DAVID HELVARG: The Making of an Ocean Activist
Otters, Kelp and the Making of the White House Ocean Climate Action Plan and, Oh Yeah, Beating Rapacious Sea Urchins with Hammers
Hot Globe often talks science but not so much the activists making the science happen on the ground or should we say at the shore. Today we chat with old friend David Helvarg, founder of Blue Frontier, which joins activism and policy. Blue Frontier is probably the premier umbrella coalition for grassroots ocean organizations in the country bringing together some 1200 groups working to save America’s coasts and seas. The Biden White House Ocean Climate Action Plan was largely influenced—goosed would be a better word—by Blue Frontier’s earlier similarly titled Ocean Climate Action Plan.
HOT GLOBE: Dave, you're kind of a landlubber from Queens, New York, if I recall. So how did you get your feet so wet and salty?
DAVID HELVARG: You recall slightly incorrectly. I grew up on Long Island Sound, splashed around there, and I had a fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Olson whose dad was a fisherman and one day she brought in a giant saw-fish bill. She was the first one who got me to realize that Long Island is actually an island. We started harassing my mom to take us to Jones Beach. The real story is, when I was 15, she took us down to the Florida Keys, and I looked out at that aquamarine seashore there.
HOT GLOBE: I thought you went surfing with the Ramones. Or is that just a rumor?
DAVID HELVARG: No, but I went diving with the hammerheads.
HOT GLOBE: Never at a loss for words. You decided to dedicate your life to oceans at a certain point. Tell us about that.
DAVID HELVARG: When I got that mask and snorkel and went to the Keys, I saw my first hammerhead and sea turtles, and I thought I'd grow up to be an oceanographer and then got distracted by the ‘60s and sort of moments and movements. I ended up being a journalist, went off to Northern Ireland and Central America and spent the next 30 years in a divided state where I'd go off to cover wars and epidemics so I could go home and body surf or go for a dive.
The future ocean activist dodges bullets as a war correspondent in Central America.
Anyway, you said my first book correctly was The War Against the Greens. The second book I wanted to write is called Blue Frontier, about the ocean. When it came out, it was one of those turning points in my life. I lost my adventure partner, she'd passed. This was when George Bush, Jr., was ginning up to invade Iraq. I thought I'd go back to war reporting because I knew that was a good solution for depression. I got a call out of the blue from Ralph Nader, who'd read Blue Frontier, the last chapter called “Seaweed Rebellion,” about grassroots activists who have solutions and need to scale up. He offered to help me start a nonprofit.
“I thought we're always going to have wars, but we may not always have coral reefs or kelp forests.”
HOT GLOBE: You've written some poignant opinion pieces on the loss of coral reefs. Let's get emotional for a second.
DAVID HELVARG: I did one piece called “Rage Against the Dying of the Reefs.”
I always get my optimism when I'm coming off bodysurfing or diving onto a beautiful reef. So it's very depressing when you go to places like Florida and Hawaii and Cuba and Fiji and Australia and see bleached coral and dying reefs and algae-covered rock where a living reef had been. I'm more frustrated than despairing, because we know what the solutions are.
It's creating the will to enact them. A Cuban friend took me to see his favorite reef but instead of rainbow fish and live coral it was rubble, and my friend ended up crying on the beach. This is happening everywhere. Now, it's happening to my other favorite habitat, kelp.
HOT GLOBE: What is kelp for our tens of thousands of readers who live in Iowa?
DAVID HELVARG: Kelp is a macroalgae. Half the oxygen we breathe is photosynthesis from algae in the ocean. Big algae forms seaweed and kelp, and really big algae is like the bull kelp and the giant kelp that can grow two feet a day and creates these vast Sherwood forests of the ocean; 25% of the cold water of the world has kelp forests around it. Again, the only reason I go cold-water diving is because I can get into kelp forests which are full of all these fish -- the Garibaldi's that look like a goldfish on steroids--and octopus.
HOT GLOBE: You've likened the loss of kelp to an underwater forest fire, just like the California forest fires on land. There's a cool analogy.
DAVID HELVARG: One of my New York Times opinion pieces talked about California's other forest-fire disaster because what most people, including most people in California, don't realize is 95% of our kelp forests north of the Golden Gate have died off since we had this marine heat wave in 2013 and 2014.
Helvarg amongst the kelp.
HOT GLOBE: Wait, let's stop for a second. 95% since 2013? That's barely a decade.
DAVID HELVARG: It's incredible.
DAVID HELVARG:. Totally climate related. My last book, The Golden Shore: California's Love Affair with the Sea talks about this. We do well in California in terms of coastal and ocean protection, but you can't stop climate change in one state. What happened was there was this intensive marine heat wave - the scientists called it “The Blob.” The warming of the ocean creates localized heat waves. Temperatures went up 5 - 7 degrees off Oregon and California. That was enough to weaken the kelp, because they like cold, nutrient-rich waters. That hot water also supercharged sea star wasting disease, which killed off almost all the sea stars along the coast. In northern California, in Monterey, where we saw those otters, when the kelp gets weakened, the sea stars die off, so one of the sea star’s prey - little purple urchins that eat kelp - came out and started eating the holdfasts, which are the roots for the kelp. Without the sea star predators protecting the kelp, these little purple urchins can just devastate them. In Monterey, as soon as the sea stars died off, the urchins just increased. And remember we no longer have otters, those cute, voracious marine weasels, that used to eat all the urchins killing the kelp. In Northern California, over a century ago, we killed off most of the sea otters. It was the Chinese market. The Chinese empress and her royal court loved sea otter fur, and Captain Cook started it up. The Russians did it, but so did the Americans and the Brits and we wiped out about a million otters from Alaska to Baja.
