Hope Is A Verb - Enric Sala - Ocean Time Machine

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

Meet Enric Sala, a marine ecologist, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and founder of Pristine Seas – an organisation that has helped create 30 Marine Protected Areas, safeguarding nearly 7 million square kilometres of ocean. From his five-year Pacific expedition using a three-person submersible to his film Ocean with David Attenborough and his work with governments and coastal communities to drive the 30x30 goal – Enric is someone who intimately understands the scale of the crisis and still has proof that restoration is possible.Other topics: the Ocean Decade’s slow progress; High Seas Treaty benefits and blind spots; why 96% of catch comes from inside coastal waters; the spillover benefits of Marine Protected Areas; community-driven reserves in Greece and Turkey; a five-year Pacific expedition with a new sub; the Port State Measures Agreement in practice; China’s distant-water fleets and accountability; combining science and National Geographic storytelling; how protection boosts local incomes; community-driven reserves in Greece and Turkey; exploring ‘pristine ocean’ that no human has gone to; financing and defending parks through politics; succession planning after a cancer scare;educating future stewards across the Pacific; Revive Our Ocean as a tool for communities; focused action as an antidote to despair; and bottom-trawling footage as a visceral wake-up call.Find Out More:Pristine SeasRevive Our OceanOcean⁠, the film.Enric Sala- Website + Books, This podcast is hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose from ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fix The News⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Audio Producer/Director Anthony Badolato, Hear That! If you love this episode, please leave a comment or review. You can get in touch with the team: [e-mail]

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Amy and I'm here with Gus. Hi. And if this is your first time joining us, we're from Fix the News. We're a solutions-based media organization that share stories of progress. And we're really passionate about showing people how much is actually going right in the world. And Gus, I don't think I'm overstating it when I say that today's guest is not only someone that we have been wanting to talk to for a very long time, he's also one of our heroes. He is definitely one of my heroes. We cover a lot of environmental progress in our newsletter.

It's an essential part of what we do because if we're not solving for conservation, everything else falls apart. And if you dig behind most stories of ocean conservation in particular, you'll probably find the name. Enric Sala. He's a marine ecologist who traded academia for action, and he's diving now into one of the most ambitious ocean conservation missions on Earth. Through his organization, Pristine Seas, Enric has already helped create 30 of the world's largest marine protected areas, and this is an astonishing statistic, safeguarding almost 7 million square kilometers of ocean. That is an area over double the size of India. From coral reefs in the Pacific to the polar seas, Enric and his team work with governments and local communities

to help them protect their patch of ocean. And now they're on a five-year expedition to explore some of the sea's wildest and most untouched places, and we're going to get into all of that in this podcast. Yeah, we are really happy to have you here for this conversation. From collapse in renewal to the power of marine protected areas and working with David Attenborough, Enric Sala will remind you that despite the challenges,

there is still an ocean of possibility when it comes to the future. I like what you did there. Well, thanks for noticing. Enric Sata, welcome to hope is a verb. It's great to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Is there anything in the world that's giving you hope, now? Well, your podcast is one. And you know, when you are a nature conservationist, it's very

difficult not to be depressed, right? Because everything we hear in the nose is bad. More coral blitzing in Australia. Another marine heat wave that kills sea fans in the Mediterranean, sea level rise, more overfishing everywhere. It's difficult to be optimistic. But there are two things that give me hope. One is the ability of the ocean to bounce back if we give it a chance and we can talk more of that later. And two is that the countries of the world agreed a couple years ago to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030 and some have already done it. All right. This is a really great jumping off point because you're holding the stories of collapse next to the stories of renewal. So I want to get into that little bit.

Let's start first with, we're halfway through the ocean decade. This is supposed to be the big decade where we sort out a bunch of stuff. How is it going? We're doing really bad because even though the world agreed to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030, which is only in five years, today less than 10% of the ocean is protected. And I say protected between quotation marks because actually only 3% is really protected. meaning fishing and other damaging activities are banned. So we have a long way to go.

We have to more than triple the protection that we have achieved in the last hundred years in the next five. Yeah. Wow. All right. The flip side of that is a few more countries that have ratified the high seas treaty. So we're now at 54 signatories. We're only six signatories away from the high seas treaty.

