By Britny Cordera for imagine5.com.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
On Earth Day 2023, thousands of people around the world took part in protests to draw attention to the threats facing the planet.
While some waved signs and chanted slogans in the street, another group gathered online to take action in a different way, united by two things: their concern for the health of the world's waters, and their shared love of Disney's The Little Mermaid.
A campaign called "Protect Ariel's Home" centres Ariel the mermaid (and other Disney characters who live close to the water, like Lilo from Lilo & Stitch, Tiana from The Princess and the Frog and the title character from Moana). It emphasises the importance of keeping rivers, oceans, and drinking water clean for all, especially people in BIPOC communities who are at the frontline of climate change.
The campaign has held three virtual rallies where 79 actions have been taken, ranging from messaging President Joe Biden to shut down Line 5 (an Enbridge oil pipeline that could threaten the fisheries and wild rice harvest relied on by Indigenous people around Lake Superior) to checking an underwater webcam in a river in the Netherlands to alert the lockkeeper if there are fish that need to get through to lay eggs. This work is being done by fans, without Disney's involvement.
The idea came from Ana-Rikki Wilhelm, an intern at an organisation called Fandom Forward, which is working on the campaign with the non-profit GreenLatinos, TikTok viral activist Western Water Girl and award winning Diné journalist from the Navajo Nation Alastair Lee Bitsóí.
Wilhelm noticed how much energy there was around The Little Mermaid after Disney revealed its first teaser trailer. "Disney received backlash on casting Halle Bailey as Ariel, but seeing Black girls on TikTok overjoyed by a Black Ariel was really inspiring," they said.
This kind of inspiration, Wilhelm believes, is a chance for fans to connect what's happening in real life - rising sea levels, oil spills and dying coral, or the water crises in Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi - to what could happen to our favourite fictional characters.
"Fan organising allows people to say, oh yeah, I wouldn't want Ariel or Lilo or Tiana to have toxic water and not be able to swim or not be able to have fun," Wilhelm said. "It frames the climate crisis in a less intimidating and scary way so people feel more comfortable getting involved."
Representation in media can often be an important first step for people to understand change that is happening all around them. For Alexis Trotter, a self-proclaimed Disney super fan, when she sees characters that look like her, she's more intrigued to learn about their world. "When you see yourself represented, it just allows your imagination to easily put yourself into the story," she said.
Trotter who took part in the Ariel campaign, doesn't get involved in a lot of climate advocacy - she has a heart defect and puts most of her energy into advocacy around this - but since this campaign involved one of her favourite characters, it was different. "I was proud to have my name on this campaign and went into it with excitement about the new movie," she said.
Inspiration to make small changes
Trotter, who uses reusable K-cups for her coffee and reminds her friends and family every day to recycle to keep plastic waste out of our waters, says: "Our favorite Disney princesses or Marvel superheroes teach us you can make a pretty significant change by making small changes."
The Ariel campaign is the latest in a proud tradition. Groups like Fandom Forward, Black Nerds Create and Nerdfighter have been creating activists out of fans online for more than a decade, inspired by our favourite pop culture characters.
Fandom Forward was one of the first organisations to do this kind of activism. Founded in 2005 as The Harry Potter Alliance, it has since expanded to get fans of Disney, DC Comics, Star Trek and other fandoms, involved in environmental and civic engagement.
It's known as fan activism or fanwork, and it taps into the idea that - as our favourite characters often teach us - there's no one way to be a hero.
Organising activism around the fictional characters we love can help activate the public imagination around climate change and environmental injustices while helping fans do advocacy work that is more accessible and less daunting than protesting.
Critical fandom
Some are calling the trend critical fandom, which probably makes it sound less fun than it is. I got my own taste of it in 2021 when I attended an online rally that tapped into two of my passions: the hit TV cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender (or ATLA, as it is known by its fiercely dedicated fans), and environmental justice.
It came at the height of the pandemic, at a time when I was looking for some way to help despite not being able to be some place in person. Fandom Forward used ATLA, which features a strong message about protecting nature, to inspire fans to campaign against the expansion of the Line 3 oil pipeline from Canada to Wisconsin. They partnered with Indigenous-led organisations A Tribe Called Geek and Honor the Earth. 424 actions were taken during that campaign, off the back of a 90-minute rally on YouTube Live.
Shortly after that, I held my own ATLA watch party with friends. We reflected on how relevant the show continues to be, how it teaches us to care for people and the environment over objects and money, and how it paints a picture of fascism that feels eerily relevant. I also got my friends to take some of the actions proposed by Fandom Forward.
Fandom Forward's campaigns director, Sara Mortensen, said campaigns around climate change can be seamlessly introduced, because fans are already doing things together. "Fandoms that have a lot of energy, you'll see fan leaders organising birthday messages for their favourite actors, or organising community spaces in [the messaging app] Discord or elsewhere," she said.
Fandom Forward and other organisations recognise this potential and push the energy towards climate or social justice issues, Mortensen said. "It helps that so many of our favourite stories have something to say about climate and the environment," she said.
ATLA is a great example of this. In one storyline, the hero Aang and his friends must help a village impacted by a toxic river polluted by the powerful Fire Nation. In the new live action version of The Little Mermaid, Ariel and her sisters are seen cleaning up a shipwreck under the sea, and lamenting how humans are killing coral reefs.
Fans are digging deeper
Critical fandom has the power to make fans care about environment and climate issues. Maritza Mendoza, a water equity and ocean program advocate for GreenLatinos recognises this power. She said people who care about The Little Mermaid tend to also care about or have an interest in the ocean. "For people who don't identify as activists or don't have a degree in water conservation, fan organising can help you learn about climate change and show that your community cares about it," she said.
Robyn Renee Jordan of Black Nerds Create says the way media reflects our real world can inspire critical fandom. "It is great to love something," she said, "but it is even more powerful to really dig deep and look at media from a critical lens and see how that reflects the world around us."
Jordan said its important to follow your passions when doing activism. It's how it keeps you going. Fan organising leans on fans' passions for pop-culture icons and doesn't expect fans to have experience doing activism.
"If you're watching The Little Mermaid and it makes you think, 'look how beautiful our oceans are', and makes you want to do something about preserving water, and you ask how do we continue to maintain that, follow that thought process and don't worry too much about getting it right. Worry about just attempting to do something or to learn more."
Britny Cordera wrote this article for imagine5.com.
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June is World Oceans Month and California environmental groups are highlighting advances in zero-emission shipping.
International shipping emits more than 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year, and 40% of U.S. container shipping passes through the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.
Grace Healy, deputy director of the climate program at the nonprofit Pacific Environment, said it contributes to climate change and the resulting air pollution can shorten life spans by up to eight years in neighborhoods near the ports.
"Children in communities near these ports like Wilmington, San Pedro, West Long Beach, they face dramatically higher rates of asthma, bronchitis and cancer risk that's linked to diesel emissions," Healy explained.
California is a leader in clean shipping and passed a rule in recent years to require ships to plug in while onshore and shut off idling engines. Another mandate led to the first electric tugboat in San Francisco and a zero-emission ferry in San Diego. Shipping giant Maersk now runs a container ship on methanol.
Healy added in the next few years, the Golden State plans to tackle regulations on pollution from container ships.
"The California Air Resources Board has also stated they are going to work on an in-transit rule for oceangoing vessels," Healy noted. "That's really exciting, because those container ships are really, really dirty."
The future is uncertain for the federal Clean Ports Program, which supports the transition to zero-emission shipping. Money awarded last fall before President Donald Trump took office should be safe but the U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to gut the program as part of the Republican funding package known as the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." The Senate version, which has yet to get a vote, appears to leave the language out.
Disclosure: Pacific Environment contributes to our fund for reporting on Climate Change/Air Quality, Energy Policy, and Oceans. If you would like to help support news in the public interest,
click here.
By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
The global population is projected to hit at least 8.5 billion people by the end of the decade. As more of us become aware of the disastrous environmental impacts of livestock production, some climate-conscious consumers are turning to seafood as an alternative to meat. But the seafood industry has its own problems, as the rise of overfishing - and its harms - has made clear.
"Overfishing is a serious global problem, threatening ocean wildlife and biodiversity, as well as seafood supplies," Dr. Beth Polidoro, Director of Research at the Marine Stewardship Council, told Sentient in a statement. "And unfortunately, it's a problem that's increasing, and has been for several decades."
Seafood consumption has risen dramatically since the mid-20th century: Between 1961 and 2021, the average person went from eating around 20 pounds of seafood every year to around 44 pounds, according to Our World in Data. Since then, commercial fishing has become a $229 billion industry, and according to a 2019 study, between 1.1 and 2.2 trillion fish are caught every year.
But as our appetite for seafood has increased, so has the frequency of overfishing. Between 1974 and 2017, the share of the world's oceans that were overfished jumped from 10 percent to a little over 34 percent, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Marine ecosystems around the world have suffered as a result.
But what exactly is overfishing, why is it such a big problem - and what can be done about it? Let's dive in.
What Is Overfishing?
Broadly speaking, overfishing is when fish in a particular region are caught at a faster rate than they can repopulate. In theory, this could ultimately lead to the extinction of the species, although in practice, it isn't clear that any fish species is confirmed to have gone extinct solely due to overfishing - although this might soon change, as we'll see.
Overfishing is directly related to the concept of yields. For any fish population, there's an "ideal" amount of fishing that maximizes the number of fish that can be caught in the long-term. Overfishing is simply when the fish in a region are caught at a faster rate than this amount.
"If you don't fish at all, you obviously don't get any long-term catch," Ray Hilborn, professor at the University of Washington's School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, tells Sentient. "If you fish too hard, you get very little long-term catch. And in the middle is this theoretical sweet spot that produces what's called 'maximum sustainable yield.'"
Hilborn says that in general, the maximum sustainable yield of a given fish population is "roughly equal to the fraction of fish who would die from natural mortality." For example, if 20 percent of the fish in a certain population would die from natural causes over the course of the year, this implies that fishers shouldn't catch more than 20 percent of that fish over that same period of time.
In contrast, you can look at the overfishing that occurred on Canada's northeast coast throughout the 20th century. Canadian cod was harvested so over-aggressively that by 1992, the region's cod population had fallen to less than one percent of its historic norm.
To ensure the species wasn't wiped out completely, the Canadian government announced a moratorium on cod fishing in the region, a decision that resulted in 30,000 people losing their jobs. And yet, the cod population in the area still hasn't recovered.
Overfishing is often grouped under the larger umbrella of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, (or IUU), by scientists, academics and policymakers.
What Are the Consequences of Overfishing?
Overfishing has a number of deleterious environmental impacts. Some of them, like bycatch, are inherent problems with fishing in general that are exacerbated by overfishing practices; others, like trophic cascades, are specifically caused by overfishing.
Ecosystem Destruction Due to Overfishing
Ecosystems involve a complex web of interactions between different species, and in a healthy ecosystem, these interactions naturally balance themselves out in a sustainable way. If predators become too populous, there won't be enough prey to feed them, so some of the predators will die off, which then gives the prey species time to repopulate. This repopulation gives the predators more access to food, thus allowing their species to repopulate, and so the cycle repeats itself.
Overfishing disrupts this natural process, and the consequences can be varied and far-reaching.
Take, for instance, the relationship between parrotfish, coral reefs and algae. Algae thrives in coral, but when it's allowed to grow unchecked, it can damage and kill the coral species. Luckily, parrotfish dine on algae, and so by simply going about their lives, they play an accidental but very important role in maintaining the health of coral reefs.
But when parrotfish are overfished and their population dwindles, this check on algae growth is removed, and the coral reefs suffer. This isn't just hypothetical: A study published in 2015 found that overfishing of parrotfish and other "grazers" has been a primary driver of the steep decline in the health of Caribbean coral reefs over the last 50 years.
This type of phenomenon, in which a change in a predator's population has a downstream effect not only on its own prey but on other species as well, is what's known as a trophic cascade. And overfishing has caused a number of trophic cascades.
The overfishing of sharks on the Atlantic coast led to a collapse in scallop populations, for instance, because sharks eat clownrays and clownrays eat scallops. Overfishing of cod and other sea urchin predators has helped degrade kelp forests, which is an especially big problem given the many environmental benefits that kelp provides.
One of those benefits is the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which brings us to another dire consequence of overfishing: rising global temperatures.
Overfishing Causing Climate Change
The idea that overfishing can exacerbate climate change might sound counterintuitive; after all, what do the number of fish in the sea have to do with the temperature outside? As it turns out, quite a bit.
The ocean absorbs a massive amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere: around three billion metric tons every year, or one-third of all global emissions. What's more, the ocean absorbs more carbon than it releases, which makes it a carbon sink - the world's biggest, in fact. Because carbon dioxide is one of the primary greenhouse gasses, the ocean plays an enormous and crucial role in slowing the rise of global temperatures.
But overfishing has diminished the ocean's ability to absorb carbon. That's because ultimately, it's the creatures in the ocean who are sucking up all of this carbon.
The process begins when phytoplankton at the ocean's surface absorb carbon dioxide from the air. These microscopic creatures are then eaten by zooplankton and other larger species, who absorb the phytoplankton's carbon, and so it goes throughout the ocean's food web - all the way up to whales, who can store up to 33 tons of carbon dioxide over the course of their lives.
This is an effective form of carbon storage, because the carbon remains in the ocean and out of Earth's atmosphere even after the fish die - unless, of course, the fish are caught by humans and removed from the ocean, in which case all of that carbon is released back into the air. Overfishing greatly exacerbates this phenomenon: According to a Sentient analysis, overfishing results in an additional 5.6 million metric tons of CO2 being released into the atmosphere every year.
Bycatch Due to Overfishing
Bycatch is what happens when fishers accidentally catch, injure or kill species that they weren't intending to catch. Common victims of bycatch include dolphins, sea turtles and over 200 other species that are protected, endangered or threatened.
The sheer extent of bycatch can't be overstated: It's been estimated that over 40 percent of all fish caught annually are actually bycatch. What's more, bycatch results in the death of more than 650,000 marine mammals - that is, aquatic creatures other than fish - every year.
Hurting Local Fishing Communities
Many coastal communities around the world rely on a healthy supply of local fish to feed themselves. Overfishing and other forms of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing have hurt these communities in a number of ways, and it's often developing countries that suffer.
In Sierra Leone, for example, overfishing in coastal waters has forced local fishers to travel further and further into the sea to catch fish, exposing them to increasingly dangerous weather conditions. In 2022, Sierra Leonean fishers told the Guardian that they're struggling to feed their families thanks to the dearth of fish caused by overfishing.
Much of the time, the overfishing causing this is carried out by foreign nations. In Japan and South Korea, for instance, more fish is caught by other countries' vessels than by domestic fleets. In Sierra Leone, most of the large trawlers used to harvest fish are owned by European and Asian companies, according to the United Nations, and 40 percent of industrial fishing licenses in the country are owned by Chinese vessels.
Possible Extinction Due to Overfishing
As mentioned earlier, no fish species is confirmed to have gone extinct solely because it was subject to overfishing. But that may not always be the case: A 2021 study by the World Wildlife Foundation concluded that one-third of all shark, ray and chimaera species are currently at risk of going extinct thanks to overfishing.
How Can We Stop Overfishing?
End Harmful Fishing Subsidies
Governments around the world spend a lot of money subsidizing their respective countries' fishing industries. Though some of these subsidies are benign, others have been blamed for incentivizing overfishing and contributing to all of the above problems. For instance, many governments subsidize or discount the fuel for shipping vessels, allowing them to fish longer, harder and farther away.
The world's governments spend over $20 billion on what researchers call "harmful fishing subsidies" every year, according to a 2019 study in the journal Marine Policy. Eliminating, or even substantially reducing, these subsidies would go a long way to curb overfishing, according to a range of experts and marine advocates.
Protect More of the Ocean
Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are areas of the ocean in which legal protections have been established for conservationist purposes. The nature and degree of these protections vary, but many of them have been effective at reducing or eliminating overfishing within their boundaries.
However, MPAs only cover a miniscule portion of the ocean. According to the UN, less than nine percent of the ocean is protected by MPAs - and that's one of the higher estimates. The Marine Conservation Institute puts the number at around five percent, while a 2024 report by a group of NGOs claimed that, due to lax enforcement and weak protections in some MPAs, only 2.8 percent of the ocean is effectively protected from overfishing.
Regardless of which estimate is most accurate, the upshot is clear: Over 90 percent of the ocean is unprotected. Bolstering MPA enforcement and bringing more of the sea under legal protections - which the UN, to its credit, is currently attempting to do - would be another powerful check against overfishing.
Eat Less Seafood
One factor driving overfishing is that consumers are increasingly developing a voracious appetite for seafood. Some coastal communities are dependent on fish for their diet, but the rest of us can be mindful of overconsumption, and how it impacts wildlife, including fish and other marine life. One alternative: the many sources of plant-based protein that don't exact anywhere near the environmental cost of seafood (or meat, for that matter).
The Bottom Line
Although it has become increasingly popular to think of fish as a sustainable alternative to meat, the far-reaching environmental, animal and human impacts of persistent overfishing throws a wrench into that narrative. If industrial fishing operations continue at their current pace, so will overfishing - at high cost to marine habitats and our ability to stave off the worst effects of global warming.
Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.
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