishing in the Mediterranean Sea. In this interview, we learn all about the logistics and politics behind driftnet fishing (a practise that was largely banned by the United Nations in 1992), and find out about The Black Fish’s strategies to gather information about what is happening in the Mediterranean with the aim to stop it before our oceans are depleted.
Here is a short video that summarizes the campaign: