Andrea Macdonald Founder ideaXme interviews George Duffield Co-founder, with Charles Clover and Chris Gorell Barnes, of Blue Marine Foundation (Blue). Blue is a global marine conservation charity based in London. Its objectives are to ensure the protection of at least 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030. With a team of only 30 people, they develop models of sustainable fishing proving that low-impact fishing benefits marine life, local fishers and communities. They restore marine habitats to revive and protect vulnerable and threatened species and to sequester carbon. Moreover, they tackle unsustainable fishing by highlighting poor practice and develop solutions that benefit the oceans and the local people whose livelihood’s depend on it.
Mobilising both the public, government and the commercial sector to both understand the sea and change human behaviour are central to all of the above.
George Duffield talks to ideaXme about the importance of the world’s oceans to maintain the health of the planet and all living things on it. He highlights the threats and obstacles that make it challenging to protect the world’s oceans. He shares with us the complexities of protecting the High Seas, which make up the largest portion of the oceans, as they lie beyond national legal jurisdictions. George talks of UN’s objective to create legislation to protect the High Seas by creating a Law of the Oceans in 2021.
He tells us of The End of the Line book and documentary that inspired him to co-found Blue Marine Foundation with Chris Gorrel Barnes and Charles Clover who wrote the book and narrated the documentary with Ted Danson. George reports how Blue Marine Foundation has secured protection for 4 million square kilometres of ocean. He discusses recent partnerships created with Barclays Bank and Shackleton clothing to support Blue Marine Foundation’s ongoing initiatives to protect the world’s oceans. Finally, George talks of the necessity to incentivise business to protect the world’s oceans and how he is creating an oceans impact fund with Chris Gorell Barnes to that effect.
The Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: Today, we’re going to talk about the world’s oceans. One of the reasons is that the United Nations has declared 2021 to 2030 as the Decade of Ocean science for Sustainable Development. The reason being the world’s oceans are at the centre of the survival of all people on this planet. Today I’m going to talk to the co-founder of the Blue Marine Foundation.
Blue Marine Foundation have managed to secure four million square kilometres of the world’s oceans.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:00:57] In your words, who are you?
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:01:01] Hello Andrea. My name is George Duffield. I am a marine conservationist. I’m a marine investor and I’m a film producer.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:01:11] Can you take us through the highlights of the Blue Marine Foundation within the context of this extremely important decade?
The End of The Line
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:01:20] Well, first of all, I’m a co-founder of the Blue Marine Foundation. I started it with a gentleman called Chris Gorell Barnes, and then we brought on a brilliant writer called Charles Clover. So, the three of us founded it, I just need to clarify that.
Blue has been in existence for 10 years and our laser focus is restoring ocean health, and in particular we do this through addressing overfishing. When people think about the ocean initially, they’re probably drawn to the plastic crisis and they think, oh, no, it’s full of awful plastic bits. Actually, the number one threat to the global ocean is overfishing because if you take every living thing out of it, then its ability to function collapses. So, in essence, if we over fish, it doesn’t matter what plastic you put in it, it’ll be a dead baron ocean anyway. So, the number one thing is to fix the overfishing crisis and that’s what Blue has been doing. So, we started by creating very large marine protected areas. When I made a film about this called The End of the Line, 0.1% of the world’s ocean was protected, so 99.9% of the ocean was fishable.