The sea otters were a keystone species, like the wolves in Yellowstone. They're the wolves of the kelp forest and they keep it healthy. When they were gone, all you had left were these big sea stars to eat the urchins. But when the sea stars all fell apart and died, nothing stopped the urchins.
HOT GLOBE: Only a mountain knows the worth of a wolf, as Aldo Leopold put it.
HELVARG: Now, in northern California, where you had kelp forests, they have what they call urchin barrens. The sea floor for a couple of hundred miles is covered in little pink pincushions. It's hard, because as the waters get cold again, the kelp tries to come back, but the urchins just eat them up. There was a big urchin fishery there for the larger urchins, Red Urchins. That's gone, so
Unemployed urchin fishermen are now being paid by the state to smash these urchins with hammers, clearing out a few acres here and there so the kelp can come back.
My next book is Forest of the Sea: The Story of the World's Kelp Forest, because kelp's the new coral. It's the next habitat that's being beaten down as a result of climate change and nobody really knows about them the way they know about coral reefs.
HOT GLOBE: Can we put kelp back?
DAVID HELVARG: This is the story! We're doing a documentary that should be out later this year called The Sequoias of the Sea, about the unemployed fishermen working with the scientists, with a local harbor master up in Fort Bragg, trying to restore the kelp in different ways. One is creating these acres at a time where they clear the urchins out so that they can plant. They're growing at universities both kelp seeds for replanting and also sea stars for replanting. Then there's a big controversy about relocating the Monterey otters into northern California to guard the newly established kelp forest.
HOT GLOBE: But the bottom line is, can certain species of kelp adjust to warming waters the way that certain types of corals, like those in the Red Sea which seem to be somewhat better adapted to warmer seas?
DAVID HELVARG: That's the question: will the bull kelp north of Monterrey eventually be replaced by the giant kelp in central and southern California? This is the science. When we started Blue Frontier, nobody had heard of ocean acidification. Now, we realize that the pH of the ocean shifted more than it has in 3 million years. There are all these emerging issues. The challenge is, can we fund the research? Can we get together and act? Which I think we can. People not just in Fort Bragg, but up in Puget Sound, the tribes and the scientists and the universities are all working together to restore their kelp forests to what they were historically, because there's been a gradual decline just due to industrialization and development and pollution. So I think it won't come back the same way, but it can come back if we just leave these natural systems alone and reintroduce the sea otters.
“It's like otter reparations! We killed a million otters over time, and they may be, you know, voracious marine weasels, but we owe them. What they give us in return is a healthy ocean ecosystem. Just like the controversy when wolves came back to Yellowstone, everything came back more abundant.”
HOT GLOBE: You wrote basically the Democratic program for the oceans. Then it was adopted by the Biden administration?
DAVID HELVARG: At the beginning of the Biden administration, the President announced he was going to double our offshore wind, and we said, “Yeah, if you double our offshore wind, it will be 1/80 of what the Europeans are putting out. What we really should do is commit to 30GW of offshore wind by 2030.” We pushed the idea. Now the head of NOAA tells me that when he goes out and talks about 30-30, it depends on the audience. Some think he’s talking conservation, others think wind power. What's nice is they're not contradictory. You can have both.
Unfortunately, old is new, and the violent backlash of the Wise Use Movement that I wrote about 30 years ago is out there again. The same intimidation and threats of violence against environmental and other kinds of activists, but it's all connected.
It's the solutions we're talking about. People are now talking about industrial kelp. A new trend in aquaculture is growing kelp for food and biofuel. I could even see a few years from now where you'll have conflict between those people working to restore the natural kelp beds and those people wanting to create kelp farms in the same rocky habitat.
HOT GLOBE: Hot Globe liquidity here. I've known “Doctor” Helvarg since we picked him up hitchhiking on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston in 1970, I think it was.
DAVID HELVARG: And we were troublemakers back then, too.
HOT GLOBE: Not me. I was a quiet, shy sort of person with dignity, and still am, but what I was going to say was you've basically started a kind of a major youth movement around the oceans.
DAVID HELVARG: Across the base of this movement young people are engaging. The message for young people interested in the ocean is just follow your passion. There are so many ways to approach restoring and protecting our planet that I'm not surprised to see young people entering the ocean movement. We’ve got an online directory that lists at least 1200 organizations fighting for our public seas.
HOT GLOBE: Well, we've got to wrap it up, Dave. What's the Blue Frontier phrase?
DAVID HELVARG: “The oceans are rising and so are we.”
HOT GLOBE: To the beach, compañeros!
[Hot Globe Assoc. Editor Michael Janelle assisted with this piece, which has been edited for length and clarity.]
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