An award-winning actor explains his dedication to protecting oceans and ocean life. It started with explaining a sick beach to his kids. Excerpted from “Ted Danson: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do to Save Them,” March 22, 2011.
TED DANSON, Actor; Environmentalist; Author, Oceana
In conversation with GREG DALTON, Director, Climate One
DALTON: What put you on the path to becoming an advocate for the world’s oceans?
DANSON: I grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona. My father was a director, archeologist, anthropologist, teacher; he taught down at the University of Arizona. Then in about ’56 he became the director of the museum and the research center. Scientists from all over the world surrounded us. I was around the digs, I was around skeletons, things like that. It sunk in that there was a lot that came before us; there will be a lot that comes after us. These times that we’re in aren’t just about us; they’re also about our stewardship.
Flash forward to “Cheers” in the mid ’80s. I was getting paid a lot and feeling a little guilty. What do I do? I take a walk along the beach in Santa Monica with my daughters, who are eight and four, and we see a sign that says “No swimming, water polluted.” How do you explain that? I didn’t know. It was a gorgeous day with crystal clear water, but I couldn’t go swimming. So I began to ask some questions.
At the same time I met a man named Robert Sulnick, who was the head of No Oil Inc. They were trying to [prevent] Occidental Petroleum from digging about 60 oil wells in Will Rogers State Beach, and we came up with a way to defeat them. We became great friends and wanted to continue the conversation. We decided to start American Oceans Campaign. Lo and behold, it became a small but respected ocean advocacy group in Washington and L.A. Ten years ago it merged with Oceana to become the largest ocean advocacy group in the world.
DALTON: Some people say that climate change is a bigger threat than overfishing. So let’s talk about the warming oceans and about how oceans can be part of the solution.
DANSON: Let me go back just a hair and say Oceana focuses on fisheries. When you talk about climate change, the impact it will have on fisheries is huge. We’re overfishing the top of the food chain. When you talk about climate change, you’re talking about the bottom of the food chain, and you can see how you could actually squeeze the life out of the oceans.
Ocean acidification is not arguable. We love to debate whether climate change is real in this country. But this is one of those things that is pure fact, pure science. Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve had about 30 percent more carbon dioxide in the ocean than before. The problem is that carbon dioxide changes the pH balance of the oceans so that the oceans turn, ever so slightly, acidic, which means the terrapods, the sea snails, the corals, all of which use calcium to make their shells, can’t make their shells, because the calcium won’t bind together. Then you start to have a big problem as you start to hit the bottom of the food chain. That’s the biggest problem.
DALTON: You’re a marine conservationist. Are you against using the sea as a form of energy, whether as underwater turbines or wind turbines that are off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard or elsewhere?
DANSON: No, I’m not. Clearly everyone is nostalgic for the view they had as a kid. But I would much rather see an ocean windmill in front of me than an oil well, or have to deal with this continued oil policy that creates so many problems.
It’s ironic that most of the oil wells were placed in neighborhoods that were, by and large, poor. They didn’t have the wherewithal to fight them. I started by fighting an oil well in my backyard because I had the time and the money. Now, it’s us who can afford the ocean view who will have to go “Uh,” because it’s the East Coast where you want to put your windmills. We’re facing that in Nantucket now. But absolutely, we should be doing everything possible – wind power, solar – we should be pouring money into research and development to find stuff we don’t even know about before we allow ourselves to continue to drill offshore and put our fisheries, jobs and tourism in jeopardy.
DALTON: Should there be no more offshore drilling, or should it just be done more safely and specifically in non-sensitive areas?
DANSON: My position is no more new offshore drilling, period. Clearly, you’re not going to take the rigs out of the Gulf. But you don’t open up the Arctic Sea. I had this amazing experience in Barrow, Alaska. I got to have an interview with mayor [Edward] Itta. He is in the middle of this fight. He said 12 years ago he got his first indoor bathroom because of oil money. Barrow is tough. That is really subsistence living, and all of a sudden his people were able to have a life that we take for granted because of oil money. Yet their entire culture is based on whaling. Their spiritual heritage is based on whaling, and if you sink an oil well in their sea, you run the risk of destroying their people. While he’s trying to lift up his people he runs the risk of literally destroying his people by allowing offshore oil drills in his area.