Blue Marine’s Goal To Protect 10% of the World’s Oceans by 2020
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:02:36] We set the goal with a network of other NGOs of getting to 10% of world’s ocean protected by 2020 and in fact, we only missed that in December by a fraction of a percent. So, we are very nearly 10% protected. So that is an exponential improvement in the amount of ocean saved or at least under protection. So, Blue has played a role, a key role in a network of NGOs in getting governments to protect very large areas of the ocean. We’re talking about protected areas the size of countries and typically in remote, distant places where the population pressure is less and where the fishing is less. So, our basic idea is, if you’re trying to save the rainforest, you don’t replant the rainforests, you save what hasn’t been cut down, and we’re doing the save in the sea. We’re trying to save the parts of the ocean that are still intact, that are still relatively pristine, that have a lot of sharks, a lot of big fish and we’re trying to save those before we go on and regenerate the stuff that’s already been destroyed. So that’s our general philosophy. Then the other thing we’ve done very effectively is work with fishermen to fish properly, because there’s two ways to approach fishermen. One, you treat them as the enemy and you tell them off and you lecture and you hector them and they don’t like you and you get into a fight and nothing happens, or the other is you sit down and you say, look, you’ve got to earn a living. The ocean has to be healthy. Let us work together and find a way. And in fact, we’ve done that in England and we’ve been amazingly successful at it. The fact is that smart fishermen understand that a healthy ocean is a better business, and there’s no one aligned against the fishermen catching more fish if there are more fish. So, we manage sustainable fishing projects, and we protect large areas of the ocean. That’s our focus.
Blue Marine’s Model for Creating Sustainable Oceans
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:04:36] Could you talk about one of the models for sustainability.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:04:44] They vary, and this is the complexity of it. For example, in our very large marine protected areas, we initially did a project called Chagos. This is a fabulous place in the Indian Ocean below the Maldives, the British Indian Ocean territories, which have been uninhabited since the Chagossians were evacuated, which has nothing to do with the Marine reserve. They are pristine ecosystems and therefore the model there was to replace the fisheries income that the government was receiving with philanthropic income and shutdown the fisheries licences and essentially to pay for people not to be able to fish. So that’s one model and the Americans have done that very successfully. They buy up fishing licenses and then they don’t use them. So that’s one way to protect areas. We’ve done another model in Ascension, which is, again, an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, an extraordinary place. There’s a lot of sharks there, which is rather wonderful, I love sharks. There, we’ve set up an endowment fund to again replace the lost fisheries income that the local community relies on to basically pay for their existence. So, in all cases, it’s about replacing fisheries income with something else.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:06:05] Then in the working fishing example of Lyme Bay, which is really our flagship project for how to get fishermen to fish sustainably, what we did there is a bit more complicated, but in essence we helped them access the market better. So, they were landing warm fish, un-frozen fish and selling them cheaply.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:06:27] In return for accessing a very large ice machine, which was the size of a building that could fill 30 boats a day with ice, so this is not your average gin and tonic ice machine. This is the industrial ice machine. In return for being allowed to access that ice and signing up to a really strict code of voluntary behaviour, then they could use the ice, they could have frozen fish, which would work a lot more and cold fish, which work a lot more. We help them in the branding exercise to directly connect to the restaurants in London who want the sustainable fish and a good story. So, we improve their margins, we improve their product, and in return they change the way they fish. Now that has been running 8 years and over those 8 years, to make it simple, the fishermen are making twice as much money, catching half as many fish. So, the pressure on the ecosystem is diminished. They are making more money. There are more fish in the sea and it’s a virtuous circle.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:07:29] It’s easier for them to catch their quota, so they spend less money going out to sea. They spend less carbon burning fuel going out to sea, and the fish go up, their incomes go up and it’s a win win, win, win, win. And it’s an amazing gold standard model for how you fish sustainably.
Central Role Oceans Play to Protect All Life on the Planet
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:07:49] The fishing industry aside, could you explain to the audience the essential importance of the ocean to protect all life on this planet in as far as protecting against global warming, acting as a carbon sink and fighting climate change.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:08:18] Yeah, Andrea you’re absolutely right. I go into the nerd stuff instantly. The big picture is the planet. The ocean is the lungs of the planet. You know, half of every breath we take comes from the ocean. The ocean is absorbing 80% of the heat that we’re producing from global warming and a billion people around the world depend on seafood for protein every day. Hundreds of millions of people rely on the ocean as their livelihood, and the reality is if we lose the ocean, we lose the planet. The fight for global warming is going to be won and lost in the sea.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:08:55] John Kerry, who’s just been appointed by Biden as the Climate Czar and thank God he’s arrived. His quote was essentially: “If we don’t save the ocean, we don’t solve climate change, and if we don’t solve climate change, we lose the ocean.” It’s all going to happen in the sea and the scale is there and the marine ecosystem is the lungs of the planet and if we break it and we’re very close to breaking it, then the sea dies, and it turns into an algal bloom and we get de-oxification of the whole system and then everything fails. The whole thing fails.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:09:33] What is very frustrating to me is that so few people understand how little it takes to save the sea and how little it takes to destroy it. It’s a very finely balanced structure and overfishing in particular and the pumping into the sea of pollutants is really close to completely destroying the system. We’ve got to address it immediately. In fact, when it comes to carbon, the solution to global warming is in the sea. This is my pet thing and my focus, I think, for the rest of my life now, is carbon in the ocean.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:10:09] We have to sequester to fix global warming. People who say you don’t need to sequester are dreaming in a fantasy world. We will be emitting carbon for our lifetimes, probably for our children’s lifetimes. I mean, we are so far away from not emitting carbon it’s laughable. People don’t have to change their existence, people should be able to fly, people should be able to travel. I’m not stopping any of that. So, what do we need to do? We need to sequester. We need to lock carbon out of the atmosphere and the only way to do that on a planetary scale is in the ocean because the ocean is the only place with the surface area with the footprint to do it. If you try and do it on land, you’re immediately competing with other people’s interests, where they live, where they grow crops, where they want to move to or to nature itself, where there’s a rainforest, et cetera. You want to sequester at scale on land, but you can in the sea, and we need to be investing in that technology. We need to be creating continent sized floating rafts of kelp, within which you can have amazing fisheries, it could even pay for itself, that kind of a system. We need to be pumping our focus into the ocean to draw CO2 out of the atmosphere and that’s how we’re going to save the planet. So, the ocean is front and centre of everything we do right now.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:11:32] Two thirds of the world’s oceans are the High Seas. Could you talk to the audience, a little of the High Seas in comparison to territorial waters and also the importance of having international law in place, a law of the oceans this year in 2021?
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:11:54], Absolutely. So, the High Seas are the bits of the ocean that don’t belong to any nation. So, each country has a 200-mile economic zone. Outside of that 200 miles is the High Seas. In an extraordinary kind of legal manoeuvre in the 1960s, the UN decided that the High Seas were essentially of no importance. They assigned the High Seas to a commissioner who sits in Jamaica and apparently has one desk and a telephone. From that desk and telephone, he runs something like 60% of the surface of the earth.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:12:28] Consequently, there is no legislation around it, and it’s literally the Wild West, there’s been some amazing stories and news and research about the criminality on the High Seas. So, let alone the ecosystem damage, people are being murdered, exploited and treated like slaves. Horrendous things are happening on the High Seas. So, from a human rights perspective, there needs to be a law for the High Seas just to stop the abuse of these poor fishermen who are often captured and kept captive for a decade on these boats and never come off, and that fish is ending up in your shop. You know, you’re eating the fish that these slaves are catching. So, it’s a human rights crime of the first order, number one. Number two, it is being decimated by any fleet with the capacity to take it.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:13:19] So, the Chinese are particularly bad at this. The Spanish are bad as well. There are many very large fleets that are out there taking as much as they can from the High Seas with no regard for what is sustainable or what is ecologically sensible. It’s the Wild West and we need to do something about it.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:13:37] Now, the only good news is that most of the biodiversity of the ocean is on the edges. Fish like shallow water. They like the crinkly bits. They like to hide in bays and fjords and such forth. So, I have heard that 90% of the fish are within 10 kilometres of the shore. I think that’s not probably entirely accurate, but it’s clear that the majority of fishing effort does work close into shore. So, the High Seas is a little bit misleading in that there aren’t that many fish there, but it needs to be protected. The other piece of this is deep sea mining. One of the big problems with the world is everybody thinks that electric batteries are the solution and I’m afraid electric batteries are just the next problem. They’re clearly better than carbon or oil, but the Teslas require minerals that can only be got by ripping the jungle up.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:14:38] You’ve got to go to the Congo, and you’ve got to destroy it to build a Tesla or Peru or somewhere like that. So, there is, it turns out, a large amount of these minerals sitting around on the deep seabed and businesses, the Chinese, again, some American companies are starting to really focus on mining the deep seabed. The problem with that is the deep seabed is the last single ecosystem on the planet that hasn’t been trashed by humanity and we have no idea what will happen if we mine it. In particular, the concern is that we will stir up millions of years of carbon sedimentation, all the bits in the ocean that have died sink to the bottom and sit for eternity doing nothing. If we deep sea mined it, that will stir it up and it will come up through the water column and through a very complicated process, evaporate back into the atmosphere. So, conceivably, deep sea mining will release megatons of carbon that have been previously locked up. It’s for that reason, because we have no idea, that a lot of people in the High Seas debate are calling for a moratorium on deep sea mining. High Seas protection is about human rights, it’s about overfishing, and it’s about deep-sea mining and not trashing what we don’t yet understand.
Damage to Oceans Created by Government Subsidies
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:15:58] Can you talk a little bit about the enormous damage that the billions of pounds of subsidies do in supporting people who are fishing the seas?
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:16:12] Yeah, of course. Subsidies are just a ridiculous situation. When you understand it, it does nothing but annoy you. Essentially, we are using taxpayers’ money to pay fishermen to go out and destroy a taxpayer owned asset. We ourselves, the taxpayer, are paying for people to rob what is our birth rite by overfishing the [00:16:39] fisheries.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:16:42] Fishermen don’t own fish. Fish Belong to everybody. So, why are we paying them to destroy this resource that belongs to us? If we took away the subsidies, which
billions and billions of pounds a year, if we took away the subsidies to the global fishing fleet, we would probably fix overfishing overnight. As recently as last year, the EU paid to fund a whole new fleet of super trawlers for the EU fishing fleet, which is one of the worst fishing fleets in the world who are categorically, conclusively overfishing tuna in the Indian Ocean to a catastrophic level. Why has the EU taxpayer funded a whole new selection of super trawlers to go out and destroy the species against all the scientific advice?
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:17:32] Subsidies are inexcusable and should be banned immediately but the politicians are terrified of the fisheries and don’t have the courage to do it.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:17:44] In this highlighted decade by the United Nations focusing on ocean science, which areas of ocean science do you think we need to really focus on?
Role of Ocean Science
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:17:58] Well, you might be asking the wrong person because I’m not a scientist and in fact, my whole philosophy is less science, more action. There are people who spend their life and respect to them, I agree with them. But they are spending their life measuring the decline of sharks. Now, we don’t need to measure the decline of sharks. They are being hammered. What we need to do is spend money convincing the Chinese to stop eating them. We know what’s going wrong with the world, less studying, more action. So, that’s my sort of global framework.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:18:33] Having said that, there is a need for a lot of science on the carbon issue. If we can prove the view of intact ecosystems for carbon sequestration, so if we can prove how much carbon is captured in a healthy marine ecosystem with kelp and seals, fish, turtles and everybody coexisting, thriving, essentially a rainforest underwater. If we can prove the carbon value of that and then sell those credits, then we can monetise people not destroying the planet and that’s how we can save the sea. We can get corporations who need carbon credits to fund, effectively leaving the sea alone. Then we can save the ocean. So, that needs science. I’m all for that. So, could they please do that?
What All Of Us Can Do To Protect The Oceans
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:19:24] Ok, let’s talk more action. What can the general public do outside of the science fields? What can the general public do?
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:19:38] Well, the first most important thing from an ocean perspective is to think about what you’re eating. We have to be very careful about what we eat. There’s such a mixed message about this. On the one hand, seafood is brilliant and it’s healthy and it’s apparently a very low carbon protein and much better than beef, all of that. But on the other hand, there are all types of seafood that are really, really bad to eat. The golden rule is don’t eat anything bigger than a baby. If your fish is bigger than a baby, don’t eat it. Right? That immediately eliminates marlin, swordfish, bluefin or any of the big fish. Forget it. To be fair, since I started this process, I haven’t seen marlin or swordfish in the supermarket for years. I mean, the answer is they’re almost gone, that’s why, but you mustn’t eat anything big.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:20:33] Then the next thing is you’ve got to think about fish farming, and you’ve got to think, do I want to be supporting an industry that is pretty toxic and pretty polluting? Now, there are exceptions and some for example, the Norwegians are very good with the salmon. They’re really paying attention because it’s so important to their economics.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:20:58] There are other people perhaps slightly closer to England, further north, but close, who are not as good and who are really pumping a lot of pollution into the ocean and are over expanding their capacity and are flooding the sea with sea lice, which kill wild salmon. You really should cut back on your farmed salmon and you should eat less, and sushi should be the rarest possible treat. You should eat sushi once a month, twice a year. You shouldn’t be able to go to a petrol station and buy sushi. I mean, that is wrong. That is why the fish are being destroyed. In 20, 30 years’ time, there’ll be no fish left in the sea at the current trajectory. We have to change this concept of sushi being all pervasive and all accessible. It isn’t. It’s a luxury item. I think you’ve got to think about what you eat. That’s my message to people. Then obviously there’s all the other stuff about carbon and global warming.
The Blue Marine Yacht Club and the London to Monaco Bike Ride
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:22:02] Ok, continuing the theme of action, can you go through all the other things that you were doing? For example, the London to Monaco bike ride, the Blue Marine Yacht Club and seeding lobster beds. Can you go through the other action?
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:22:35] We’re about 30 and we continue to expand. There is no doubt we’re in the right place at the right time. We’re having a moment and we can’t rely on it lasting, but we are we are really expanding well. Blue is a UK global NGO, and we do what it takes to get money in and to get attention. Part of our focus when I started is, we got together, and we thought about who the world’s richest people who cares about the ocean and you overlap them, and you’ve got people with very large boats.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:23:17] So, our focus has always been let’s go for the super yacht community because the people who enjoy those boats, the people who build those boats, the people who service those boats, that ecosystem of very substantial wealth, if they don’t save the sea, who will? They profit from it and they enjoy it. If they’re not going to step up, why should somebody on the street who’s worried about putting a meal on their plate, about cancer, about ageing, about AIDS, about Africa and the classic charitable causes, how can we go to them and say they help us?
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:23:53] On the other hand, we can go to people with big boats and say, listen, you’ve got an amazing boat don’t you think you should be doing something to help with marine conservation. So, that’s been our focus. So, the London to Monaco bike ride is where we go from London where we exist and we end up in Monaco, which is really the epicentre of the super yacht community globally. We try and raise attention and funds around that ride and it’s very much for the super yacht community and people around that.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:24:21] Some of the other things we’re doing at Blue, like the oyster restoration project, is a brilliant piece of ecosystem management. Essentially, England used to have the largest oyster fishery in the world. The North Sea used to be gin clear, you used to be able to sail from England to Holland and you could see the bottom the whole way because of these incredible oyster beds. What oysters do is they clean up the water. They secure the mud, and they stop all the muck, and they filter the water, and it makes the ecosystem so healthy. They’ve all gone all of them billions and billions and billions is gone.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:25:01] So we are slowly beginning a reseeding program starting in The Solent, but also in partnership with wind farms, because you could put oysters around wind farms because you can’t do anything else with a wind farm, you can’t fish. So, we’re slowly expanding out these oyster beds with an attempt to take the ecosystem back 100 years. All of this is just going back to where we were, which was an abundant, healthy ocean. That’s a great project.
Ocean Impact Fund
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:25:31] Then personally, what I’m doing is I’ve partnered again with the co-founder of Blue, Chris Gorell Barnes, and we’ve started an ocean impact fund. So, what we’re doing now is we’re raising money to invest in Ocean Technologies because philanthropy is great and it’s amazing and it can do things normal money can’t do. But there is a finite amount of philanthropy in the world, and in particular, the amount of people giving to the ocean is vanishing. There are a few dozen really big ocean donors and that’s it. So, how do we scale up? The answer is we make it profitable. If you can make something profitable than everybody piles in. We are investing in businesses that will build sustainability in the oceans. So good fisheries, good aquaculture, different ways of making farmed salmon, for example. From that, we hope to grow the blue economy. We hope to bring in the billions of pounds that we need, not just the millions, but the billions of pounds we need to save the planet.
