Richa Syal 0:07
It was my first experience encountering shark finning, which was just awful. I was living in the United Arab Emirates for a couple of years, and I was an independent reporter there, and I remember, as part of one investigation that I was doing into the shark fisheries in the UAE, which is legal, there are just certain species that are critically endangered that cannot be fished, and shark finning is illegal as well. But I remember going to the first shark auction, and it was something that I’ll remember for the rest of my life, because it was such an unusual day where it was 6am the sun had just risen. It was in the peak of summer, so it was so blisteringly hot, and we were just standing by the port, just waiting for the vessels to arrive. And, you know, I look around me and there’s mostly men just murmuring. It’s a very familiar environment to them, and then as soon as I see the first vessel come up to the port, I turn around. It’s just a huge crowd behind me, and they’re they’re getting into a frenzy. They’re so excited I had no idea what to expect. As soon as the fishermen on that ship just got up on the deck, they’re barefoot, they’re running around. They start to hoist up with this tattered rope, the first shark from the hull of the boat, and I was really taken aback. It was this bloodied shark carcass with these black, soulless eyes, and it was hooked on by the gill. And I’ve never seen anything like this before. And I just watched as these men unhooked the shark and passed it onto another man at the port, and that man just threw it onto a plastic table, and then again, another shark comes up from the hull, and they throw it on and again and again. Next thing you know, there’s like over a dozen bloodied shark carcasses right in front of me, and I was really just surprised at seeing the scene. But then the worst part was I look around me and you see these fish traders with these tiny little notebooks that they’re hiding close to their chest. They don’t want anyone to see what’s going on. And while the auction starts to happen, the men just they just stretch out their index finger and their thumb like an L, and they use that to measure with their fingers the size of the dorsal fins of these sharks. And then they write something down. And they go up to another one and they write something down. And I’ve never seen anything like this. And I asked one of the men, why are you measuring their fins? And they go, Well, it’s the most lucrative part of the shark. As soon as these sharks get sold, someone is going to cut off the fins and sell them off somewhere else. And you know, we do a lot of work in reading into shark finning as an industry, and we think, Oh, how horrible. How horrible. But to see it right in front of you on that one day just really stuck with me. And I remember driving home with such a disheartening and eerie feeling and a lump in my throat thinking, My God, this is terrifying. And these sharks, I love sharks so much. I dive with them as much as I can. And never did I expect to see something like that, but it’s a great motivator for people like us to continue telling these stories.

Hannah Stitfall 3:15
This is Oceans: Llife Under Water, a series exploring our oceans and the fascinating life within them. I’m Hannah Stitfall. I’m a zoologist, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster, and I’m bringing you along as I learn everything I can about our watery planet. It’s estimated that around 520 million people worldwide rely on fishing for their livelihood, but illegal fishing poses a major threat not just to coastal communities, but also to our marine ecosystems. Now I have to admit, as someone who’s been vegetarian for as long as I can remember, this is a world I’m not hugely familiar with, so I’m especially eager to learn from our guests today about the impact that unregulated fisheries are having on the ocean.

Michel Strogoff 4:06
I didn’t really think about, you know, shark is important. That’s only in my mind once I left the school. One thing target shark, make money, help family.

Jessica Aldred 4:20
It just seems archaic that we’re sending all of our best produce abroad and then buying in things just because there’s this traditional idea that we have to have cod with our fish and chips.

Hannah Stitfall 4:31
This is Oceans: Life Under Water. Today’s first guest is someone you might not expect to hear from when it comes to shark conservation, because for years, he spent his life hunting sharks. But trust me, his story is very different from what you might expect. So I’m excited to welcome Michel to the podcast. Michel, where are you joining us from?

Michel Strogoff 4:56
Today, I’m joining you guys from Madagascar. I’m literally living on the northwest coast of Madagascar in an island called nusibi in the north side of Madagascar.

Hannah Stitfall 5:10
So for our listeners, can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about what you do.