If that comes into force, is that going to change anything? Well, that's going to help the high seas for sure. But that only addresses 4% of the problem, meaning that the high seas provides only 4% of all the global fishing catch. 96% of the global fishing catch comes from the exclusive economic zones of countries, from the 200 miles from the shore that countries have ownership of. Countries are not protecting their own waters and they are using the high seas tree. as a distraction to say, oh, it's important to get to 30%. We need the high-ciss treaty, et cetera.

Meanwhile, they are not doing what they have to do in their own country, in their own waters. So it is important, but it's not as ocean. 96% of the problem that can be abated by marine protect areas is in the country's waters. Let's not forget that. So, Enric, we've obviously seen a huge rise in land-based conservation over the last decade.

why hasn't ocean conservation had the same swell? It's out of sight of mind. You know, when the world protested against the industrial slaughter of whales around the world. In the 1980s, the International Whaling Commission agreed to a moratorium. We have seen how the species of whales that were almost driven extinct, like the blue whale, are slowly returning. Like the humpback whales, for example, in South Australia, incredible recovery, right? More than doubling their populations in a few years.

So there are great examples of recovery. The marine protected areas that we have now are extraordinary. You protect an area from fishing, and marine life comes back spectacularly. You don't kill the fish. What happens? They take a longer time to die. They go longer. It seems silly, but marine protected areas do something that fisheries management will never be able to do, which is allow the fish to reach to their maximum sense. sizes. On our pristency expeditions, we've been to the most pristine places in the ocean, places without people, without fishing. And we have seen fish and lobsters whose size is larger than the maximum size reported in the scientific literature. Why? Because if you have fishing

over time, one of the things it does is reviews the maximum size of the fish because the fishers are told, respect the babies, but catch as many big fish as you want. And that's a mistake. Because as the fish grow in length, they also grow in volume. And volume increases in three dimensions. So the big females produce an exponentially larger number of eggs. And this happens only in the protected areas where the fish are not killed. This is one of the beauty of these marine proteget areas.

They not only increase marine life within their boundaries. There is a spillover of eggs and larvae and also of a dollfish. I would cite the limits of the protected areas, and that spillover of fish. It's like a financial flow. You have this fish flow and lobster and scallop flow from the protected areas to the unprotected areas surrounding them. That is making fishers catch more than ever. Enric, you touched on it a couple of minutes ago.

You are currently, I think two years into a very epic five-year expedition to explore and chart a whole lot of the Pacific Ocean that hasn't been looked at before. Can you tell us a little bit about this project, how it's going? I think you were recently in Fiji. Yes, this is the third year of our expedition in the Pacific. We have a new submersible that allows three people to go down to 1,000 meters deep. And we are working with governments and communities to support their conservation vision. So these countries have invited us to come to their water.

to help them figure out, okay, what are the most important areas to protect? We have a team of scientists on the vessel right now in Fiji, assessing the condition of the marine life from the surface to 6,000 meters deep. We have this remote cameras that we can drop to 6,000 meters. And most of these places, nobody has ever been to, even in places like Fiji, which is easy to get to. The team has been diving with places where there has never been any deep, research ever.

So what we're doing is pure exploration. We're going to places with people, places without people. We've been doing this since 2008. We've been to 35 or 40 countries around the world from the Arctic to Antarctica to every ocean basin. But in the Pacific in the last three years, we've been to Cook Islands, Niuwe, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, the Solbon Islands, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Fiji, next year we're going to Samoa.

And it's extraordinary to see that the central and western Pacific is the region of the world that is most committed, but not just with lofty speeches and empty words. They are really committed because they are developing their national ocean policies and they are creating protected areas. So we are working not only in the most biodiverse region of the ocean, but also in the area that is politically more committed to ocean protection. It feels like you are on the last real adventure on planet Earth at the moment.

Can you paint us a picture when you go to a piece of ocean that has never been visited before by human beings? What do you see? That's my favorite part. You go to one of these places, a coral atoll, for example, that is so remote that's never been fished and nobody lives there. The islands are covered not by coconuts, but by the native forest.

Coconuts were introduced by people who wanted to have a cobra plantation. The native vegetation of this specific alliance is not coconut trees like you see in the movies. It's this tree that grows really old and creates this thick canopies. And you see tens of thousands of seabirds the nest on the narrow strips of land on these atolls.

Then you jump in the water and as soon as the bubble is clear, you see sharks. There is one place, In the Marshall Islands, where we were a couple of years ago, where every dive we saw 200 great sharks in that place every single day. Some of these places we go to, there's never been a scientific expedition ever. We don't have any scientific data about the underwater world,

which seems crazy in the 21st century. We are the first humans there. So these sharks come, they check us out, they get excited, and then they get bored, and they go do their thing. And then you look down, and the bottom is covered by living core. Today, in the Caribbean, between 5% and 10% of the bottom is covered by coral. The rest is seaweed. It's been destroyed by human activities.

And this remote Pacific pristine areas, 80% of the bottom is live coral. And you see the schools of surgeon fish and this big para fish, the huge groupers, schools of jacks, then a sea turtle comes. People say it's like an aquarium. Well, it's way better than an aquarium. It's like a time machine. is like diving back a thousand years and this we have seen in every place

that is still pristine and Rick pristine sees started as a PowerPoint presentation to National Geographic in 2008 and back then you were in academia and here you are all these years later getting to dive and enter these spots

and really move things forward can you just talk about the gulf between those two worlds and what led you to make a change how do you know about the power point presentation. We do our research. You know your research. Yes.

So I was a professor at the University of California in San Diego, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. And I was studying the impacts of humans in the ocean, the impacts of fishing and global warming. And as academics, we have to publish scientific papers in peer review journals. And one day I realized that as I was writing yet another paper, that I'm saying the same thing I said five years ago. What we are doing is just rewriting the obituary of the ocean every time with more precision, but we're saying the same thing. I felt like the doctor who's

telling you how you're going to die, but not offering a cure. That day, I had this realization. I decided to quit academia and work on the cure, work on conservation full time. And I took some time to think about what I wanted to do, and I came up with this idea of Christine Siss. Let's go to wildest places in the ocean, and let's save them before it's too late. So I came to National Geographic in January 2008, indeed with a PowerPoint, and so much lights with the idea, the vision, and a list of five places. Let's go to these places in the next five years, one place per year, and let's see if combining my scientific research with your storytelling to convince the people, the leaders of those

countries, to protect these places. And they said, yes, I moved to Washington, D.C., and it's been a fantastic ride since. We've been to more than five places for sure. You know, there's a very distinct energy that you start to pick up on, especially when you speak with people like Enric Sala. It's relaxed, but it's intense. And maybe it just comes from these people that are able to hold both the problem and the possibility equally.

Yeah, I also pick up on that. It's the same energy we've encountered many, many times already on the season, which is we're just going to do this. I don't care what you're doing. I don't care what everyone else is doing. We're going to do this. and there's no sense of existential dread lurking anywhere there. No, no.

And there's also no exit clause. It's this laser focus. And I really loved when he left academia, he decided to focus on one tool. And that one tool was these marine protected areas. There's so much in a lot of these people we've spoken to that have a really big vision, they end up finding this really narrow,

effective pathway through. Yeah. The moment that stood up more for me, maybe because it resonates personally, was when he said, I decided we were going to bring my scientific expertise and we would combine it with National Geographic's storytelling prowess. And I think when you do combine those two things,

it makes magic. So often the storytellers or the scientists and experts, they often are just doing their side and they're forgetting to bring on board the other side. When you put them together really well, then you can protect almost seven million square kilometers of ocean. We speak to some really extraordinary people on this podcast, but we also understand that people are just people.

And that kind of work can be discouraging. You get burnt out. maybe you realize that despite all of that work, things just aren't improving. How do you stop yourself from giving into despair? Yeah, I was talking to a friend of mine about this precisely today. It's hard not to be discouraged because you see then some governments, they undo protected areas, right, because of pressure from the industrial fishing lobby. So it seems like it's one step forward and four steps back.

but for me what has worked is focus because there are so many problems if you worry about plastic pollution and sea level rise and ocean warming and acidification and overfishing you're going to be depressed you're going to die unfulfilled and not have any impact

so I decided early on to focus only on this tool that I have proven it works the marine protectorates abate certain threats the threat of fishing, destruction of the habitat, deep sea mining, oil drilling, everything that extracts marine life or damages that area. And the more protected the areas are, the more marine life comes back, and the more people benefit from them because fisheries around the protected areas are going to be enhanced.