Blue Marine Foundation And Shackleton Clothing Partnership
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:26:35] Can you talk to us also about the partnership with the Shackleton brand of clothing?
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:26:42] Yeah, they’re brilliant. This is beginning to happen more and more for Blue. Brands come to us and say that we really like what you’re doing. Can we partner with you? I always want our logo on the item but never mind. So, Shackleton’s brand is around the explorer Shackleton. He was of course famous for his Antarctic expeditions. But they are trying to generate awareness around the MPAs. So, Antarctica is in a very bizarre place at the bottom of the world and it’s owned or managed by a collection of countries. They’re under a group called Calamar.
[00:27:22] They are only managed by consensus. Everybody has to agree. The problem with that is you’ve got the Russians in there and the Chinese in there. And of course, they don’t agree with anybody. In particular, what they don’t want to do is stop fishing because there are very profitable fisheries in Antarctica. It’s one of the last places left that has been trashed, partly because it was so difficult and expensive to get to. So, groups of people are trying to protect Antarctica and there’s a big push to do The Weddell Sea, for example, and it keeps getting knocked back because the Russians veto it. The Chinese veto it or in some cases, I think even the Americans did something bizarre. But anyway, Shackleton as a brand is trying to mobilise public awareness around these campaigns and have partnered with us to do that. We’re really grateful for their support and if somebody wants to buy their amazing Parka, which I think I’m going to have to buy, then a piece of the money goes to Blue. So that’s the kind of corporate time we’re always looking for. It’s a way to help brands help us.How To Create Marine Protected Areas?
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:28:30] Could you talk to us about the process through which one has to go in order to reach the goal of marine protected area (MPA)?
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:28:43] How does it work or, is it different in each case? Is there an actual process?
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:28:49] Well, there is and one of the reasons why Blue has succeeded is because we are dealing with the UK government. All marine conservation of any scale involves governments because the governments control the sea. Now, if it was as simple as buying the sea, we could make enormous progress. The Americans have a fantastic conservation international, the Nature Conservancy, and they have these models where they buy land and then they protect it. Now, that works fine if you can buy land. That doesn’t work at all in the ocean. You can’t buy the ocean. So, all you can do is persuade the government to change law around the use of the ocean. It’s always about government and therefore it’s about which government you’re dealing with and say what you like about England, but we actually have a very sophisticated, civilised rule of law system and we can get things done. Now, I have friends who come to me and say, look, is desperately sad situation going on off the coast of Ethiopia. Can we create a marine protected area? But I can’t personally, I can’t engage with the government of Ethiopia to get a binding law passed that you can then protect and run a program around and enforce.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:30:06] So, the answer to the question is, you create a marine protected area by getting the government to change the law, to allow that area to essentially shut fishermen out of that area or shut users out of that area. In many cases, you can do that. But then the question is, how do you enforce it, and unfortunately, a lot of marine conservation, especially in other parts of the world, there are these things called paper parks, where the government, in a bid to look good, they declare a massive marine protected area. Oh, we protected millions of square kilometres and then they don’t do anything about it. So, they signed a piece of paper and they do nothing. The fishermen fishing, the European fleets keep coming in and bottom trawling. The Chinese use the super trawlers. Nobody does anything, and that is a paper park. So, you not only have to get the government to say we’re protecting this area, then you actually have to protect it. In fact, that’s where the philanthropy comes in, because what we found is that the governments are bankrupt almost without exception and whilst they’re all too happy to agree to protect an area, they can’t afford to do so. But if you can bring in private money, philanthropic money to run protection, then you can actually achieve the result you want, which is a protected area. So, it’s a little bit of a law and it’s a little bit of activity, let’s put it that way.
Passion For The Sea
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:31:32] How did this passion for the sea start? The documentary, was it made in 2009?