Michel Strogoff 5:17
My name is Michel Strogoff, but everyone around me called me a Goff as my nickname. I am a former shark fisherman sea turtle and also other kind of animal in the ocean, but at the moment, I’m work as a photographer and filmmaker and also environmental activist with Madagascar film and photography. How

Hannah Stitfall 5:41
much do the people of Madagascar rely on the oceans?

Michel Strogoff 5:46
15% of people here in Madagascar relying directly in ocean. Inside of the 15% one of my tribe, which is called vezu, which mean vege is people who are lying in ocean for their daily life, in their all a lot on all of their livelihood, but majority of the other 85% people are still have a lot of demand from the the the ocean also, as like, you know, food have to get at a fish. And you know, every like, you know, seafood needed, it’s come from the ocean. We are not like, you know, importing food to the seafood from other country. Everything that we have in terms of a seafood is come from our country, and

Hannah Stitfall 6:43
when did you first become a fisherman? So that time,

Michel Strogoff 6:47
I left the school when I was 16 years old due lack of income, as my parents couldn’t able to support to cover all my school fee and also everything that I needed to stay at school. I start fishing when I left school and joining my uncle for sailing up with our local boat. But I start fishing on the age, when I was eight years old, like, you know, playing, you know, by the beach, threw a hook away, like, you know, from the, you know, rock Peninsula. You know, to catch a fish, like the needle fish, half a bake, also a needle fish, some other bentic fish. This how I started to become a fisherman, and

Hannah Stitfall 7:41
how did you get into fishing for sharks? Shark

Michel Strogoff 7:45
is one of the most valuable in the Chinese market. As you know, shark fin is very popular and also delicacy in China. So that’s one of the reason we target shark because there is so much value in it, and also to bring a lot of money to our family and also to the household, which is on that time I was, you know, thinking about like, you know, household in or I thinking only myself to, you know, to have a better life, to have what I needed, and also to support, you know, my parents to put a food in the table and stuff like that. I didn’t really think about, you know, shark is important. I’m only thinking a shark is food bring a lot of money to my family. That’s only in my mind once I left the school. One thing target shark, make money, help family. Only one thing shark for me is some animal that can make me rich. That’s only in my mind. Can put food in the plate with my family. That’s only things in my mind. And

Hannah Stitfall 9:00
do you remember your first experience catching a shark? Can you think back to that moment and tell us the story of that morning all day when you first caught your first shark? So

Michel Strogoff 9:14
my first time a courting shark was That was 2004 in an island of called a Anza vuh. So the shark I we caught was a guitar shark and still alive, and that time in the in the net, that was a first time experience. I didn’t really know how powerful is the animals you know when they are still alive in the net, you know to killing this, this guitar shark. It was like you know that you were fighting, if a lion, it’s smashing the water, smashing the boat, and you. I don’t really know what to grab, but the people around me, they are so much experience. So I just see them, what they do, and I just, you know, learn it from like, you know, practising, and how they actually dealing with the situation with a live animal.

Hannah Stitfall 10:19
When you were a shark fisherman. Were there any moments that your life was in danger.

Michel Strogoff 10:27
When you were like, you know, stepping in those small sailing, local boat that we have, your life is in the line of a danger. But sometimes you forget how dense Re is ocean is you think it’s yourself is powerful, but the ocean is also way, way powerful than yourself, than everything that you use. When I quote great word shark, there, I found myself was in a grave danger, because that great word shark that we caught was too big. It’s a huge it’s about like, you know, almost five metre long. And the boat we actually use is very small, about six metres, but very thin. So to load this great white shark into the boat, we have to cut it in the middle. There is blood everywhere from the shark. And also, we are 15 kilometres away from the shore, and you have to, you know, belling the water out of the boat so the boat can float again after that head of the shark is inside of the boat, that is one of the dangerous things that I have done in my life.

Hannah Stitfall 11:51
I won’t spoil the rest of Michael’s journey just yet, but I promise you’ll want to stick around until the end of this episode to hear about how much his life has changed. Next up, we have an independent photographer and writer who is truly making waves in the world of conservation. Last year, he was nominated for wildlife photographer of the year for his work during a research mission aboard the Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise. So hi, Tommy, thank you for joining us today. Can you please introduce yourself to the listeners and tell us a little bit about your work?

Tommy Trenchard 12:27
Sure. My name’s Tommy Trenchard. I’m a photographer and a writer, and I basically work on stories, either humanitarian, environmental, cultural, often in Africa, but sometimes further afield. And yeah, I work for a mix of magazines and nonprofits. Yeah, documenting various issues.

Hannah Stitfall 12:49
So you’ve spent a significant amount of time documenting ocean related issues. Can you tell us about any stories that spring to mind?

Tommy Trenchard 12:58
Yeah, so I live in Cape Town, which is kind of at the heart of the sort of natural range of the African penguin. And they used to be the most populous sea birds in southern Africa. They were talking like 100 150 years ago today, barely, I think 2% of their former numbers are still around, and they just have been getting, kind of like battered from all sides, from kind of a lack of sardines, which conservationists say is a result of the commercial fishing industry here, to kind of pollution and oil spills. I mean, for a long time, humans were just devouring their eggs, I think in the 10s of millions, 10s of millions, really? Yeah, it used to be quite a big thing. Apparently, they were even served on the on the Titanic before it went down and in Parliament here in South Africa, once a week. Penguin sex were wicked. Apparently, they were very fishy to taste. And so, yeah, I spent a while kind of exploring this issue, and particularly visiting there are several sanctuaries along the coast where conservationists are taking in sick or injured or malnourished penguins and rehabilitating them and then releasing them back into the wild. Yeah, I mean, so that story had a bit of both, like, there is this serious issue, but there’s also such, like, inspiring work going on by some really, really committed people and organisations to try and address that. And yeah, we’ll see how that goes, like scientists say at the moment, but I think by 2035 if the kind of current trajectory continues, African penguins is expected to be functionally extinct in the wild off the west coast of Africa. And that would be a great shame. So that the work that these sanctuaries and hatcheries are doing is is really vital.

Hannah Stitfall 14:47
I mean, I was going to ask you, do you have hope for their survival? These are pretty bleak stats.

Tommy Trenchard 14:52
I think you have to. You have to keep some hope. Otherwise, you just got to wonder, like, yeah, what it’s all about. But I hope. That in some form they will survive, and perhaps at some future time, their numbers will be able to rebound. But there are just so many factors working against them at the moment that it’s it’s kind of hard to imagine that happening in the immediate future.

Hannah Stitfall 15:15
You were recently nominated for wildlife photographer of the year. I saw the photograph for the first time today. I didn’t think it was real. It is amazing. Congratulations. Can you tell me and the listeners a little bit about the photograph itself and the story behind it?

Tommy Trenchard 15:34
Sure, as I spent a few weeks on board the Arctic Sunrise, we travelled from Senegal to Cape Town, and what one of the main goals of the trip was to document the bycatch of sharks. So that’s the supposedly unintentional capture of sharks while fishing for other species, which was mostly a tuner or sailfish of different billfish of different kinds. And we would cruise around, we had somebody on board who was very good at kind of tracking vessels, and we were looking to basically follow these long line fishing vessels and just create a record of what they were pulling up so long lines. Just for a little bit of context, for anyone who doesn’t know is they lay these huge lions in the in the deep ocean, and often with 1000s of 1000s of baited hooks, and they can be incredibly effective at just catching vast numbers of fish. What we found over the course of the trip was that very often these vessels may have had a quota to like legally catch however many swordfish or tuna. But they were just catching heaps and heaps of sharks of different kinds. Some of the birds we followed were catching, I think, five times as many sharks as their target species. So the sharks get, they don’t get thrown back in they they actually are very commercially valuable to these boats, so they get kept and provided the fins are still attached to the body. They’re not, I think at the time, they were kind of within regulations in doing this. Yeah, so we would spend hours in ribs, rigid hold inflatables, kind of driving alongside the long liners as they hold in their lines and yeah, trying desperately to keep camera equipment dry the waves so often constantly crashing over the side. And those keep the camera hidden behind your back until the last minute, then take it out, get a very quick shot and hide it again. Yeah, they were long, long days, but it was, it was very rewarding, and it’s nice to see this image. We’ll be getting some some more exposure, and that it’ll reach a bigger audience. And I think the kind of overall purpose of that trip was to sort of highlight the inadequate regulations that exist on the high seas, so the areas of the oceans beyond the territorial control of any one country to it was part of this call to protect 30% of the high seas by, I think 2030.

Hannah Stitfall 18:11
I mean, the image is incredible, and for all of our listeners, it’s of a shark. It’s jumping out of the water in front of the boat. You can even see the pilot fish is still it’s jumping with the shark, isn’t it?

Tommy Trenchard 18:24
I think it’s attached onto the, like, onto the belly of the shark, yeah, from memory, but we were seeing that constantly, just shark after shark was was was coming up, and the crew would often, so they’d haul it up then, like, stick a knife in, I think, to kind of sever the spine somewhere around the gills, and you just kind of watch it like time after time. And there are just these incredibly beautiful creatures. So it was very hard to hard to witness that.

Hannah Stitfall 18:53
Tommy, thank you for taking the time out today to speak to us. We really appreciate it. And look, we’ll look forward to more of your photographs, and good luck with wildlife photographer of the year as well.

Tommy Trenchard 19:03
Thank you so much. It’s been a been a real pleasure. Thanks for having me on

Hannah Stitfall 19:11
A big thank you to Tommy for taking the time to speak with me today. If you head over to our social accounts, you’ll be able to see the photo we discuss, and it really is amazing and harrowing at the same time. You can find us at oceans pod on Instagram and tick tock. Don’t forget that this series, we’re also offering listeners access to some very special bonus content. If you want to get an exclusive look behind the scenes, head over to action.greenpeace.org.uk/oceans-podcast. This podcast doesn’t just explore our blue planet’s breathtaking beauty, but also exposes the dangers that threatens it. To find out more about Greenpeace’s work to protect the oceans and how you can support go to greenpeace.org/oceans.

I’m absolutely thrilled to be joined in the studio today by not one but two incredible guests together, they’ll help us dive deeper into the damage caused by fisheries and share their hopes for the future of the oceans. Please welcome Jessica Aldred, the oceans editor at Pulitzer and Risha sale, investigative reporter at unearthed, Greenpeace’s independent journalistic outlet. Hello, both of you.

Jessica Aldred 20:38
Hello. Thank you for having us.

Richa Syal 20:40
Yes, thank you Hannah, it’s great to be here.

Hannah Stitfall 20:42
Jessica, could you give us an overview of how the fishing industry, especially trawling, is affecting our ocean ecosystems?

Jessica Aldred 20:49
I think it’s probably it’s one of the biggest demands. Just because the appetite for seafood has grown so much in the past 30 or 40 years, I think it’s nearly tripled, and the amount of wild fish that we can sustainably catch is is just dwindling. And, you know, that’s why you’ve seen the emergence of farmed fish. I think what I see is, I think a lot of people think that illegal fishing is the problem, and it’s the illegal either you’re using a type of net that you’re not supposed to be using because the holes are too small, or unregulated, as in, you know, nobody has any idea how many fish are being caught or under reported, which is people are misrepresenting how many fish are being caught. So they’re catching more than they they’re actually reporting. But I actually think equally as big a threat is the legal fishing. It’s the subsidies that go in to support these vessels that can go all over the world for huge distances. You know, there’s associated with all sorts of problems, like the labour that is used aboard these vessels, and under just these crazy, outdated quota systems, like even here in the UK, most of the fish that we catch gets shipped to Europe, and then we buy in all of these species from other countries. And you know, this is this has gone on for since the 1970s you know, there’s very solid evidence that we are catching way more than the populations can replenish. And it’s also things like the volume of catches that are being caught legally in places like West Africa that you know of these huge species and amounts of fish are going to fish meal factories and being ground down and turned into oil and fish meal, which is being taken off to other countries and used to feed our pets at the expense of local communities, food and livelihoods. So the legal side of fishing is just as damaging as the kind of dramatic piracy that you see reported