And this is something that we can do and it's working. So that's what we do. We focus on the bit that we can do that helps. I would really love to dive into these marine protected areas. They're one of our favourite conservation topics here at Fix the News. Of course, pristine seas has inspired the creation of about 30 different marine protected areas around the world, the most recent one in Colombia. But I want to understand, Enrique, how do you protect a patch of ocean?

It's very simple, actually. I can't show. It works, and we've seen it working all over the world. It's just that we don't have enough of them. But a country, a government, passes a law designating the area, meaning there are lines on a map, on a nautical chart. Notical charts are now digital. And you go with your boat and your GPS, and you'll see these lines.

Okay, this is a marine protected area. And there are many different types of protected areas. Some allow a lot of fishing, including the destructive bottom trawling, but others are fully protected. It means you can navigate through it, but you cannot fish in there. If you fish, then you are violating law. Now, how does the government know that you are fishing, especially if the area is big, right? We could not have boats in the water monitoring areas that are large. Fortunately, today, we have satellite technology that allows us to monitor fishing vessels.

And we just published a study just a couple months ago using global fishing watch data where we were able to prove that the areas that by law prohibit industrial fishing in reality successfully exclude industrial fishing. We were able to detect not only the vessels that have that transponder, that little device that transmit their position to the satellite, but also with the current technology, we are able to also detect what we call the dark vessels that either don't have the transponder

or they turn it off when they enter into marine proteot areas. So right now, the bad guys cannot escape anymore. What does that mean in terms of enforcement? It's one thing to say you can spot them carrying out illegal activities, but do governments around the world have any mechanisms to be able to hold those vessels to account?

Yeah, well, that then depends on the political will, right? And we have great examples of fishing vessels that were caught illegally. In the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador, where the government navy were able to apprehend a Chinese vessel transporting 3,000 shark fins inside the protected area. So they were able to apprehend that vessel. And in other places, there is something called the Port States Measures Agreement, meaning if we detect a vessel fishing illegally in your protected area,

but you don't have a Navy. If you're part of this agreement, when the vessel comes to my port to refuel, then we can enforce for you. Now, a big piece of news from the last few months is that China has signed up to that agreement. Is that going to make any difference? Well, I don't have a glass ball,

but I hope that means China is going to start cleaning their mess because China has the largest fishing footprint on the planet. They are fishing everywhere. Legally, in other countries, with bilateral agreements, and also illegally. It is well known in Argentina, for example. They turn their transponders off to get into the Argentinian waters to catch squid. That's absolutely illegal. And every year, more than $2 billion of fish is removed by,

foreign fleets. These are $2 billion of fees that could have fed the local population, which also has a series of problems. So China has to really clean their act. But China is not the only country that is doing illegal things, right? There are a few other countries that are major culprits in the high seas and in the waters of global south. We've been talking a lot about the big global scale and the investment of countries. I'm really interested in the local communities. What has their response been to the creation of a lot of these marine protected areas? Are they on board? In some cases, it is the local fishers who have asked for the creation of protected areas. For example, the government of Greece just created

three small notic areas in the island of Amorgos, in the cyclists, because the local fishers asked for it. They knew that they hit rock bottom. And they have seen what happened in other places in the Mediterranean, like in Turkey, for example, in Gokova Bay, where the full protection of five areas has produced such spillover that the local fishers have tripled their income in only four years. Yeah, wow. That's amazing. No fisheries management in the world has able to achieve anything like this just by

regulating the way we fish, right? That shows the miraculous and positive. impacts of proteot areas. In other cases, the fishers, like in the beginning in Kokoaba Bay and Turkey, they didn't like the idea of a marine protector. But after four years, now they are asking for the area to be expanded. So that's what happens usually. The fishers in the beginning are skeptical with the idea. And after they reap the benefits, they realize that they have been doing it wrong and they want more protection. And this is amazing because one of the biggest arguments against marine protected areas is the economic impact.

Yes, this myth that we cannot fish more because that would harm the fishing industry, that's perpetuated by the industrial fishing lobby. We have proven all over the world from small reserves to large ones, from small species that move very little like scallops or lobsters, to species that move thousands of miles every year like yellowfin tuna, that proteot areas are going to improve the economic benefits for the fishers. And this is something that I truly don't understand. It is insane that the fishing lobby would work so hard against the only areas that are helping them to replace their fish populations.