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:31:38] Yes, so I was and am film producer, although the film producing side of my life has fallen away.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:31:46] I read this book called The End of the Line, and it changed my life. But before that, I was really inspired and attracted to nature by two artists called Olly and Suzi. Olly and Suzi are amazing artists, and I would actually encourage you to have them on the show.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:32:06] They paint wild animals in wild and the sort of living Damien Hirst is the way I’ve always pitched them. They work together and it’s an amazing experience to see the work. I got to travel with them because I basically fell in love with them both, and I got to travel with them around the world documenting their process. We were actually in the Galápagos and we were diving on Darwin’s Arch, which if anybody’s ever dived the Galápagos , they will know that is the greatest dive site on earth. You can see four whale sharks and 100 hammerheads and 50 seals in one dive, and it makes everything else just look rubbish. Anyway, there I was in Darwin’s Arch and a whale shark came up to me and it literally stopped next to me and looked at me with its eyes. It must have been a minute, but it felt like a year. I mean, it was such an extraordinary moment for me, and I sort of surfaced from that dive and I never stopped thinking about the ocean ever since. So that was extremely powerful.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:33:10] Then I read The End of the Line and I knew immediately I had to make the film. I’d make films before, but I knew I had to make this film. I called the author and he said, Oh, I’m so sorry, this is Charles Clover. He said, I’m so sorry. I just licensed the book to another producer called Claire and I happen to know Claire. So, I called her up and I said, Claire, we’ve got to make this together and she was nice enough to let me join her. Then we made the film, and the film was a success in as much as a film about overfishing can be a success. It’s not Spiderman. What we then did is and if there’s anything I’ve done that’s inspired other people to do similar, it’s that we took this film and never stopped working on it. So, we have spent 10 years continuing the mission of the film through Blue to reach people, to educate people about overfishing and to basically achieve meaningful campaigning results in the overfishing sphere.
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:34:15] I was inspired by Olly and Suzi, I was inspired by the book and then I just spent a whole decade and the next 20 years of my life fighting for this one thing to just try and make a difference.
Obstacles To Protecting The Oceans
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:35:12] What are the obstacles to you achieving the absolute pinnacle with the Blue Marine Foundation?
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:35:22] The obstacle to anybody achieving anything in conservation is obviously resources. But the number one thing we all face, and this is not just my opinion, not just Blue’s experience, this is everybody trying to do anything and it is poor leadership. How as a society are we going to save ourselves if our leaders act the way they do? So, the block on Blue succeeding beyond our wildest dreams, is government, is leadership, is a lack of attention from politicians.
How To Make Politicians Better?
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:36:57] Somehow, we need to figure out how we make politicians better. Do we run an X Prize for politicians? How do we lure people into politics who actually can make a difference because it’s appalling what’s happening right now.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder of ideaXme: [00:37:37] In the short to medium term, how can the public help you, how can they donate to your cause? Maybe you could provide some details on the process.
Donate To The Blue Marine Foundation
George Duffield, Co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation: [00:37:51] I mean, please, you can donate to www.bluemarinefoundation.com. There’s a donate now button.
Blue Marine Foundation’s Corporate Partnership with Barclays Bank
[00:37:59] We’re looking for corporate partners. If you work at a company and you want to do something for the ocean, please come to us. We’ve just done an amazing deal with Barclays where we really aligned with them and they’ve given us a substantial amount of money and funding a lot of projects for a lot of years and they’re really moving the needle with us on that. What would be great is to connect with businesses that want to make a difference, because I think they’ve got the resource and they’ve got the long-term vision to back organisations that are actually achieving change. People are having such a hard time right now, I don’t want people to give me £20, but if they can get that company to start thinking about marine conservation and their role in saving the ocean and therefore saving the planet, that would be brilliant.Credits: Andrea Macdonald founder of ideaXme.
If you enjoyed this interview check out ideaXme interview with Fionn Ferreira Google Science Fair Winner which is conducted by ideaXme world oceans ambassador Richard W Smith, oceanographer.
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