Richa Syal 22:24
That’s such a good way to explain it, and specifically with trawling, and more specifically, bottom trawling, that’s considered one of the most destructive types of fishing practices. And I mean, you know, as a vessel, you are basically dragging this enormous net behind you on the sea floor, that’s bottom trawling. And imagine you’re like a bulldozer just going through a forest. You’re gonna just tear down everything in your path, not just, you know, the trees that you might potentially be wanting to target. And so that’s one of the main criticisms with bottom trawling, is that it can be an extremely damaging method to fish, because you were just imagine dragging this along the sea floor. You’re gonna capture everything that you a don’t intend to catch. For example, lots of sharks and dolphins and turtles get caught in these nets. This is what’s known as bycatch, and quite often in this process, the bycatch typically dies in the process of bottom trawling. But as you can imagine, you’re also dredging up a lot of the coral reefs and the other marine ecosystems that live on the sea floor. And some of these reefs, they take, I don’t know, hundreds of years to recover. And so we’re really damaging a lot of fragile and delicate ecosystems as a result. And what the worst part is, is that you may not be only intending to just catch a specific species, and that’s why bottom trawling is, I think, a very destructive method, and it’s still legal in many, many parts of the world, including here in the UK.

Hannah Stitfall 23:52
See, I feel bottom trawling is something and I’m sure for a lot of our listeners as well who are interested in the oceans, we’ve been hearing about this for years, and the fact that it is still legal is is wild. I mean, what are the current regulations and practices to try and keep damage to a minimum with it? And are they working bottom trawling,

Richa Syal 24:12
I think is banned in some marine sites here in the UK, but it’s not a blanket ban. And to exacerbate the situation, we have what are called Super trawlers, which are also equally allowed in our offshore marine areas. If you can imagine super trawlers are just trawlers magnified by 10. They’re hundreds of metres long. If you can imagine a 30 story building laid flat on its side, this is the kind of size we’re talking about, and these super trawlers, while they’re able to, you know, fish for weeks and months on end in the UK, they’re also traversing into West Africa and in South America, and they’re able to stay active for months at a time and capture 1000s of tonnes of fish. You can imagine the amount of bycatch that also. So gets caught as a result. So there isn’t really a lot of strict regulations, specifically with bottom trawling. Unfortunately, as you said, it’s been something that we’ve been knowing about for for years now.

Jessica Aldred 25:11
I think it’s that the sheer size of like, how industrialised it is. I mean, people have these romantic notions of eating seafood and doing this job has completely ruined that for me, if I go on holiday in the Mediterranean, and I’m, you know, having a glass of wine, and the sun’s going down and there’s a plate of calamari, and, you know, people think, Oh, it’s just been caught off the beach by a local artisan official, by Super trawlers off the coast of Latin America. It’s been put on a massive container at sea. It’s then being, you know, shipped to Southeast Asia and frozen and repackaged, and then come back and put in the deep fryer. And we did a reporting exercise at a un ocean conference in Barcelona earlier this year. We had this fantastic tour of the port, and they showed us all the artisanal vessels, and then they showed us some of the the other boats that were there. And the guide told us that there’s only one restaurant in Barcelona that sources its seafood directly from the waters outside the port, which are, you know, incredible array of species, but it’s all being bought in all the restaurants buy the fish in at a cheaper price from somewhere else. They did have a fish market which kind of doesn’t exist anymore, because there’s not demand for it, because the restaurants are all buying cheaper products from abroad. So it’s gone from something that it was, you know, very local to something that is just hugely industrialised, and the size of some of these vessels, and that the time that they can spend at sea, and the practices I remember reading after Ian had been did a lot of his squid reporting stories these the kind of the way that they haul these squid up on these hooks and lines, and it just seems so barbaric. There’s a lot of things that I just can’t eat anymore.