DALTON: I’ve been up there, and the people would like a little more comfortable living. Oil, or gas, can bring that more comfortable living. Do people see the risks or do they just see the money in front of them that may help their material well-being?
DANSON: It’s really hard; it’s wonderfully humbling. It is easy to say no more offshore drilling to you guys [in San Francisco], but go to Louisiana, go to Texas, go to Alaska and say no more oil drilling. You’re saying, “I shouldn’t be allowed to put food on my table, I shouldn’t be allowed to get my kids through college, so you can be right about no more offshore drilling?” It’s very humbling, it’s very hard when you’re talking about people’s livelihoods.
Mayor Itta’s position was that you have to let science lead the way; he means that genuinely. If you let science and common sense lead the way, you’re not going to sink an oil well. Look what happened in the Gulf. Accidents do happen.
DALTON: Let’s talk about overfishing. What are some of the big drivers of overfishing? As India, China and emerging economies continue to grow, the appetite for animal protein is growing.
DANSON: We’re being wasteful and destructive. For example, 90 percent of the fishermen across the world do it the old-fashioned way that has been working for centuries. But 90 percent only catch 10 percent of the fish. The 10 percent of the workforce that catch the 90 percent of the fish work on those huge, international, deep sea trawlers. So just talking about jobs, you do the right thing and, immediately, you create way more jobs.
These trawlers trawl about half the size of the United States every year and they have these huge nets – some of the nets’ mouths could fit a 747 into them – and they used to have to lift the nets when it came to rocks, because it would tear the nets, but they don’t have to anymore. They can roll along the bottom with these huge heavy rollers – it’s so sophisticated – and they churn up what’s underneath and they catch what’s left in their nets. They can take coral reefs, rocks, nooks and crannies, which are the nurseries where the little fish become the big fish that we like to eat, and turn it into a gravel pit. So when you attack the nurseries at that level you will have an impact.
Then the stuff the net catches is put on board, and a third of what the world catches is thrown overboard. So there is a huge amount of waste and a huge amount of destruction, because the fleets are so over-subsidized. This country, by the way, doesn’t do this. So you get Democrats and Republicans all agreeing, which is wonderful.
It’s an $80- to $100-billion a year landed-fish catch worldwide. Twenty-five billion is subsidized, and that’s crazy for any business; it’s like $30 billion, but $5 billion of that goes to science and safety, so $25 billion goes to trying to catch more fish, to going out and doing the wrong thing even more. If you cut subsidies, half the boats in the water would be gone. That’s a really good thing.
DALTON: These are state subsidies from other countries trying to support jobs?
DANSON: Exactly. The good news is that The World Trade Organization has language in this Doha round [of global trade negotiations] that for the first time ever is willing to cut subsidies. It’s tricky because everyone agrees that you have to cut subsidies, but “It’s not my boats, its his boats over there.”
So that’s the argument: Do not fish at barely the margin that it’s sustainable. You need a big buffer zone because it could collapse. Nine out of the 10 big fish that were around when I was a kid in the ’50s are gone. And 90 percent of the tuna is gone, 90 percent of the sharks gone, marlin, swordfish, king mackerel – all gone. So it’s not that we’re fishing with 10 percent of the fisheries that we had in the ’50s, but it’s way diminished. We’ve been pretty good, in this country, about not overfishing what’s left of this huge amount we had in the ’50s.
DALTON: Has that affected the price? Usually, when something gets that scarce, the price goes up and that has some effect on consumption.
DANSON: Someone had this great line: “We are eating what our grandfathers used to call trash fish.” We would have never gone after that ugly fish we’ve cleverly called orange roughy, and then gone, “Awe, orange roughy.” We’re eating way down the food chain, and because you can keep putting something on the plate, it looks to us as though everything is fine.
We thought aquaculture was, and will be, the answer. Salmon farming is a big problem. Someone told me in Washington State they are getting better at it. But the problem is most of our salmon comes from Chile, where they grind up three to five pounds of wild fish to make one pound of farm salmon. We’re here going, “What’s the problem?” and in the Southern Hemisphere’s local markets you can barely find any fish, and if you do, they’re smaller. And there is a huge amount of antibiotics; they’re getting better at that, but these are antibiotics that we take as last-ditch antibiotics for when we get really sick. In the meantime, they have been proliferated into the fish farms to the point that by the time the virus gets to us, it’s like, “Big deal, I saw that a long time ago.”
DALTON: What transparency mechanisms are in place so people can find out what they are eating, if they choose to eat fish?
DANSON: Here is one of the things you can do that will make you feel empowered: Become a smart consumer. The Bush administration [said] one out of six – I think it’s currently at one out of ten – women in this country have too much mercury in their system. If they are within childbearing years, they are at risk of giving birth [to a child] with neurological damage. It comes mostly from the fish you eat. It gets into the fish in this country from the coal-burning plants in the Midwest or the chlorine plants that use mercury in the manufacturing of the chlorine molecule. It gets into the gills of the little fish, it’s water soluble, and by the time you eat the big fish it has so much mercury in it that it’s really not good for you. So become an informed consumer.
You have the great Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch. You can go online and it will update you on what is healthy for you to eat. You can go to the supermarket and ask them, because in California, by law, they have to post what is healthy for you to eat. Do it for yourself, do it for the fisheries and do it for your kids. You’re only supposed to have the equivalent of a can of tuna a week, at most, if you’re a woman or child. So educate yourself. You have a huge amount of power. When you’re at a restaurant, go “Sorry, is this farmed salmon?” If they say yes, say, “Sorry, wild salmon is a yes, but not farmed salmon.” You need to become an international activist. You can do the consumer thing, it’s the right thing to do, and it makes you feel empowered. But most of these are policy issues that are governmental and worldwide. So how can you do this in your busy, crazy day? Go online to oceana.org; go to the part where you can become an e-activist. They’re called Wavemakers in our organization. You click a few buttons, here and there, and without even donating any money you agree to become an e-activist.
When something happens, in Spain or in this country, we’ll send you a blast and you’ll agree to do this or that. It was 60,000 of you who encouraged the West Coast fishing councils to put aside over 140,000 square miles of ocean floor to bottom trawling – no more bottom trawling in this sensitive area.
DALTON: I believe President Bush set aside a huge reserve off the shore of Hawaii. What are some of the top areas that you feel should be preserved that are not currently being preserved?
DANSON: Some people say 10 percent of the world’s oceans need to be set aside. I know Oceana is mapping out all along the West Coast areas that have import to the fisheries. Whether it is nurseries or breeding grounds, things have to be preserved to make healthy fisheries. Then they will make their recommendations.
Just as an example of how effective that is: CNN had a story about Kenyan fishermen who had big grins on their faces because Somali pirates had scared away industrial fishing fleets for about five years in that area. So the fish came back overwhelmingly. I’m not recommending Somali pirates, but it shows that, given the chance, fisheries will rebound. Same thing happened after World War II in the North Atlantic. The fish stock just exploded.
DALTON: How about the cruise line industry? They’re another source of ocean pollution.
DANSON: One of the first things that we did at Oceana was to engage Royal Caribbean. These things are like floating cities, and they go to the most beautiful cities in the world. They go to the reefs; they go to the precious places. I think it was Royal Caribbean to whom Alaska said, “Don’t come in anymore,” because they weren’t treating their sewage enough to not be hurting the little areas that they were going to, so they went off and changed a number of their boats.
We engaged them and said, “Will you do all of your boats?” And they said “No,” and we had a big campaign. They now have put $150 million into changing their entire fleet so that their sewage treatment is top of the line. What’s sad is we said, “Great, now can we publicize that?” and they said, “No.” They have an agreement with the other fleets that says anyone that does anything good environmentally will not tout it to embarrass the others. Which is too bad.
