How To Protect The Ocean

Somewhere on the ocean floor right now, a coral colony has been growing since before the Great Pyramid of Giza was finished. One deep-water black coral off the coast of Hawaii has been dated at 4,270 years old, making it one of the oldest living skeleton-building organisms known to science. A single pass of a bottom trawl net can wipe out that kind of habitat in seconds, and it's a fight that's still being decided this very year at the United Nations.
In this episode, Andrew breaks down why bottom trawling is such a hard problem to regulate. It's rarely the fish stock itself that takes the worst damage. It's the seafloor habitat those fish depend on to hide, feed, and survive, and that habitat can take centuries to rebuild once it's gone. Andrew traces the policy fight behind this back to a failed 2004 push for an outright ban on high seas bottom trawling, the 2006 compromise that did pass (UN Resolution 61/105), and the recurring cycle of reviews since then that have kept tightening the rules bit by bit.
That fight isn't a closed chapter. A UN preparatory workshop on bottom fishing's impact on vulnerable marine ecosystems was held in July 2026, feeding into a full General Assembly review later this year, with advocates pushing for a firm, time-bound end to seamount trawling on the high seas by 2027. Andrew connects it to Canada's own back-and-forth over fish habitat protection in the Fisheries Act, and sets up Friday's interview with the guest who chaired the UN fisheries negotiations that started this whole process.
Takeaways:
Some deep-sea corals have been alive for thousands of years, and a single trawl pass can destroy that habitat in seconds.
Bottom trawling's real damage usually lands on the seafloor habitat fish depend on, not the fish stock itself.
The landmark 2006 UN resolution on bottom trawling (Resolution 61/105) was a hard-fought compromise reached after an outright ban failed in 2004.
International ocean policy almost never arrives finished. It gets built in stages and strengthened through repeated review cycles.
A new UN review is underway in 2026, with advocates pushing for a firm end to seamount bottom trawling by 2027.
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A grad student faces a simple choice: write another term paper, or take a summer internship. She takes the internship, gets assigned to sea turtles, and thirty years later she is in the room for some of the most consequential ocean policy agreements ever negotiated. This episode traces that career from the beginning, and it starts with a realization that shapes everything that follows: sea turtles do not read maps. They cross every border humans have drawn, which means protecting them requires countries to cooperate, not compete.
Andrew walks through the arc of this career step by step. It starts with an anthropology degree and a grad-school detour into public policy, an internship with an NGO in Washington, D.C., then called the Center for Marine Conservation, and a growing understanding that migratory ocean species force international cooperation whether countries want it or not. From there the story moves through the State Department, more than a decade on international tuna negotiations, and eventually a role at the International Sustainable Seafood Foundation (ISSF). Along the way, Andrew connects the story to his own winding path from marine biology researcher to ocean communications manager, and makes the case that careers in ocean conservation rarely move in a straight line.
This episode kicks off a five-part week on How to Protect the Ocean. Tuesday looks at corals nearly as old as the pyramids and the fight to save them. Wednesday covers the High Seas Treaty and the moment the gavel dropped. Thursday breaks down seafood policy and what retailers need to know about what shoppers actually want. Friday brings the full interview with the person at the center of this week's story.
Takeaways:
Careers in ocean conservation rarely move in a straight line. This one started with choosing an internship over a term paper and grew into three decades of international policy work.
Migratory species that ignore national borders, like sea turtles, are the practical reason international cooperation and multilateral ocean agreements exist at all.
Green sea turtle populations are showing real improvement, a genuinely hopeful data point inside an episode that's otherwise about policy and negotiation.
This is episode one of five leading into Friday's full interview with the guest whose career this episode traces.
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Deep sea mining is no longer theoretical. In this episode, Andrew sits down with Matthew Gianni, co-founder and Political and Policy Advisor of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, for an in-depth look at what's actually happening on the seafloor and in the negotiating rooms deciding its fate. Matthew spent years as a commercial fisherman, including five years as a deep sea trawlerman off the Central California coast, before moving into ocean conservation with Greenpeace International and eventually co-founding the DSCC to fight destructive bottom trawling on seamounts. That history shapes everything he has to say about what's coming next.
The conversation covers the science and the politics in equal measure: what seamount trawling studies off Tasmania revealed about how quickly deep coral ecosystems can be destroyed, why the deep sea is far from the "biological desert" some mining proponents describe, and the 2024 discovery of "dark oxygen" being produced by the very polymetallic nodules that mining companies want to extract. Matthew also walks through the current state of play at the International Seabed Authority, including a fresh update from the July 2026 meetings in Kingston, Jamaica, the leadership change from Michael Lodge to Leticia Carvalho, the legal fight over The Metals Company's push for a US mining license outside ISA authority, and why the economics of nodule mining may not add up even on the industry's own numbers.
Whether deep sea mining moves forward is still being decided right now, and Matthew makes the case for why the decisions being made in 2026 will shape the deep ocean for generations. This is a dense, detailed update for anyone trying to understand where deep sea mining policy actually stands, straight from someone who has been in the room for over a decade.
Takeaways:
Matthew Gianni co-founded the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition after years as a commercial fisherman and deep sea trawlerman, then a career at Greenpeace International running its ocean program.
Seamount trawling studies off Tasmania showed how fast deep coral ecosystems can be wiped out once bottom trawling begins.
The 2024 discovery of "dark oxygen" production from polymetallic nodules raises new questions about what deep seabed mining could disrupt before science even understands it.