Hannah Stitfall 26:41
And the thing is, you know, when you go on holiday, you you just assume it’s all freshly caught from the local area. But as you said, you know it’s coming from these the seafoods coming from these super trawlers. I mean, how do you address that issue?

Jessica Aldred 26:56
So I think that there has been progress at an international level, as it last year or the year or the year before, we’re the World Trade Organisation, they put an end to subsidies that were being used to drive over fishing or illegal fishing, and that happened at an international level, and that treaty is being ratified at the moment. So I think at an international level, there is progress being made slowly. But I think what makes it incredibly complicated is from the ground up, when you think about the power that we have as consumers, particularly in Western markets, to make these choices about things. And I also have done a lot of work on palm oil, and it’s really interesting to see how these two industries compare, that, you know, we have the power to change the way that companies do things, and we did see that in the US and Europe with palm oil. But every country has different certification standards. You know, what might be okay to eat in one country is not okay in another. There’s no standard labelling across the world, so it makes it very hard for consumers to make the right choice, and therefore drive any kind of change for supermarkets or restaurants to, you know, only source things. And you know, my family hates it when we go into a restaurant and I ask, have these scallops been hand caught or rather than, you know, dredged, and always asking the embarrassing questions about where the fish comes from. But I think that kind of the education and the consumer power is something that we really do have the power to harness, to change it and to change the way that these fishing companies operate. And I just think with all of the things with food security across the world, it just seems archaic that we’re sending all of our best produce abroad and then buying in things just because there’s this traditional idea that we have to have cod with our fish and chips.

Hannah Stitfall 28:31
So that might I mean, do you think that sustainable fishing can exist?

Richa Syal 28:37
I mean, I have a bit more of a pessimistic view than Jessica does. I just find that the fishing industry is so incredibly hard to keep accountable. There are a lot of regulations, but they’re not being effectively enforced at a blanket, wide scale, and these activities are happening very far away on these waters that are often out of sight and out of mind for a lot of people who need to be engaging in that kind of awareness and enforcement and monitoring and oversight, and there are, quite frankly, a lot of loopholes that the fishing industry can quite easily exploit to evade environmental regulations. Human rights abuses are quite rife at sea. As Jessica alluded to, it’s really easy for the fishing industry to get away with a lot of damaging activity.

Hannah Stitfall 29:23
Are the regulations being ignored, or are there just not enough regulations?

Richa Syal 29:28
It’s a good question.

Jessica Aldred 29:30
It could be a bit of both, a bit of both. I think there’s regulations, but it’s easy to get around them. Yeah, because there’s just not enough capacity to monitor this

Richa Syal 29:38
And the regulations, some of the wording is so ambiguous and vague that it’s, it’s the language is not really available for some of these ship owners to take quite literally, and so it’s easy, easy, easy for them to just say, well, the regulation wasn’t clear, so we’re just going to go ahead and do X, Y, Z anyways.

Jessica Aldred 29:56
And the regulation is very patchwork as well, isn’t it? In its nature, you’ll have. Of regional fisheries management organisations, which known as rfmos. They will govern species like tuna, which are migratory. They’ll still govern a particular fish stock. Then you have access agreements where a country like Sierra Leone can sell, you know, 200 licences to foreign vessels to come and fish within its waters. Then there will be that country’s policy and some other regional policy, and I think at an operational level, it must be impossible to keep across all of that. So I think it’s there is regulation, but it’s very Patchwork, and it’s not joined up, and I don’t think there could be a lot of understanding of it comprehensively.