So I guess the question is you've been involved in this fight for a very long time. You've met many of these industrial lobbyists. You must have your own theories or ideas about why that is the case. It's the classic principle of short-term exploitation to cash as much money as I can now and then invest it. somewhere else it's human nature it's not different from what oil companies are doing so you're swimming upstream against human nature and you're swimming upstream against some very powerful interests and yet pristine seas has as an organization been responsible for the protection of almost seven million square kilometers of MPAs why have you been able to make inroads where other people haven't the argument is

the same the more life that is in the water the more life there's going to be to fit people And the more benefits we're going to get from the ocean, tourism, climate mitigation, coastal protection, and fisheries enhancement. What changes is the people you deal with in the Pacific, where we are focused for the next few years. The governments have committed to protect 30% of their own waters because they understand that, wow, that means more fish for us, that means more tourism, more jobs, better protection from sea level rise. but then you have governments that are more interested in economic growth at the risk of losing the little nature that they have left because nature always loses at the finance departments. So when we have had this fight, as you say,

of having to show the evidence, we have been very lucky to have encountered a series of really visionary leaders that have realized that there is no future to our fishing industry, there's no future to our coastal economies without a healthy ocean. Most of the ocean today is like a checking account where everybody withdraws, but nobody makes a deposit. You don't need to be a banker to know what's going to happen to that account. But these not take areas are like investment accounts with a principle

that you set aside that grows with compound interest because the tons of fish per square kilometer increases on average five times inside these not take areas in less than 10 years. and that principle keeps going over time produces these returns that spill over inside and outside the boundaries. So there is a clear economic rationale and the rationale doesn't change from country to country. What changes is the political leadership. When you're talking about saving the ocean, how do you measure success? I mean, the scale is so huge. What does success look like for you? And is it still the same as it was in 2008?

When we started in 2008, only 1% of the ocean was protected. Now we have almost 10%. But then, 0.1% was fully protected from fishing. Now it's over 3%. So there's been a huge improvement in relative terms. But in absolute terms, we still have a long way to get to that 30% that every government agreed to. So for me, success is every time we help to create a marine. protected area. That's success. When we can ensure that this marine protected area is going to be

financed sustainably over time. So the countries will have the means and the resources to manage these areas and ensure that they are well-enforced and that marine life will come back and will be restored and will help replace the areas around. That's the ultimate success. And the most important thing, not for the pristine areas where nobody lives, but for areas that are near human populations, that those communities believe that these areas are theirs. Enric, I am struck here just in your conversation about how much of this has to take place over a much longer time period. This is not a five-year project. It's not even a decade-long project. You're talking here about conserving our oceans. That is a project that is 20, 30,

even 50 years in the making. It makes me think about a conversation we had with, Chris Tompkins about her foundation and what they're doing across South America. And a lot of her energy and attention right now is going into making sure that when she's gone, what she has been doing continues. Have you thought about that? Chris is one of my heroes. I love her. She's a great friend. And what she's inducted in South America is absolutely extraordinary. In 2014, I had cancer. I had cancer of the kidney. I was lucky that I survived now I have only one kidney

but I had the time to think about what's going to happen next what happens if I go so I build a team they are so good right they really don't mean me much these days unfortunately I'm spending more time in a suit than in a wetland

but I have a fantastic team that can do the work but the key is beyond pristine C is beyond our team we are catalyzers We help achieve the conservation vision of local communities and governments faster. But it is their waters. It is their vision and their commitment.

It is them. We always partner with local scientific organizations. We have also a strong education program to teach kids about what we have learned. And we love to combine the traditional knowledge in these places in the Pacific with our new data to come up with. a more holistic picture because when we go deep especially with our submersible, you know, the deep sea was not known to the old navigators. It's just too deep. I didn't have the means. But now with local partners, we go down and discover together what is beyond the reach of humans without this technology. It's really wonderful to merge these two worlds. There's a lot of knowledge

transfer. What we have seen in our experience, once they are committed to protect these places, they are really committed and we are confident that they will make it happen because the local chief who's able to dive in the submersible or that young girl who's watching the documentary in her school. They are going to be the future leaders of the country, the future managers of these protected areas. So these places are going to be in very good hands. This idea of ownership and the ocean is a really, really interesting. one. What do you wish more people knew or thought about the ocean? What are most of us missing? Well, the ocean is clearly the epitome of Outer Sider of Mine. I would recommend

everybody to watch our documentary Ocean with David Attenborough. Because what we wanted to do in that documentary was to show how everything is connected in the ocean and how we depend on that healthy ecosystem, but then we want people to know what we are doing to the ocean, especially the industrial exploitation. And at the end, we wanted to give a message of hope because the film shows what happens when you protect an area, how everything comes back, and the rest of the ocean is replenished, and fishers improve their livelihoods. It helps us with climate resilience.

So I would encourage everybody listening to your wonderful podcast. to spend 82 minutes watching the film. And not just the 45 seconds of bottom trolling that everyone has seen from that. Congratulations, that has gone everywhere and has been really effective. Isn't that crazy that the first instances of bottom trolling that were documented

were more than 600 years ago, I think in this 14th century, in England. And only now, in 2025, we have seen it underwater for the first time. And now everyone has seen that. So what do you think when you, you know, you both know so much about the ocean? What do you think? What do you feel when you watch those images of the net destroying the bottom of the ocean?

Look, I think it's such a visceral reaction. And that is why it went so viral. That 45 seconds just was everywhere. I think it was just, it was almost like a cellular response. Yeah, yeah. It goes beyond the prefrontal cortex. It's right down at the core of your being, the response to that. It is.

It is. It's in you. It feels like something's been ripped out. There you go. So you do just prove how important it is for people to actually see what we're doing to the ocean. Cellular response. I hadn't heard that one. I love that one.

All right. People should go watch the ocean. We know we've taken up a lot of your time here. We've got one or two last questions for you. I'll hand it back to Amy. First of all, where are you off to next? How can people support? your work? The vessel is in Fiji now. In next year, we're going to be in three more countries

in the Pacific. And we have a long list of people who want to come on our expeditions, but that the list only grows longer. You know, what I would say is that people living on the coast, especially, think about what's in their waters, what's missing in their waters, because most people don't know what's missing. People in the Mediterranean, where I go. People in the Mediterranean, from, when I was a kid, we all thought that hammerhead sharks were something that existed only in tropical seas. But there were hammerheads in the Mediterranean, only that fishing extirpated them more than a century ago. So there is this shifting baseline. What we think is natural is not natural. It has been sliding over time because we started recording the ocean

way after we started degrading it. And if somebody watches the film Ocean with David And things, wow, I love to create a proprietary in our waters. How do I do that? There is a new initiative called Revive Our Ocean. So people can go to revive ourocean.org. And this is a place where local communities will be able to learn what it takes to create their own protected area in their own waters. Oh, I love that. We'll make sure that we put all of that in our show notes. Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. Final question, what does the word hope mean to you, Enraxala? Hope is something we cannot live without.

Hope is the only choice in these moments that are so difficult politically, environmentally, socially. Hope is the lifeline that the world needs. So I will continue listening to your podcast and I will continue keeping that hope alive because the ocean and the natural world can bounce back if we just let it be, if we just give it space and time. Someone like Enric Sala, it's these people that have the capacity to hold our biggest problems and enough hope to keep working for the solution. It's right at that intersection.

And I always think that is so much for one human body to hold. Yeah, I think when you're out there seeing what it is that's being destroyed, it must feel like so much more is at stake. We get disappointed when we hear that news, but can you imagine what it's like for someone like him? I wonder if it's the lows are the low and the highs are higher. Yeah, but then you're just, you're more alive than the rest of us. Yeah, and maybe that is the other ingredient that we pick up on.

Like, these people are just, they're smack bang in the middle of life. I wasn't aware that 96% of fishing takes place. in coastal waters and that's a very interesting piece of feedback for us in terms of how we're reporting. Every single time we report on one of those MPAs

being created in our newsletter that is going to hit different for me from now on. You know, those are real victories and we will report them as such. If you want to find out more about Enric, Pristine Seas or get involved with

the Revive Our Ocean Initiative you'll find all the links in our episode notes. And make sure that you join us next week as we've begin the countdown to the end of this season with Brian Walsh, editorial director at Vox's Future Perfect, where we find out which stories are getting his attention. We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making projects like this podcast possible. If you're interested in finding

out more about our work, check out fixthenews.com. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. This podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Garagal and the Wurundry and Wei Wurong people. If you enjoyed this conversation and would like to support Hope as a verb, make sure you subscribe and leave a review. Thanks for listening.