The International Seabed Authority is legally obligated to act "for the benefit of humankind as a whole," which is central to the current fight over mining regulations.
The Metals Company is pursuing a US mining license through NOAA to bypass ISA authority entirely, a move Matthew calls "unilateral mining" that risks undermining the Law of the Sea Convention.
The economics of nodule mining are being challenged even within the ISA's own analysis, with mined metals representing a small fraction of global terrestrial supply.
A leadership change at the ISA, from Michael Lodge to Leticia Carvalho, has shifted the tone of negotiations, though Matthew says the fundamental disagreements remain unresolved.
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In September 2021, Time magazine profiled Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company (TMC), and his push to mine the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a stretch of international seabed between Hawaii and Mexico. In that profile, Barron called the CCZ "the most desert-like place on the planet," arguing that mining the deep sea does less environmental harm than mining a rainforest because there's supposedly so little life down there to disturb. That single line has been repeated for years as justification for deep sea mining. Andrew puts it to the test.
The science tells a very different story. A 2016 survey of the CCZ measured real, on-site abundance of larger seafloor animals and found meaningful densities of megafauna, plus hundreds of individuals per square meter of smaller sediment-dwelling species. A 2023 species inventory led by the UK's Natural History Museum and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts documented more than 5,000 species in the CCZ, with the large majority entirely new to science. New species are still turning up, including a batch of amphipods described in 2026. And a landmark study on nodule-dependent species found that more than half of the megafauna living in these nodule fields rely directly on the nodules themselves, the very rocks TMC wants to extract, as the only hard surface available to grow on in an otherwise soft, muddy seafloor.
Andrew walks through what happens when the nodules are removed, why TMC appears to be pursuing a path through the Trump administration rather than the International Seabed Authority, and what's at stake for communities near the Northern Mariana Islands, where a new mining lease is moving forward despite more than 60,000 public comments in opposition. This is a fact-check episode: quote first, then the evidence, so listeners can judge for themselves whether "desert" is an accurate description of one of the most biodiverse deep-sea ecosystems studied to date.
Takeaways:
Gerard Barron (CEO, The Metals Company) told Time magazine in September 2021 that the Clarion Clipperton Zone is "the most desert-like place on the planet."
A 2023 Natural History Museum / Pew-funded inventory documented more than 5,000 species in the CCZ, with the large majority new to science.
A 2016 study found meaningful abundance of both megafauna and smaller sediment-dwelling species across CCZ survey sites, not the near-absence of life the "desert" framing implies.
More than half of the megafaunal species in CCZ nodule fields depend directly on the polymetallic nodules as a hard surface to grow on, the same nodules targeted for mining.
A 2025 study of an actual industrial mining trial found significantly lower animal abundance at the disturbed site compared to untouched seafloor nearby.
TMC is pursuing a mining pathway through the Trump administration rather than the International Seabed Authority.
A proposed lease near the Northern Mariana Islands and the Mariana Trench marine protected area has moved forward despite more than 60,000 public comments opposing it.
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Why would someone who watched one deep-sea mining company collapse go back and try it again? That's the question at the center of this episode, and it's not hypothetical. It happened, with the same industry, some of the same licenses, and the same person at the center of it: Gerard Barron, now CEO of The Metals Company (TMC), one of the most prominent and best-funded companies pushing to start commercial deep-sea mining today. This isn't framed as an accusation against Barron specifically. It's a documented sequence of decisions, and by the end, you can decide for yourself what the motive looks like.
Before TMC, Barron was an early investor and promoter behind Nautilus Minerals, a company that pursued seafloor mineral deposits off Papua New Guinea. Nautilus raised hundreds of millions of dollars, including investment from the PNG government itself, before its costs spiraled, it was delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange, and it filed for bankruptcy in 2019. Barron reportedly sold his shares years before the collapse, walking away with a return as high as $30 million, while PNG's government and environment were left holding the damage. Years later, people connected to Nautilus, including Barron, regrouped as Deep Green, which became The Metals Company, and picked up exploration rights in the Clarion Clipperton Zone that had once belonged to Nautilus.
This episode traces that arc from Adstream to Nautilus to TMC, including TMC's push to trigger the ISA's two-year rule, its more recent pursuit of a US mining permit outside the International Seabed Authority process entirely, and Barron's consistent argument that mining the seabed is less environmentally damaging than mining on land. Whether that comparison holds up, and what it means that the environmental cost of Nautilus's failure barely factors into how Barron talks about it now, is the thread running through the whole story.
Takeaways
Gerard Barron, now CEO of The Metals Company (TMC), was an early investor and promoter (not CEO) behind an earlier deep-sea mining venture, Nautilus Minerals, which went bankrupt in 2019.
Nautilus's projected operating costs of about $70 per ton reportedly grew to about $192 per ton, contributing to its delisting from the Toronto Stock Exchange and eventual bankruptcy.
Papua New Guinea's government invested in Nautilus and, according to the country's prime minister, the country spent roughly 300 million Kina (about $72 million USD) on a project later called a "total failure."
Barron sold his Nautilus shares years before the company's collapse, reportedly for as much as $30 million, while PNG's government was still invested.
TMC, which Barron now leads, is pursuing a US permitting path through NOAA and the Trump administration, outside the ISA process.
Long-term recovery data on deep-sea mining damage remains limited; some studies cited in the episode indicate no biodiversity recovery three to four years after mining activity occurred.
Barron has publicly compared seabed mining favorably to land-based mining, but a specific biomass figure he's cited in at least one interview is disputed in this episode as inaccurate.
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