Hannah Stitfall 30:35
So a big question for you both, are you optimistic or pessimistic for the future of our oceans.

Richa Syal 30:43
I feel a bit of both. To be honest, by nature, our work is to uncover a lot of environmental injustices at the hands of corporations and governments. So that work just leads us to be quite cynical and pessimistic about the world, because we are surrounding ourselves with people who are conducting pretty severe wrongdoing. So I am quite pessimistic about what’s going on,

Hannah Stitfall 31:10
Not the answer we want, but

Richa Syal 31:13
But I will say that I am extremely thrilled at two things. Number one, the amount of advanced technologies that we can use to bolster our investigative journalism. In the future, we have such amazing access to advanced satellite technology, there’s more data in the world we have access to speak directly to the people who are working on some of these industries that can speak to us on what’s happening. That, in and of itself, is something that makes me optimistic, because there are more chances for us to uncover truths and to hold more people accountable, and that does bring optimism. The second thing I would say is there’s generally a really wonderful amount of awareness on ocean issues that have come about in recent years, and it really does make me happy to see people care about the amount of plastic pollution that’s happening in our oceans, or that shock and awe that we talk about when I’m at a dinner party and I talk about a story that I worked on eliciting that reaction and getting people to care. It does, in part, selfishly, make me feel good, because I think if I can get people to care, they can get more people to care, and that can spread out into real change and real action. And that’s always a challenge with oceans issues, isn’t it? Jessica like it’s really difficult to get people to care, but I think podcasts like this is a great way to get people who wouldn’t normally have access to these information to learn about a topic. And so as a journalist, my my advice is always just to say, read and learn and learn about these issues. There’s so much reporting that has been done on oceans issues, and I think the best thing you can do is inform yourself and then use that as leverage to spark action.

Jessica Aldred 32:55
I mean, I generally am an optimistic person. Anyway, I’m optimistic about, as we just said, the level of awareness that we’re seeing. And you know, especially among younger people, I’m just thinking about like my children, for example. And you know, they’re obviously going to be more aware because of me and the job I do, but you know, just it within their school and their community of friends, the kind of level of awareness that they have of things. And I think you know if that’s kind of coming through in future years, that is pause for hope. But then equally, you look at the kind of dragging of the feet every year when we have a climate cop, and the lack of progress on that because of vested interests. And that does make me more pessimistic, I suppose. But I suppose, going back to what you said, if we use the kind of pessimism, natural pessimism, and cynicism of journalists to get these stories, then hopefully these stories will raise the awareness and that can kind of give us some cause for optimism.

Hannah Stitfall 33:52
I have to say, we had so much to unpack that we ended up talking for hours. I’ll be sharing more of our discussion with you later on in this series. Now, earlier, I told you to stick around for the rest of Michael’s story, and here it is how Michael made the transformation from Shark fisherman to conservationist.

Next week, we’re diving head first into the fascinating lives of dolphins, uncovering what these amazing creatures get up to beneath the waves

Anna Bunney 38:33
Second to humans, they’ve got the largest brains in terms of their size, so they’re known to feel emotions just like us as well, like empathy.

Sarah Sharp 38:41
And I remember looking out, and I had binoculars on, and I could count, and when I got to 50 animals, I said, All right, I’m gonna go back. I’m gonna get my things, and I’m gonna head down there.

Hannah Stitfall 38:52
It’s going to be an adventure you don’t want to miss.

This episode was brought to you by Greenpeace and Crowd Network. It is hosted by me, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster Hannah Stitfall. It is produced by Vicki Wright, Catalina Noguera, Robert Wallace, George Sampson, Kate Stevens, Steve Jones and Christina Irivnak. Sound design is by Crawford Blair. The music we use is from our partners, BMG, Production Music. The team at Greenpeace is James Hansen, Alex Yallop, Jeane Meyer, Marta of charik. Flora Hvesi, Becky Malone and Alice Lloyd Hunter, archive, courtesy of Greenpeace. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai